By Steps to Recovery on November 30, 2012
Are you playing the victim? Are you blaming others for your situation or making excuses for why things aren’t going the way you want them to? Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the victim role, especially in recovery. It’s so hard to own our stuff! But when we do, it’s so liberating and empowering.
Playing the victim is a decision. It is a decision to not live authentically, to deflect our troubles on something or someone else. Playing the victim is the easy way out. Recovery isn’t about the easy way out. It’s about reclaiming your life, reclaiming all of who you are. Playing the victim is about choosing to stay in the role of the submissive person who has no control, recovery is about making a conscious decision to change your life. To take control and fully become who you are meant to be.
What would it be like to say, “Yeah, I’m having a crappy day and it’s because I made some bad decisions,” instead of saying, “Why is this happening to me, why doesn’t anything ever work out?”
I know exactly what this is like. When I say the first choice, it is easy to remember that I am responsible for myself, I am in control of how my day goes, I am the master of my destiny and the choices I make for myself will determine how successful and happy I am.
When I say the second thing, it completely shuts down my personal accountability. I step out of living authentically. And what happens is I start to feel worse and worse, because I don’t feel like I am in control of my life, or have any say over what happens to me. (It’s really easy to get sucked into the victim role.)
When you switch from a victim mentality to an empowered one, problems become opportunities. It’s easy to get excited about life and start welcoming and actually enjoying challenges instead of wondering why things never work out for you all the time. This shift in perspective and attitude will change your life and your ability to live fully as who you want to be.
Being in the victim role creates the perfect incubator for relapse. It’s easy to make excuses for using when you are the victim, when you are not in control of your life and what happens to you, or how you perceive it. In recovery, ceasing to play the victim role is essential to deeper healing and longterm success.
How do you play the victim? How do you get out of it?
