These 8 things contribute to a victim mentality.
Self-pity is one of the most powerful ways to undermine your happiness and progress in life.
There will be times when things just don’t go right or how you planned. Sometimes they will blow up in your face or do damage that you weren’t expecting – relationships end, jobs get terminated, and friendships fall apart.
All of these things are a normal and expected part of life. Learning to survive and overcome them is not so normal. In fact, many people mishandle these events because of their emotional investment in the outcome.
You see, it hurts. It hurts a lot to lose a job you enjoyed, a person you value, or have a drastic change in life circumstances. It’s painful to be rejected. But self-pity doesn’t do anything to improve these situations. In fact, it’s throwing away valuable emotional and mental energy, like throwing your cash on a bonfire. Sure, it keeps the fire burning, but for what purpose, and at what cost?
Yet despite this, some people seem to take on the victim persona and almost thrive on feeling sorry for themselves. They perpetuate the cycle of misery by not taking the steps necessary to break it. Instead of taking corrective action, they do these 8 things.
1. Dwelling on emotions for longer than necessary.
Losing things in life is painful. It’s okay to feel hurt, angry, and sad about the situation. That’s healthy.
What’s not healthy is to dwell and ruminate on it for longer than you need to.
By all means, give yourself some time to feel your emotions, but building a house and living there is just foolish.
If you find those emotions are intruding, you have to be the one to decide you’re not going to let that happen, take control of those emotions, and shift them someplace else.
As the saying goes, “Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing.”
2. Being ungrateful for what they do have and failing to see the positives in a situation.
It’s pretty difficult to feel both self-pity and gratitude at the same time. Positive people tend to use this to their advantage, yet people with a victim mentality often choose to dwell in a place of lack rather than abundance.
Take losing a job, for example. Yes, it sucks, but you may have made some lifetime friends there. You can choose to appreciate having had that job for the experience it gave you and the friends you gained during your time there. Or you can choose to feel sorry for yourself.
Or yes, you lost a job, but your health is doing well, and everyone in your family is doing well. You can choose to be thankful for the things that are going well, or you can choose to conveniently gloss over them
But listen, sometimes there is no silver lining in tragedy. That’s okay too. You don’t have to be grateful or look for a silver lining in something absolutely awful. That’s toxic positivity, and it’s not healthy either.
3. Maintaining an overly negative, pessimistic mindset.
The emotions that we’re feeling often color the way we perceive an event. You’re more likely to perceive a neutral event – or even a positive event – negatively if you feel negative.
But a positive attitude can soften the blow of the events that might otherwise send you into a spiral of negativity and self-pity. You will still feel them, but they will have less of a negative impact on your mindset.
People with a victim mentality tend to have a “glass half empty” view of life. Yes, that could be partly down to genetics, but it’s also a choice. You can work at being more positive, if you want to. It’s not easy, but it’s certainly not impossible.
4. Wasting time moaning that could have been spent finding solutions.
Time spent swimming in self-pity is time that could have spent looking for a solution or building something better.
People who wallow in self-pity waste that valuable time on fruitless activities.
Rather than trying to figure out what they might do to make the problem go away or ease the practical and emotional burden of it, they spend too much time in the dwelling phase. As we’ve talked about, feeling the emotions is ok, but living in them is not.
The less time you waste, the better off you will be. You only get 24 hours a day. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.
5. Surrounding themselves with people who reinforce their pity.
Misery loves company. Miserable people love to be around other miserable people because they throw their misery into one another and have a companion to wallow with.
The people you spend time around have a drastic effect on the way you perceive and handle your life.
It’s tough to stay positive or neutral when the people around you are throwing constant negativity on you, talking down your accomplishments, or telling you that you deserved whatever happened.
People who feel sorry for themselves tend to be drawn to others with a victim mentality because they don’t actually want someone to help snap them out of their misery, they want someone who will throw them a pity party instead.
6. Splashing their problems all over social media.
People love to blast their problems out across social media and other internet channels. Particularly those with a “woe is me” mentality.
What you end up with is a bunch of people who don’t know your life or situation commenting on it. They don’t know the whole situation. They don’t know the details that you know. They don’t know what’s the truth and what’s not. And they only see the parts of your life that you’ve chosen to share with them – the negative ones. So if you’re lucky you’ll get the sympathy you’re looking for and reinforce the victim mentality.
But what can be worse is if no one comments on it at all. You post up something that felt terrible to you. No one bothers to acknowledge it at all, which may just be the social media algorithm not showing your post.
But someone who plays the victim won’t see it that way. They’ll see it as reinforcement that no one cares how hard their life is, further fuelling how sorry they feel for themselves.
7. They fight change and take it personally.
Change is the one great constant in life. But how you react to change can greatly influence how you feel about yourself and your life.
When you feel sorry for yourself, chances are that you are generally quite resistant to change. You feel anxious or stressed whenever something stable suddenly becomes less so.
When you realize that you can’t hold back the change or go back to how things were before, you feel down. And to some extent, that is natural. Stability in life takes some mental load off and makes life that bit easier. So when things change, it’s normal and okay to feel worried about what that change might mean to you.
But people who feel sorry for themselves take this to the next level. They fight change and see every threat to their stability as a personal slight. They forget that life is change. Everyone experiences it. They aren’t special and a change in circumstances doesn’t mean they are having a harder life than everyone else.
8. They don’t make an effort to work on themselves.
A person who often feels sorry for themselves will likely have a poor opinion of who they are and what they deserve. They feel prolonged pity for themselves and their misfortune because they don’t feel they are worthy of better outcomes.
They identify as a victim when bad things befall them because they have low self-worth. In fact, they use those bad things as proof that they don’t deserve better.
They also suffer from low self-belief which means they struggle to see a way to fix or improve the situation.
And as a result, they don’t make an effort to do things that would improve their self-worth and self-belief. And so the cycle continues.
Finally…
Ultimately, those who remain trapped in self-pity continue to sabotage their own happiness and potential. By engaging in these eight behaviors, they perpetuate a cycle of victimhood that’s hard to break. While life’s challenges are universal, it’s their response that sets them apart, keeping them stuck in a narrative of perpetual misfortune and missed opportunities for most of their lives.
