Today, everyone is a "victim."
Everyone has to watch everything they say to avoid offending or “triggering” other people. Social media has become an outlet through which people both offend and become offended, victimize others and become victims themselves.
People constantly drown in their victimization while ignoring the life rings thrown toward them. They get so focused on their own situations that they forget that other people need help just to survive every day.
Naturally, we all have struggles that are frustrating and may lead us to small moments of self-pity. Most of the time we pick ourselves up again and move on with our lives. However, there are some people who decide to make their homes in their self-pity and stay there. This phenomenon is called the Martyr Complex (a.k.a. Victim mentality, Victim identity).
As Dr. Andrea Mathews from Psychology Today puts it, “A person with a Victim identity is someone who has identified with whatever crises, traumas, illnesses, or other difficulties [that] have occurred in their lives, especially those that began very early in life.” It contains an extremely pessimistic, self-centric point of view that revolves around the “life is hard, people always target me, no one can understand me, the world is against me” outlook on life.
Whoever has this Martyr Complex always has a “worse” situation than anyone else and therefore sees him- or her-self as justified in their self-pity. It makes life easier to deal with when you blame everything happening to you on everyone else instead of taking responsibility for your own actions, right?
People with this Victim mentality manipulate other people to attend to their needs and take care of them. They might do things such as ask you how to fix their life, then refuse your suggestions or “try” them and say nothing works because of their situation which is, of course, not understood by anybody.
This keeps you in a loop of looking for more solutions and being rejected and feeling guilty because you want to help your friend but nothing will work. That guilt makes sure you stay connected with that person or something worse could happen and you would feel responsible.
An example would be a girlfriend claiming that she will commit suicide if her boyfriend breaks up with her. That forces responsibility on the boyfriend to stay with her; if he breaks up with her, her suicide would be “his” fault. As a result, he stays with her regardless of whether he wants to or not out of guilt.
Ironically, the Victim, in the manipulative sense, becomes a Bully by controlling people to constantly focus on taking care of him or her. When someone refuses to comply with the Victim’s wants, the Bully side then comes out to make that person feel guilty.
People with this mentality do not take responsibility for their actions. They blame those around them for all of their problems when, in reality, most of their problems can be solved by recognizing their role in causing or prolonging those problems. Taking responsibility for your own actions, learning from your mistakes, and moving on from the past is the best way to avoid becoming the Victim.
If you have a friend who seems to fit the description of a Victim and nothing seems to help, remember this fact: People can only be helped as far as they want to help themselves. While you are responsible for your own actions and how you treat others, you are not responsible for the actions of others. You are on this Earth to live your life, not that of another.
This does not mean that everyone who goes through tough times has the Victim mentality. Traumatic events, grief, friend troubles, and many other situations cause genuine pain and can have lasting and devastating effects, but sitting in that pain and letting it become your only defining trait is how you get the harmful Victim identity.
Life means getting knocked down and getting up again. Sometimes we pull ourselves up and sometimes we need a helping hand to pull us up. We can either decide to be stronger and move on with our lives or we can stay down and let situations push us around without doing anything about it.
Strength of character is becoming scarcer as more people take things personally and refuse to drop the issue by, say, making passive-aggressive (or full-on aggressive) posts on social media.
Every single person has done things that maybe hurt other people or that they are not proud of, and every single person has been hurt by other people.
Accept that fact, try not to hurt others, and live your life.
Be strong in the face of adversity. Do something real.
Focus on fixing the problems on this Earth more than simply posting about them. Stop being the Victim.
Start being the Victor.
