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Victory Over Victim: Giving Up the “I Give Up” Mindset

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~ may you fly free in your heart with confidence and joy ~
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“I give up” is an insidious mind set that robs us of life on every front. Instead of claiming victory for our lives, this mind set establishes us as losers who settle for scarcity, poor health and unhappy circumstances. I've worked with clients who started giving up on life as children, inch by inch, so that by the time they were young adults they barely functioned at all!

Of course, there is an appropriate time for ‘giving up.' There are lots of things that, after much deliberation and clearing, we need to give up such things as, attitudes, beliefs, jobs, addictions, relationships: things that are not furthering us need to be surrendered.

But these sorts of let-go's are not the kind of ‘giving up' I am talking about here. I'm talking about the kind of giving up that is never healthy:

The things we must never give up on are: Ourselves, Our lives, love, and Source.

Instead of giving up we reinforce our will to live everyday. And we found our lives on gratitude!

Focus your attention on Source and proclaim Victory over Victim by proclaiming such affirmations as these:

No matter how many mistakes I make I keep on going.

I never give up on me.

I rise above my circumstances by understanding that my life challenges are preparing me for better things. I am confident that my life is purposeful and that I am guided.

I never give up on my life.

I grow through whatever difficulties I face, especially through my challenges with loved ones; I me into a more conscious and forgiving person. I seek understanding rather than resort to blaming.

I never give up on love.

No matter what disease I may be dealing with, I know that healing is possible.

I will never be too old to feel my oneness with the One True Source/Reality.

I never give up on Source.

Wishing you a lifetime of never giving up!
Blessings, Lynne

(This is an example of the weekly messages that readers receive as subscribers to my “Signs Of Victimhood” FREE download & Victim Vocabulary.)

Victimhood Is Our Made-Up Stories About Reality

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Every day is filled with opportunities for us to practice consciously choosing our responses to life. Rather than reacting habitually out of old patterns of belief we chose, instead, to be awake; we are watchful for times when our unconscious thoughts & words land us in a state of victimhood.

I often remind my clients that landing in a state of victimhood is a commonplace happening. It can be considered ‘normal,' even inevitable, to move in and out of a state of victimhood throughout any given day.

It is unrealistic for most of us to achieve a complete absence of victim consciousness. That is not what counts anyway. What counts is how long we stay there. It is our return to reality that matters most, not how many times we get caught up in victim thinking.

How long does it take for us to recognize we're in a state of victimhood and how immediate is our return to reality? That is what we want to work on.

Remember that a state of victimhood is never based on reality. It is based on our made-up stories about reality. That means that when we are in a state of victimhood we are out of touch with reality.

We return to reality by asking ourselves important questions such as, “What negative thought of mine is causing me distress right now? Am I willing to step into the observer’s seat and watch what happens when I believe that thought? Am I willing to get honest with myself about what I see? Am I more focused on finding and blaming an external problem or in freeing my mind from my own problem thinking? Am I 100% committed to clearing the thoughts that are keeping me in a state of victimhood or am I still making excuses and/or holding others responsible for my unhappiness?”

Victim Mind is Fear Based

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Fear is the driving emotion when we are in victimhood. Regardless of what role on the Victim Triangle we may be operating out of, fear predominates because victimhood comes out of fear based thinking.

In life there are two prevailing emotional frequencies: “Love” or “Fear.” Every feeling falls into one or the other of those two categories.

Emotional responses generated by fear include anger, hurt, shame, sadness, anxiety, guilt, depression, grief, etc. Such feelings cause contraction and shut down the heart. Such feelings leave us feeling “at the mercy of” what we perceive, as victims, to be a scary world.

Emotional responses generated from love include joy, congruency, happiness, connection, appreciation, gratitude, acceptance, trust, etc. These emotional responses open the heart and align us with a higher life frequency. They are feelings that align us with a loving Universal Source that guides and protects us.

“A Course In Miracles” states that love and fear cannot inhabit the same space at the same time because they have such opposing vibrational frequencies. We are either functioning out of the lower “fear” frequency or we are aligned with and transmitting the higher “love” vibration.

Our work is to “adjust” our emotional frequency from fear to a higher frequency where love prevails.

Are You Promoting Autonomy or Dependence?

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Seeking Help
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How do we find the balance between codependent “rescuing” and “cold detachment”? This is a question we must ask anytime we step into a service oriented relationship with another. It is the question we must ask at every level – from our personal relations right up to the level of national and international affairs. Whenever we face a decision about “helping” others – we must discern whether the service we are planning to offer empowers the other or fosters dependency.

We have to be able to tell the difference.

Care-taking starts the minute we start seeing someone as less something (less privileged, less financially able, etc) and in need of rescuing. As soon as we start thinking of someone as “having a problem” that needs our fixing, we have demoted them in our mind to the role of “less fortunate” or victim in need of rescue. Whether we intend it or not, we look down on them and see ourselves as superior.

We have now climbed on the Victim Triangle with them, a merry-go-round that offers no happy endings for either of us. When we see others as unfortunates who can't do for themselves we feel moved to start taking on their problems … we take control of their life situation because we think we can handle their lives better than they can. But the more we try to make life easier for them the less they end up feeling capable of doing for themselves. They come to believe, as we do, that they can't take care of themselves and they look to us for their answers. They now see themselves in need of rescuing and so they sit down and wait, expectantly for us to figure life out for them.

It is easily observable in human nature that the more others do for us the less we do for ourselves … the less we do for ourselves the more we become dependent on someone else to take care of us …. Eventually we come to expect to be taken care of and feel afraid and resentful, even outright mad, when our rescuers don't fix our problems for us. And who can blame us? We too have come to believe that we can't do it for ourselves so somebody's got to take care of us, right?

mattlas 003

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As rescuers trying to prop up these “unfortunates” we feel increasing hopelessness and frustration because the more we do for them the heavier they are to carry. We end up reinforcing their helplessness by taking care of them and because they too have come to believe they can't take care of themselves they become dead weight who now demand to be rescued. Instead of feeling grateful to us as their rescuers, these “unfortunates” grow increasingly angry because in spite of all of our efforts things are no better for them. Our gigantic efforts not only fail to fix them but leave us feeling completely depleted.

The rescuing approach does not work in families, relationships, at work, or on the community or national level. Rescuing is doomed to fail – every time – because success does not come from one person (or organization or country) taking responsibility for another (person, organization or country.) Success can only come when each of us takes 100% responsibilty for the quality of our own lives and stops looking out there for superman in the form of a parent, spouse, politician or government to do it for us.

Who are we rescuing? Who is rescuing us? And what are the consequences of that rescue? These are the questions to ask ourselves, our politicians and our government.

Loving ourselves and one another means to start taking responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings and choices on every level and respecting others enough to let them do the same. Self responsibility empowers us, it strengthens our capabilities and gives us a sense of self respect that ultimately frees us to live life autonomously.

The Victim Triangle

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Do you know that every time you blame something or someone outside yourself for your unhappiness that you are seeing yourself as a victim? This way of perceiving the world is what creates all of our mental and emotional misery. We see the world through a victim lens every time we think something outside of us is causing our unhappiness

There are three aspects or roles in this state of consciousness called victimhood; the Rescuer, Persecutor and Victim. These three roles of victimhood were originally diagramed by a well-respected psychiatrist and teacher of Transactional Analysis, Stephen Karpman. He calls it the Drama Triangle – I refer to it as the Victim Triangle.triangle

I believe that every dysfunctional interaction takes place on this Victim Triangle.

The three positions on the Victim Triangle are called the roles of victim because no matter where we start out on the triangle we eventually end up in the victim position. We simply move around the triangle going from one role to another in our interaction with others (and/or ourselves) with painful results.

The Victim Triangle is the playing field on which our unhappy stories gets acted out. We use the triangle to verify our limiting stressful ideas about each other and life in general.

The bottom line is that if we’re on the triangle we’re in victimhood, plain and simple!

Read my article, “Faces of Victim” to learn more. And be sure and sign up there on my article site to receive the eBook “Signs of Victimhood” which will also bring you continuing information on ways to liberate yourself from the victim mindset.

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