How to Stop Being a Victim
How to Stop Being a victim: Fully Feel Into Being Victimized…
One of the biggest stages of growth I experienced was when I fully accepted and took responsibility for being a victim. This was the stage where I grew up, became an adult, and began the process of loosening the grip of codependency.
That awareness was the cognitive part (top down). Then came the somatic part (bottom up) - and this is where the true healing came in - when I gave myself permission to fully “feel” into being victimized. For decades, I held on to the victim persona. I had stories and many reasons why I was stuck and not moving in the direction I wanted. But, I had be with the bodily sensations to get the integration my nervous system was asking for.
The reality was that I truly was victimized. As a child, I’d experienced nearly every major abuse: physical, sexual and relational: neglect, abandonment, enmeshment. Those parts of me (the immature child versions), never got a witness to their experience. They were never seen, felt or heard. They were angry and exhausted, and were in deep need of grieving in the presence of a witness I felt safe with.
As with all unconscious wounds, my nervous system recreated scenes to show me where my work was. Our nervous system will orient us towards people and experiences that somewhat “replicate” the original trauma that likely occurred when we were very young. The most recent scene that I’d experienced was my then-husband cheating on and suddenly leaving me. I held on to that story of being left and having to navigate life alone for years.
I got sympathy, empathy and compassion from the outside world. People began to show up to “save and rescue” me. This is what the little girl version of me needed when the original traumas took place. I wanted attention. I wanted my parents to hold me and say, “there, there sweet girl, I’m here for you.” That repair didn’t happen, so the unconscious part of me attempted to reconcile it in the external world. Alas, the reconciliation didn’t happen there either.
About this time, I was diving heavily into Depth Psychology and shadow work. I was also extremely privileged to be the witness to my clients experiencing a similar stuckness as their body attempted to renegotiate the victim stage as well.
I went into this embodiment process with my mentor. She listened to me. She challenged me to pause and feel the sensations in my body that accompanied my story of being left alone. Parts of it were gnarly and it was not a weekend journey of excavation. This was a slow and nuanced process as to ensure integration. I began feeling the newfound “adult” begin to to gradually land in my body. This was the point at which beautiful experiences began to show up in my external world.
The inner creates the outer. So many of us spend countless days, even decades, attempting to manipulate our external environment to create lasting changes. If our internal environment is full with traumas and karmic deposits, we will continue to recreate these original emotional injuries through patterns, typically in intimate relationships.
We are the most relational beings on this planet. What went missing for most of us to offer repair - when relational injuries took place - was a trusting Other to soothe us via co-regulation. The embodiment and relational aspect must be present for us to truly heal. The byproduct of this is a completion of the original trauma(s), which naturally leads to integration. For me, and for many of you, a completion and integration of the victim state allowed me to show up fully in integrated form in the world. This is how we heal this planet.