What is a victim mindset?

H Williams
3 days ago
5 min read

Q: What is a victim mindset?

A: This is one of my favorite topics because1.) it’s so easily misunderstood (I love explaining misunderstood topics), and2.) I love personal responsibility (so of course this is a topic I need to cover).

Let’s unpack what a victim mindset is by starting with what a victim is.

This is something all of us can understand, and most of us have been a victim of one thing or another in our lives, to varying degrees of intensity. Basically: a victim is someone who has been harmed, subjected, wronged, or overpowered by another person, institution, societal construct, or a circumstance beyond their control (like a natural disaster).

A victim is someone who actually, truly experienced something harmful. Something very real happened, and it caused very real damage. It describes a fact of experience — not a personality trait, identity, way of thinking, or way of seeing reality.

Now, depending on our life experience, the culture we grow up in, our childhood conditions, and any religious and/or spiritual frameworks that help us digest the up-and-down nature of reality,

there is

what we’ve legitimately been through (what we’ve been victim to),

and then there’s

the identity we build around what we’ve been through, or the narrative we develop to cope with what happened.

The identity and narrative-building is where the victim mindset is formed.

This is extremely nutshell, but: something bad happens to someone (short-term or long-term), they don’t receive adequate care or support to process or digest it, and [in order to cope] they develop an identity or personality around what happened to protect themselves from having to experience it (or anything similar to it) again.

This is almost entirely unconscious.

Most people in the victim-seat don’t realize they’re there until the discomfort of staying put becomes more painful than the fear of expanding or growing into something new.

But in essence, that is the basic origin of a victim mindset.

It’s a way of seeing and thinking that preserves psychological safety on some level. So, in a way, it’s helpful — but the problem is that it keeps you confined. I’ll return to this concept in a bit.

The identity of victimhood talks a bit like this:

“I wouldn’t be like this if they hadn’t done that to me.”
“Must be nice to not have my problems.”
“Why do I always get the short end of the stick?”
“This shouldn’t be happening to me.”
“If I try, I’ll just get hurt again.”
“I can’t move forward until they apologize.”

The tone of a victim mindset is circular, heavy, and defensive.

It’s a mindset built around justifying stasis.

Again, this provides psychological safety and cushioning on some level.

What’s interesting about my examples of victimhood talk is that they’re not entirely off-base. If my mom hadn’t crawled drunk into bed with me at night, I wouldn’t have night terrors.

So I could easily say, “I wouldn’t be like this if they hadn’t done that to me.”

It’s true! But blame rarely moves the needle.

It may feel good to blame someone for where you’re at, but that blame alone will not improve your life. What changes your life is — for sure — fully acknowledging and processing the grief of what happened to you, and then getting very curious about how your attitude about life is impacting your actions, behaviors, and general feelings.

Exiting a victim mindset is not about getting “tough” or ignoring what you’ve been through. There’s a difference between being tough and being brave. Tough can also be quite stubborn — and what do stubborn people do? They stay exactly where they are. Brave people are willing to move away from where they’ve been, even if it means hiking in the dark.

When you exit a victim mindset, you’re almost always hiking in the dark, through territory you’ve cleverly avoided for years. So if you’re going to hike in the dark, how do you want to do it?

Is hiking in the dark another unfair punishment doled out by an uncaring Universe?

Or is it a chapter in your own personal hero’s journey?

Maturity is realizing you are the sole captain of your inner narrative’s ship, and it is gravely serious to navigate that ship well.

One of my mentors refers to the opposite of a victim mindset as an author mindset. The V of victim creates a valley that one can get stuck in — you can’t see ahead, you’re stuck in a narrow view of yourself, reality, and what’s possible in life. If you flip that V upside down, you get the A — and the author stands on top of it, looking out across the world and all of the possibilities there really are.

There are possibilities for how to heal, how to make new choices, how to speak about yourself in new ways, how to ask for help, etc. An author is also comfortable with discomfort. It’s incredibly painful to own up to the ways you’ve been contributing to your own pain in a victim mindset. It can be incredibly uncomfortable to make new choices or challenge yourself to tolerate new things as you expand your capacity to live fully.

Where a victim mindset is circular, heavy, and defensive, the author-mindset is made up of different qualities:

An author takes total responsibility for their inner world, even when the outer circumstances were objectively unfair.
An author can tolerate discomfort with repeatedly collapisng into blame, stubbornness, or avoidance.
An author remains consistently curious about their own psychological patterns instead of defending or justifying them.
An author makes life choices based on who they’re becoming, not who they’ve been or what the past felt like.
An author sees themselves as an active participant in life, not as a passive recipient of an endless deluge of Cosmic Punches.

As someone who takes personal responsibility very seriously, I’d like to note that these traits are not static or permanent. It’s more like, a feeling or an approach toward life that you are consistently re-orienting to.

Something I get tripped up on a lot is not justifying my patterns. So maybe i’ll have a day or two where I’m very stubbornly justifying a pattern or belief, but because I have a pilot light of personal responsibliity flickering in the background, a pilot light I have cultivated over years, eventually I’ll come around and get curious about what I’m digging my heels in about. So becoming an author is not about perfection. It’s about continually making the choice to become the captain of your experience of life.

Where the victim mindset says, “This should not have happened to me,”the author mindset asks, “How do I want this experience to shape me?”

You can be a victim without being helpless, and you can move in ways to prevent harm without denying that you were a victim.

Please understand:

What happened to you is not your fault.But it is your responsibility to learn how to live — and even thrive — despite what happened to you.

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