Victim Consciousness & Its Opposite

photo credit: Rob­bert van der Steeg

I have lived on all sides of addic­tion (alco­hol & drugs) and so have much per­sonal expe­ri­ence with life on the vic­tim tri­an­gle or what we call vic­tim con­scious­ness. I’ve found that mov­ing out of vic­tim con­scious­ness requires that we move into its oppo­site, observer consciousness.

A pri­mary require­ment for access­ing observer con­scious­ness is the knowl­edge that our thoughts and beliefs gen­er­ate our feel­ings, and prompt our behav­ior. In other words, our reac­tions and feel­ings about oth­ers and our life sit­u­a­tions deter­mine our state of mind, NOT those peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions. When we respond from that under­stand­ing we do not feel the need to per­son­al­ize what peo­ple say and do. We under­stand that our life sit­u­a­tions do not cause our reac­tions — our thoughts do.

That sim­ple shift in under­stand­ing moves us from the vic­tim view­point that says, “they are doing it to me,” to a more reflec­tive one, “I am unhappy because of what I think/believe — not because of what they say or do.” From this place of self-responsibility, we are self-determining, rather than at the mercy of oth­ers. We observe our own thoughts first, rather than to auto­mat­i­cally blame them for what we feel.

From observer con­scious­ness we learn to look closely at what we tell our­selves about our life sit­u­a­tions, rather than look out­side our­selves for evi­dence of how we’ve been mis­treated — the way we do when we are in vic­tim con­scious­ness. Rather than to react in neg­a­tive painful ways towards the other per­son, or our exter­nal sit­u­a­tion, as we do when we are in vic­tim, we, as observers, learn to address our feel­ings on the inside by find­ing the thoughts that gen­er­ate our unhap­pi­ness and ques­tion­ing those thoughts/beliefs.

When we are in observer con­scious­ness, we sep­a­rate our thoughts from the exter­nal sit­u­a­tion. We see the exter­nal action, (hus­band telling me how to cook eggs, for instance), and we hear the inside scoop, i.e., what we are telling our­selves about the action, (“He’s try­ing to con­trol me.”). We know that the action, and our beliefs about the action, don’t always match. We can be wrong in our thoughts/beliefs about what hap­pens in our life.

When we are in observer, we no longer blindly believe our neg­a­tive thoughts about a sit­u­a­tion, the way we do when we are on the vic­tim tri­an­gle; instead we stand back from our thoughts, and ques­tion them.

For instance, from observer we might notice par­tic­u­lar neg­a­tive feel­ings and thoughts regard­ing our spouse’s behav­ior, but instead of auto­mat­i­cally believ­ing those thoughts and react­ing accord­ingly — by telling him off, per­haps, or by lec­tur­ing him about it — we ques­tion our assump­tions about his behav­ior instead. “The Four Ques­tions and Turn Arounds” pack­aged by Byron Katie ( www.thework.com ) are a con­cise set of ques­tions that are pow­er­ful because they move us out of vic­tim con­scious­ness and into observer consciousness.

When we access observer con­scious­ness con­sciously and con­sis­tently, we find less and less exter­nal rea­son to see our­selves as a vic­tim of some­one else’s behavior.

Hope you find this to be help­ful.
BLess­ings, Lynne