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Why Coming Out of Victim Mentality Requires Looking at Your Own Behavior
Part 1 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It
This is part 1 of a 5 part series on what victim mentality is and how to get out of it. In this essay, I’ll share about how understanding “your part in things” (as we say in 12-step recovery) brings you out of victim mentality.
If you’re not familiar with victim mentality, it’s a way of thinking that’s so deeply internalized that we don’t realize we have it. You might call it a paradigm, which is a framework for thinking that includes some basic assumptions about what is taken to be “true.” For example, the idea that the world was flat was a paradigm which informed many areas of life. There was a paradigm shift when it was understood that the world was a sphere. Tehre’s often a lot of resistance to shifting paradigms becsuas the assumption that the original paradigm is “true” as so deeply embedded.
That can be true of victim mentality as well. That was definitely true for me! This mindset shift was the most important one of my recovery, and I continue to come out of victim mentality to this day. The thing that helped me the most was doing step 4 where we take a searching and fearless moral inventory” or in plain language, come to understand “our part in things.”
