- Personal therapy
I Feel Everyone Is Out To Get Me – Why?
- Mark Colclough
Af Mark Colclough, Parterapeut og psykoterapeut, cand. mag.
If you are stuck with the feeling that everything bad happens to you – that the world is out to get you, or you have more challenges and hardships than others, you kunne be self-victimising. If so, here is how we can work to break this pattern…
Are YOU The Victim?
Når der sker dårlige ting, er det naturligt, at vi har ondt af os selv.
Is it the case that bad things keep happening to you? That you truly are the butt of life’s joke? Or could it be that you place yourself in the victim role?
Mark Colclough, MA
You’ve perhaps been cheated on by a partner, or had your wallet stolen, or stubbed your toe! Any one of these experiences will, understandably, induce a sorry feeling of self-pity.
Og det er normalt. Det sker for alle.
A challenge occurs when you find yourself in a more permanent victim state. Is it the case that bad things keep happening to you? That you truly are the butt of life’s joke? Or could it be that you place yourself in the victim role?
The Drama Triangle
In psychotherapy, we frequently look at something called The Drama Triangle. The Drama Triangle is a theory that has held strong in psychology for more than 50 years. It hypothesizes that in any conflict, you play one of three roles – the persecutor, the helper, or the victim. These roles shift, and continue in a cycle of game playing without resolution. If you’d like to read more about The Drama Triangle, click here. You can also read more about the persecutor and helper roles.
I denne artikel fokuserer vi på, hvorfor nogle mennesker gerne vil blive i offerrollen.
The Victim Role
Research has suggested that seeing oneself as a victim may be an aspect of personality. For the purpose of this research, they refer to a victim mentality as “Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood,” or TIV.
They define TIV as an “enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships.” Within this research, several components of TIV were identified.
- Need for recognition – people who self-victimize are seeking recognition from others.
- Moral elitism – A form of black and white thinking, the victim will see themselves as morally superior to the persecutors who are out to get them.
- Lack of empathy – where the victim's own suffering trumps the suffering of others. The victim will struggle to see past their own issues to recognize pain in others.
- Rumination – an overwhelming tendency for a person to brood and stay extremely fixated on the many ways they've been victimized.
Also within the findings was that victims are more likely to assign negative motivations to others, in order to place themselves in the victim role. Let’s look at an example of this in action:
Mary har lavet en joke på arbejdet, som hendes kollega Gabriel har opfattet som racistisk. Gabriel har udfordret den racistiske joke i håb om, at Mary vil indse sin fejl og lære, hvorfor den er upassende. I stedet for at lære en lektion eller undskylde, bliver Mary meget fornærmet over at blive udfordret og beslutter, at Gabriel mobber hende. Hun trækker sig tilbage og nægter at tale med nogen resten af dagen, sætter sig for sig selv og sender sms'er til sin kæreste for at få sympati over sin frygtelige kollega. Mary dvæler ved sagen i flere uger og kan ikke forstå, hvor dum og følsom Gabriel er, for ikke at kunne tage en joke.
Vi vil bruge terapi til at identificere dine udløsere, finde årsagen til dit problem, udforske de følelser, der opstår omkring det, og derefter lære, hvordan du kan regulere disse følelser mere effektivt.
Mark Colclough, MA
In this example, we can see Mary doing all the things described in the research above. She believes herself to be morally superior to Gabriel because she can ‘take a joke’ whereas Gabriel can’t (moralsk elitisme). Hun mangler empati om hvordan og hvorfor joken kunne støde Gabriel, selvom den er blevet forklaret hende. Hun stews på spørgsmålet i uger (drøvtygning). Hun vil have sympati for sin lidelse (anerkendelse).
Moving Beyond The Victim Role
Hvis du kan identificere dig med Mary (eller nogen af de områder, der er diskuteret i denne artikel), kan terapi hjælpe dig med at undslippe offermentaliteten og bevæge dig hen imod en sundere tankegang. Ligeledes, hvis du kender nogen, der ofte fremstår som offer, som en partner, og fremstiller dig som forfølgeren, kan terapi hjælpe med at identificere rollerne i drama trianglen og hjælpe dig med at fjerne dig selv fra de fælder, der kan blive sat af offeret.
At identificere sig som et offer og ønske at ændre denne mentalitet er et enormt positivt skridt fremad. For nogle kan offermentalitet blive så blændende, at introspektion om emnet er næsten umulig. Hvis du overvejer, at du måske er fanget i offerrollen, er der håb om, at du kan give dig selv magten til at komme ud af den og ind i et mere ansvarligt, afbalanceret sted.
