“If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.”
-Richard Bach
“Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.”
-John W. Gardner
- Know the benefits of a victim mentality.
There are a few benefits of the victim mentality:
Attention and validation. You can always get good feelings from other people as they are concerned about you and try to help you out. On the other hand, it may not last for that long as people get tired of it.
You don’t have to take risks. When you feel like a victim you tend to not take action and then you don’t have to risk for example rejection or failure.
Don’t have to take the sometimes heavy responsibility. Taking responsibility for you own life can be hard work, you have to make difficult decisions and it is just heavy sometimes. In the short term it can feel like the easier choice to not take personal responsibility.
It makes you feel right. When you feel like the victim and like everyone else – or just someone else – is wrong and you are right then that can lead to pleasurable feelings.
Seems to me that people with the victim mentality often make a very unhealthy generalization: they start with something like "doing bad things to other people is evil; not doing bad things to other people and suffering from other people's bad actions is good"... and gradually simplify it to: "doing things is evil; not doing anything is good". -- In extreme cases they may admit it openly, and perhaps call it an ancient wisdom. But in the typical case they would refuse this as strawmanning; yet their reasoning and action is as if they bel...
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: