Navigating the Victim Mentality
How living in the past holds you back from healing.
This article is meant to educate and inform on how a victim mentality may develop as a result of repeated traumatic experiences. It additionally discusses the key reasons behind why a victim mentality may manifest. However, some may find the information triggering.
There is a plethora of information available online that tends to reinforce a victim mentality by pointing fingers at a person as somehow being overly dramatic or exaggerating the extent of their lived experiences in order to gain sympathy. The reality is that the more someone tries to shame a person for having developed a victim mentality, the more those types of articles reinforce the dynamic. It becomes a circular argument; hence, those kinds of articles become counterintuitive to what they are trying to convey by perpetuating the role of a victim. It is my hope that this article can help shed a different light on a “victim mentality”.
A victim mentality is a mindset that is learned and conditioned over time, and from repeated exposure to traumatic events, mainly events that are correlated with relational trauma. When a person develops a victim mentality, how they see themselves and the world are negatively influenced by their overall outlook, including a sense of learned helplessness…
