In my high school, one of my classmates was notorious for being moody. She had difficulty keeping friends for a long time, she often kept to herself, and each time she was offered help by well-meaning people, she either refused or fought with them. I managed to be friends with her, but she was never consistent. She was off and on. Some days she would be super sweet with me, and we would talk for hours or practice volleyball together, other days she was just aloof. During volleyball practice, we realized that if she made a mistake in like passing the ball or serving etc, she would find a way to blame it on someone. After school, some of the girls in our team including myself managed to keep in touch with her via social media. 

Recently, I met another school friend and he shared that he was hanging out with her and her husband for a good couple of months. Both their families would go out for picnics and dinners. And then all of a sudden, she stopped taking his phone calls, and stopped replying to text messages. In short, this woman ghosted this friend of mine for no apparent reason. This is not the first time she had actually done that. A lot of my classmates have testified that she doesn’t trust anyone, and often ghosts friends. 

This schoolmate of mine most likely has what’s termed by psychologists and scientists as the victim’s Mindset. Guess what? Nobody is exempt from this mindset. All of us, from time to time, assume ourselves to be victims of a situation, instead of taking responsibility. If you have ever been accused of playing the victim’s card, or you have consciously played the Victim in a situation, this blog is for you. 

Do you play the victim often?

Do you feel like the whole world is against you? Do you have trouble making friends because you don’t trust people? Do you feel like it is never your fault? Do you always find some kind of fault in pretty much everyone? 

People with a victim mentality feel as though bad things keep happening to them and the world is against them. They may feel as though everyone else is against them, be it their partner, coworkers, or even their family or friends. Even though there might be things that they can do to help fix the situation, they don’t take responsibility for anything and feel as though everything is out of their control. Yeap victim’s mindset is damaging for their overall growth. 

In my lifetime I have come across many people who have a full-blown victim’s mindset and also people who like using the victim’’s card from time to time. Many of those people don’t realize that they have this mindset and they keep sabotaging their growth because of this lack of awareness.  

Why do some people play victim?

Let’s start with why some people think the whole world is against them. Now we all have played or acted like a victim when we made a mistake and we didn’t want to own up, once in a while. But if some of us have felt the need to play victim regularly, we may be suffering from a victim’s mindset. A victim’s mindset may come from a string of bad experiences in the past, or unprocessed trauma or grief. Sometimes these reasons are extremely serious, and we may need professional help to deal with past trauma or grief. The problem with unprocessed grief or anger is it reflects in our behavior towards other people, and we may unknowingly or knowingly hurt others.

Sometimes a victim mentality may also be the result of the environment we were raised in where we were taught to not trust anyone. I have also seen the victim’s mindset among people with low self-esteem. I am sure you may have read this thought somewhere – Hurt people hurt people. Meaning if we have some kind of unprocessed trauma or hurt, we will end up hurting others. 

Other times, a victim mentality comes from a place of manipulation, it is often used by abusers who have become adept at taking advantage from others. Such abusers may suffer from narcissim or low self-esteem. 

But a lot of times, we develop a victim’s mindset simply because it is the easy way out. We are lazy, we don’t want to own up responsibility for our actions and in the past, playing the victim has helped us get away from awkward situations, conversations or our own faults. So why not?

As I said I have personally come across many people who think it is other’s fault that they have problems in their lives. They blame their parents, or siblings, or spouses or friends or colleagues for their misery or failures. 

A young engineer, who hates his job, blames his parents for making him choose engineering. A young couple, unwilling to work their differences, blame their parents for marrying them off so early in life.  A manager, not wanting to lose his job, holds his incompetent team or office politics responsible, for his failures in project management. 

We all have blamed others or circumstances to some degree in our lives. But if this is our continual attitude toward life, ummm,,it’s a problem.  

I agree that not every victim in a real-life predatory situation is able to step up. This episode is not for victim shaming. Real victims exist, but this is why it becomes all the more important to say this out loud. Because sometimes we ignore the real victims in a situation and end up favouring fake victims. 

Also even if we may have been an actual victim of abuse earlier, once we are out of that bad situation, it is not fair to project that victimhood upon others, these others may have no idea what we have gone through and they may genuinely want to be friends with us or help us, and yet we push them away because we think everyone is out to harm us. 

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How do you know if you are suffering from the victim’s mindset?

So how do we know if we are suffering from the victim’s mindset? 

• If we blame others for the way our life is. Like if we think we couldn’t grow in life because of this or that person, or we often find reasons to excuse our lack of growth. This is a sign of a victim’s mindset. 
• If we make friends only with people who agree with us all the time.
• If we always see something negative in a fairly decent person, it may be something negative about their character, their personality, their job, their communication. Like if we have a tendency of finding something negative or something disagreeable in almost everyone we meet. 
• If we have very few friends because we don’t trust people, we think others are either against us, or making fun of us. These are signs that we either have a full-blown victim’s mindset or we lean on a victim’s impulses. 
• We feel attacked when someone tries to give us feedback or we feel personally attacked when someone criticizes us. We instantly villainize our critics and think they are our enemies. 
• We feel bad for ourselves, and often pity ourselves.
• IF we often attract such people who also blame others for their misery. 
• If we find it hard to examine ourselves and admit our faults. If we have difficulty owning up to our mistakes and we feel ashamed of admitting our errors. Then we definitely have a victim’s mindset. 

How is this mindset toxic for others and bad for ourselves?

People who often play the victim card don’t realize that they are sabotaging their own well-being and credibility. Others will eventually see through their constant pattern of blame-game or offering excuses, and this will kill their credibility. 

A victim’s mindset also jeopardizes perfectly great relationships – be it with our spouses, friends, siblings, parents or colleagues. Nobody wants to be around someone who plays the victim all the time. This mindset truly hurts those we love. And if we continue to play the victim card, we will never be able to make deeper connections or have long-lasting relationships. 

This mindset also hampers our own growth. Shifting blame or avoiding awkward conversations directly affects our confidence. We will never be prepared for the actual crisis when it happens, when there won’t be people around to blame or circumstances or causes for a certain mishap, we will feel isolated if we don’t leave the victim’s mindset. 

This mindset never allows us to do a self-evaluation. We tell ourselves lies, we don’t face facts. As a result, we will never get better, improve or grow as a person. 

The siblings who never blame

I know a pair of siblings who have suffered so much in their lives. They had a difficult childhood. Just when things were beginning to look a bit better, their mother was diagnosed with cancer. They lost her to cancer 8 months later. As a result of this trauma, their father struggles with mental health challenges. I know this pair of siblings for over eight years and amid misery and difficulty and unending struggles of life, I see them sometimes standing next to a dear friend on his wedding, or other times showing up to a coffee date, or sometimes taking a short retreat with a group of friends or organizing a prayer meeting in memory of their mother. 

Never in the last eight years I have seen them ever play the victim card, or blame anyone or God for their problems. They have decided to take life as it comes. 

I so wish all of us were like them, facing life’s struggles head-on without blaming others. It doesn’t make difficulties any less bearable but this attitude also stops producing more victims. God knows our world would be better off without too many victims. 

The pastor who played the victim’s card

Recently Fox Neworks released a documentary titled The Secrets of Hillsong. The documentary tried to tell the stories of the victims of sexual abuse in the hands of the Hillsong Megachurch. In one such case, a celebrity pastor Carl Lentz was accused by multiple women of sexual abuse. Carl Lentz has cheated on his wife more than once despite having delivered hundreds of sermons from the Biblical morality standpoint. 

The documentary director wanted to be fair and give Lentz too a chance to present his point of view. Lentz used this opportunity to reveal that he was abused as a child. Now imagine this documentary shows the narrative of the victims, the ones who were abused by Lentz and Hillsong. And here’s a perpetrator who chooses to reveal about his own abuse at this time, like he was trying to take away the attention from his victims to himself. Do you see what he did here? 

While it may be true that Carl Lentz may have been abused as a child, revealing it at a time when he was asked to take responsibility for his actions shows he played the victim card.

This is the textbook definition of adopting a victim’s mindset. 

And this mindset destroys relationships, produces more abuse victims, and ultimately harms the person playing the victim in the long run. 

J K Rowling never played the victim

We all know the story of Harry Potter’s creator J K Rowling. Since she was born in a poor family, her parents advised her to pursue a degree that would pay bills. She still chose Classics and Humanity and didn’t tell her parents until her graduation about her actual subjects. Many years later, she had lost her mother. She had her first child but she was divorced and on the brink of poverty. She had a clerical job to barely keep her going. She used to frequent a budget cafe in London, and that’s where she began writing Harry Potter. And the rest is history. When Rowling was invited to speak at the commencement of one of the Harvard University graduations,  she didn’t mince her words. 

What she said is something we can all learn from. I believe her words beautifully portray what I am trying to say. This is what she said in her now famous Harvard Commencement speech- 

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. – 

I think in just one sentence Rowling called out all the people with a victim’s mindset.  This is her full speech.

I want to conclude by speaking out loud some truths. 

Truths you should know

The world does not exist to please us or make friends with us. 

If we only make friends with those who are good to us all the time, or agree with us all the time, well, those may not be our true friends. And with this mindset, we will never foster healthy relationships. 

Nobody owes us any goodness. Nobody owes us friendship or kindness. We choose these things. 

The world is evil and passing, but there’s enough number of good and kind people. If we wish to live a fulfilling life, nobody else will find opportunities for us but ourselves. We will have to hunt for those opportunities. We will have to up our game, we will have to fight our weaknesses and find great friendships and lasting relationships. And if we are unwilling to make this effort, we will never grow, we will just keep ageing, and live an unexplored and unfulfilling life. 

There’s nothing wrong or bad or harmful in taking responsibility for our actions. It hurts to admit faults in that moment, but in the long run it prepares us to make better choices, be more confident, make good friends, build deeper connections with people. And last time I checked, these were qualities we all wanted, didn’t we? 

Love playing the victim? Snap out of it now!