Counselor, Author, and Reflective Eclectic
Constructive Conflict is now in audio, narrated by Pete Ferrand.
I have 25 free copies to give away and will raffle them off next Monday, August 25, 2016. Fill out the form below if you are interested.
If you can’t wait and want your copy right now, click here to go to Amazon.com. It’s also available in paperback and Kindle.
If you have thought it was hard to find a therapist, you’re right. A study appearing in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior shows that, among middle-class people who contacted a therapist to schedule an appointment, only 28 percent of whites and 17 percent of blacks received appointment offers. As if that wasn’t bad enough, appointment offer rates for both black and white working-class therapy seekers were an abysmal 8 percent. The study held factors such as insurance and time of appointment steady.
I’ve heard many therapists claim that they would not work with people from some cultural groups out of respect because they do not feel they are culturally competent to treat them. No wonder. If you do not see people different from you and listen to what they have to say, you will not understand them. If you do, you will.
Click here to read the article
Here’s a website I like, the Fat Nutritionist. One who advocates a sane approach to food. Click here to go to a post on being nice to yourself.
As if it wasn’t hard enough to deal with the people who hurt you, you also have to deal with their representatives you carry around in your head. Actual people you can divorce, send to jail, move across the country and never see again; the people of the mind follow you, they share your bed despite divorce. Regardless of orders of protection, they dog your footsteps, day and night. It’s imperative you find a way to cope with these imaginary people or they will do you more harm than the real ones ever could.
You’ve heard the things these imaginary people say to you: You’re never going to amount to much… You’re just a slut… You’re a failure…. No one is ever going to want to be with you. No, they weren’t actual voices that you can hear. They’re thoughts, but thoughts are as persuasive as voices. These words may have originally come directly from the actual person. It’s like you have a tape somewhere, playing them over and over again. You worry that you might be going crazy, except that everyone has these inner critics.
You’ve tried to argue with these voices, prove them wrong. You’ve written positive affirmations, taped them to your bathroom mirror, and repeated them fourteen times a day. Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better. I will be successful. I’m a loving, committed partner. Everyone wants to be with me. You think this will help, but it doesn’t. The niggling nabobs of negativity natter all night, nonetheless.
At the risk of adding my voice to theirs, you’re doing it wrong. This isn’t the way you handle an inner critic. You’d be happier if you trained it to be better at its job.
We all need the capacity for self criticism. A good inner critic can stop you from committing many foolish things. It’ll halt you from saying that impolitic thing you were going to say. It’ll make sure your fly is zipped when you leave the men’s room. It’ll help you pick out the perfect outfit. It’ll hone your performance so that every day, whatever you do, you’ll do it better and better; not because you say so, but because you’re learning from your mistakes. A good inner critic is like a personal trainer, a portable therapist, a life coach, and a father confessor, all rolled into one. You should thank your stars you have an inner critic. It might save you from public humiliation. But, you need a good one.
You can train your inner critic to get better at its job by replying to all its statements with a single word question: Because…?
So, let’s take the things inner critics say to people and try out this method on them.
“You’re never going to amount to much.”
“Because…?”
”You’re just a slut.”
“Because…?”
“You’re a failure.”
“Because…?”
“No one is ever going to want to be with you.”
“Because…?”
If the inner critic is able to complete the sentence and tell you why you’re never going to amount to much, etc, then you’ve got some information you can use. For instance, if it says you’re never going to amount to much because you spend so much time playing video games, then that’s an intelligent point of view you should consider. Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s wrong, but, at least you can reason with it. When the inner voice doesn’t do anything more than pronounce that you’re a loser, then it’s no different than those bullies who called you names on the playground. Their words are hollow, their arguments specious. You can dismiss their claims because they have nothing to back them up.
When you challenge the inner critic to give evidence and it follows through, then you turn the critic into a trusted advisor who gives you something you can use. It becomes a consultant who is more than just a yes man. If the inner critic doesn’t follow though and provide any evidence for its point of view, then it’s not a true inner critic; it’s an inner bully.
It’s important to understand who these people of the mind are and what they are doing there. In the same way that a meteorologist will program a simulated climate into a computer, you set the people of the mind up to match the actual world. Then you run different scenarios. They are your creations. There should be a strong resemblance; but they are not the people they represent and they are not you.
For example, probably everyone has an inner father. When you were a child it was in your interest to be able to predict what your father would do in a given circumstance. If you thought about swiping a cookie, you needed to know whether he would smile, yell, or beat you with a leather strap. So, you constructed an imaginary character you called your father, based on your father. The more accurate a representation of him it was, the more useful this construct could be. This inner father is not your father, it’s a simulation of your father; but, if you are a good author, it would be a damn good simulation.
You would also have to give these simulations free will in the same way that you might program a computer to make its own decisions based on preordained factors. The inner person has to be able to operate on its own, without too much input from you. It does you no good to hand a script to your inner father and tell it how to respond when you swipe a cookie; you need to know how it would respond so it can tell you how your real father would. This is how come these people of the mind seem to have a will of their own. You give it to them so their behavior can be like the free will behavior of actual people.
The simulations also have to go on running when the actual person is not around. Just because your father has left the room, it doesn’t mean you don’t need the simulation. You need to know how he would respond to the missing cookie when he returns. Just because you haven’t seen the actual person in months, doesn’t mean you won’t see him again. Just because he’s dead and buried, doesn’t mean you won’t come across people like him someday. This is why it’s often not good to dismiss a person of the mind. You might need it again.
These simulations get repurposed when we come across someone new who somehow resembles them. When you meet a new boss, for instance, you may use the model of your father upon which to construct a new model of your boss because they both have something in common: they are important, powerful males in your life. This way, if something comes up in which you don’t know how your boss will respond, you run the contingency through the father program, so at least you have something to go on. You may easily get confused, though, about who you’re dealing with. Many assumptions about your boss may come from what you have come to expect with your father.
You can see that you can easily get confused about who these people of the mind are. You may confuse the inner person with the actual person. You may think you know them when you don’t. If you do confuse them, then that’s because you’re a good author and have developed rich, well-drawn characters who seem real.
These people of the mind do more than give you models for how actual other people may behave. They also help you work out how you will behave. They help you play with possibilities to see how they might turn out. Before you swiped that cookie, you imagined yourself swiping that cookie. You worked out how to move the chair and reach the top of the cupboard without your father hearing you. You debated whether you should drag the chair or pick it up. You told yourself, if you drag the chair, it’ll rub on the floor and make a sound. That was an inner critic. It said, “Quiet, you’ll be too noisy.”
You can thank your inner critic for helping you steal that cookie.
The construction of inner representations of yourself has to follow the same rules that apply to constructions of other people. The simulation of yourself has to be an accurate representation of how you could be in the real world. It has to know whether you are strong enough to pick up the chair, for instance. The simulation of yourself also has to seem to have a will of its own so you can accurately project how it will behave. The simulation of yourself also has to persist over time, so that you can build on past failures and successes. It can also be confused with your actual self, so that you can’t tell the difference.
You can hear this confusion when you talk. You say, “I keep telling myself I’m a loser, a slut, and no one will ever want to be with me.”
No, that’s not you saying that. It’s your inner critic: a character of your own creation set up to resemble you or an important person in your world. If you confuse this character with you, then you did a good job creating it; but it’s not you. You are the creator. You are the person directing, watching, and listening to the show.
In summary, this is how you deal with the people of the mind: You act like the creator of this inner world, which you are. You put them to the use they were intended. You realize that you are to them as the figure of God is to His creation. You are the Almighty and, if you want, you can cast them into Hell where they cry and gnash their teeth; or you can extend grace, mercy, and redemption to a broken inner world that matches the broken actual world.
Let’s say you are deeply disappointed in your mother, who never was the mother you needed her to be when you were a child. You want to get past this because, after all, you’re not a child anymore, right? The story, as you tell it, goes like this:
My mother divorced my father when I was young and she had a series of relationships with men throughout my childhood. None of them were any good. They were drunken, violent louts. Nonetheless, she always chose them before me. She would do whatever they said and moved me in and out of different homes before she really knew any of them. None of these men wanted me around and I got the feeling my mother didn’t, either. I was just an inconvenience to her.
This is a heartbreaking story that is all too common. If this happened to you, the effects go deep and can persist a lifetime. You would really rather they didn’t. What can you do to let it go?
Here’s a place to start. Stop calling her My Mother. I don’t mean you have to stop calling her My Mother or Mom, or Ma, to her face. Nor, do you have to renounce her forever. She still is your mother. I mean, when you tell the story, refer to her by name instead of title. If her name is Alice, call her Alice.
My Mother is a being who came into existence when you did and exists only in relation to you. Alice was born long before you and has a life distinct from you. My Mother is so close to you that she’s an extension of yourself and you’re an extension of My Mother’s self. Alice is another person. You can connect as an equal to someone named Alice in a way you can never to My Mother. When Alice chooses the company of men over you, it might hurt a little, but when My Mother does it, it’s catastrophic.
It was catastrophic when you were a child, but you’re not a child anymore, so it’s not, not anymore. Now it’s as if someone named Alice did it.
Some people resist this exercise because they think it is disrespectful. I think it’s more respectful to understand someone as a whole person, independent of yourself, who is trying to play with the hand she is dealt.
The second step is take a look at Alice’s life, from the beginning to the end. Tell the story from her point of view; the whole story. How was Alice’s childhood? What were her parents like? How might Alice have been shaped by her relationship with her first husband, George, whom you know as Dad? What were the social and economic forces of her early adulthood, the period of time when you were a child? What were Alice’s dreams and aspirations?
I’m often amazed by how little adult children know about their parents, except the parts that directly pertain to them. You may be able to ask her to tell you these things. If not, then guess. You will probably be right. You probably know more than you know you do.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that Alice’s dad, your grandfather, was distant, hard working, but emotionally unavailable. A lot of fathers were, in those days. When she was a kid, Alice dreamt of going to college and traveling around the world, but she got pregnant in high school and married George, your dad. That’s what people did those days when they got pregnant. Shackled with a kid, little education, and in a shotgun marriage, she didn’t have a lot of choices. George had no respect for her and, when she never lost the weight she gained in her pregnancy, he ran off with his secretary. Now, she was really screwed economically and worried about raising her child without a male role model. She started to date, to find a man who would support her and her child. The prospects of an out-of-shape single mother in the marriage market were not good. She soon found herself scraping the bottom of the barrel. No matter how much she might have loved her child, she regretted ever getting pregnant.
See how different the two stories are when you are not in the center of it? You are seeing the context. You could conclude that she did the best she could. Maybe not. You could still be angry with her. That’s your prerogative, but now it’s an adult being angry with another adult, not a child being angry with his mother.
The third step is to calculate how old Alice was at the time in question. Let’s just say she was twenty-five. Now, look around at the people you know who are twenty-five. How mature, wise, and altogether are they? Some are, granted, but most haven’t got all the kinks worked out. Twenty-five year olds might actually be younger than you are right now. If that’s the case, then remember how much maturity, wisdom, and know-how you had. That’s what Alice had to work with. Now calculate how old you were at the time. Let’s say eight. Look at eight year olds you know today. How much maturity, wisdom, and understanding have they? Do you really want to look at the situation from an eight-year-old’s point of view?
It’s impossible to gain any of those insights about My Mother but entirely possible with someone named Alice.
You can use this method with all the disappointing people who have titles in your life: husband, wife, sister, brother, friend, leader, colleague. When you are no longer at the center of the story, blocking the view, you are better able to see and, if appropriate, genuinely forgive.
Being the father of four children, I completely understand the urge to spank. My children are all adults and I still, from time to time, want to take them over my knee and give them a good one. So, there is the urge, but beyond the urge, there’s also the perceived duty to spank. You might have heard this, too. I was told I had to spank, even when I didn’t want to, for the good of my children. You know, spare the rod and spoil the child, and advice like that. So, there’s the urge and there’s the supposed duty, but then there’s science.
The Journal of Family Psychology recently published a paper by Elizabeth T. Gershoff and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor. It analyzed fifty years of research on spanking.
“The evidence against spanking is one of the most consistent findings in the field of psychology,” said Gershoff.
This type of paper is a meta-analysis. It analyzes other analyses, studies other studies. Presumably, the results are more accurate. A single study could be flawed, but a summary of dozens of studies is less likely to be flawed. When a psychologist says that something is one of the most consistent findings in the history of psychology, that’s about as close to iron clad truth as anything in the behavioral sciences ever gets.
She says there are three things wrong with spanking. It doesn’t work, it’s harmful, and it violates human rights.
The strongest argument against spanking, I believe, is the first. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Spanking is supposed to teach children the difference between right and wrong. The paper shows it’s less effective than time out. Moreover, spanking alone does not teach children why their behavior was wrong or what they should do instead.
Hitting, by its nature, causes physical pain, and it can be confusing and frightening for children to be hit by someone they love and respect, and on whom they are dependent. Children report fear, anger, and sadness when they are spanked, feelings that interfere with their ability to internalize parents’ disciplinary messages.
Secondly, spanking probably causes more problems than it solves.
… spanking was associated with increases in mental health problems in childhood and adulthood, delinquent behavior in childhood and criminal behavior in adulthood, negative parent-child relationships, and increased risk that children will be physically abused.
Then there’s the fact that spanking is totally illegal in thirty-three countries and has been condemned by the United Nations. It may not surprise you that one of the countries in which it is illegal is Denmark. It might surprise you that another is the Democratic Republic of Congo, hardly a bastion of progressive thought. The United States is increasingly isolated in that it permits corporal punishment by parents. If you believe there is such a thing as human rights, you’ve got to say that the rights of a weaker, dependent person to be protected from violence by a stronger, not self-disinterested person, albeit a parent, is a significant one. Seldom does punishment by spanking respect due process.
If you’d like to read the article, click here.
First, I had you acknowledge your feelings, then set them aside. I had you recognize that you were a victim, then I urged you to stop playing the victim. I told you to not forgive cheaply, then I said you were a fool not to forgive. So, which is it? You ask. What do I want?
I want you to stay on the road to reconciliation. Here’s the thing about roads. You can drive off of a road on either side. In order to get anywhere, you’ve got to keep moving. As you move, the road changes. When you fail to recognize the changes, you go off the road, hit a tree, and stop.
There are lots of ways of going off the road to reconciliation. One way is by sticking with an official story.
As any conspiracy theorist can tell you, there’s a big difference between the official story and the real one. The official story is the corporate or governmental public relations bullshit that’s repeated so many times that it begins to pass for truth. It’s designed to tidy up the mess, reassure the public, establish the narrative, and maintain the status quo. It’s what you tell your mother after a hot date or the explanation given to a prospective employer after you walk out on your last job. It’s often not an outright lie, just a highly varnished one. It contains elements of the truth, but it’s not the truth. The truth is usually much more awkward. The official story is meant to be the last word. It’s something people tell, not to answer questions, but to stop questions from being asked.
It’s not just corporations, the government, frisky children, or disgruntled workers that employ official stories. The person who injured you does it, too. You’ve heard them. He hit you because you made him so mad. He hit you, but you hit him first. He couldn’t help but hit you because his father did it to him, too. He hit you, but he’s sorry and it taught him not to do it again. These may have all been true. What makes them official stories is when they are meant to be the last word. When they are used to shut you up.
As the victim, you have your own official story, too. You may have adopted one of his and have been perfectly content to admit that you made him so mad he hit you, or he hit you because you hit him first. You might want to let him off the hook and say that he only did what his father did. You might accept a premature apology just so you don’t have to deal with the whole thing anymore.
Or, maybe your official story is that you’re a victim, subject to a paternalistic society, without rights, resources, or recourse. You may be correct in this, but it’s an official story if you stop there and make it the last word. If you look at what happened and examine its context, then you can see the cracks and patches in the official story. You see that the official story glosses over significant exceptions and inconsistencies. The official story is not the whole story. Even a genuine truth is not the whole truth or the only truth.
You’re not just the victim and he’s not just the perpetrator. In fact, the word, just, should no longer be in your vocabulary, at least not used in a reductionistic manner that conceals the details. Remember that, while I want you to hold the offender accountable, I also want to avoid seeing you getting stuck in just being a victim. There’s more to you than that.
There’s something about us humans that makes us want to take vibrant life and engrave it in stone. We do it so we can handle it, manage it, put it in a box, and carry it without dropping it. We fixate it and then we fixate on it, trying to keep it fixed on a pin. But life is not like that. You are not like that. Life is meant to be, well, lively. So keep it moving and be suspicious of the last word on anything.
Let me say one more thing and it’ll be the last word on having the last word. I promise.
Go to your cupboard and find a single piece of simple food: a Cheerio, say. Before you pop it in your mouth, think about what it took to bring that single Cheerio to you, the context of the Cheerio, in order words. There were farmers, truckers, warehouse workers, and grocers, as well as the tractor manufacturers, fertilizer salesmen, oil rig workers, agribusiness executives, box makers, etc, that support them. Then there’s the parents, the partners, and the children of those farmers, truckers, warehouse workers, grocers, tractor manufacturers, fertilizer salesmen, oil rig workers, agribusiness executives, and cardboard box makers, as well as their teachers, doctors, lawyers, barbers, and accountants. And that’s only the people involved in the Cheerio. Don’t let me get started on the chemical properties of the cereal and the history of the elements involved. Get the point? It’s infinite. You could spend all day looking at the context of a single Cheerio, and it’s just a Cheerio.
The official story is it’s just a Cheerio. Well, if there’s a lot to a Cheerio, then imagine what there might be regarding you, the loved one who hurt you, and an incident between you.
As you can imagine, it could take you all day to eat a single Cheerio. Similarly, you could spend the rest of your life thoroughly appreciating the context of any incident between you and your loved one; you’d never be any closer to the end. That’s no good, either. Life goes on. Seeing the context is a good thing, but, at some point, you’ve got to chew and swallow the damn thing. There’s lots of ways of getting stuck on this road. One way is by thinking too much and never settling on anything.
So, here I go again, talking out of both sides of my mouth. I want you to see the context and be open to multiple interpretations; but I also want you to figure things out and close around some conclusions and resolutions, be decisive, in other words. Which is it? You ask. What do I want?
I want you to stay on the road. When you start veering over too far to one side, veer over to the other.
If you read my last post, entitled Avoid Playing the Victim, you would have come across this example. I stole it.
The fourth sign [of playing the victim] is hard to explain. Imagine going to a restaurant and getting a waiter who is so attentive, so obsequious, so unctuous, so over-the-top in his waiter-like flourishes that he seems to be a caricature of a waiter. When he praises you for the entree you selected from the menu, you wonder if he’s being sarcastic. You don’t trust him because he doesn’t seem real. He actually is a waiter, but he still seems to be playing a part. There is something inauthentic about him, something that seems faked or forced, something of bad faith.
So, the fourth sign that you are playing the victim is when you are more intent with keeping up the part you play than in just being yourself. You’ve got a mask on so no one can see who you really are.
I ripped off the bit about the waiter from the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre. I owe a lot to Sartre. Of all the philosophers, he probably has influenced my thinking more than any other. It’s time I gave him his due and his own link within these pages of the Shrink’s Links.
To Sartre, this waiter was an example of a person reducing himself to an object, rather than simply being as he was. Sartre believed that the waiter had to play at being a waiter as a way of denying that he, at that moment, had other possibilities. For instance, the more annoyed he was at the customers, the more perfect a waiter he had to be. The waiter said to himself, I can’t be rude right back to that rude customer, I have bills to pay. I have no choice.
That’s not true, says Sartre. Of course he has a choice. We all have choices, always; but we want to trick ourselves into believing we don’t. Sartre, who wrote his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, in the middle of France in World War II, had a radical belief in human freedom, a strange thing to have as people were being strafed by planes and led away to concentration camps. Perhaps that is a testimony to the freedom he asserted. We can believe what we want, despite evidence to the contrary.
You can imagine that, in my work as a therapist, I come across many people who think they are not free. People who put up with a lot of terrible situations, who are horribly victimized, simply because they believe the have no choice. People who accept the part of victim as their identity, precluding the possibility they could be anything other than a victim. Then there’s the folks who believe that they have no choice but to take that drink, shoot that dope, hit that wife, be depressed, or act like an ass simply because circumstances or genetics dictate that they do so. It’s my job to show them there’s another way. Sartre comes in handy then.
I will admit that Sartre’s book, Being and Nothingness, from which I stole the waiter, is a tough read and, in a therapy sessions, the less that is said about cranky incomprehensible French philosophers the better. In fact, philosophy is seldom something that can help people feel better or even do better. People often need real human connection, rather than rationale and abstract arguments, and the ones inclined to turn to philosophy need real interaction more than the others. That is not to say, though, that therapists shouldn’t have their thoughts grounded in the thinking of people who had the time, talent, and inclination to think things through.
So, if you are a therapist, or if you just want to think like one, read Sartre before you tell anyone that they just can’t help themselves. Read Sartre if you want to recognize self deception.
Click here to read Sartre.
So far, I’ve been urging you to bear right on the road to reconciliation. There’s a good reason for this. To the left are all the hazards that come from not taking your injuries seriously enough: cheap pardon and being out of touch with feelings and uncommitted to values. Now I want you to slightly change direction. If you continue the bearing you are going, you’ll go over a sheer cliff. You’ll go from being someone who is speaking out against injustice to someone who is playing the victim.
You’re playing the victim when you fabricate or exaggerate your suffering so that you can cope, seek attention, or justify abusing and manipulating others. You deserve an Academy Award if you act like you played absolutely no part in what happened to you. You’re being a drama queen if you use your injury to extract unfair concessions. Indeed, go down this Playing the Victim road far enough and you will no longer be the victim; you’ll just be another perpetrator.
Sometimes I ask people who have been victimized by something: who would you rather be, the person who had suffered the injury, or the person who had committed it? No one wants to suffer the injury, but in the aftermath, practically everyone would rather be the victim than have to live with themselves after having committed some crime or betrayal. This is what motivates people to play the victim.
People play the victim the same way other roles are played. Certain traits are emphasized and inconvenient contradictions ignored. You become histrionic and dramatic, possibly operatic. You’re certain that your version of events is the only possible version and everything else is lies. You cling to your script and don’t know what to do when the footlights are off. You assign blame and forget that when you point a single finger at someone else, three more are surreptitiously pointed at you. You so strongly believe in a convenient fiction that you have lost touch with the truth.
Early on the road to reconciliation, it is necessary to get a clear picture of the damage done by the person who hurt you. I’ve talked a lot about the pitfalls of cheap pardon and losing touch with your feelings. It’s necessary to acknowledge the hurt and speak out against oppression. The problem comes when you begin to believe your rhetoric too much or become too strident in an effort to be heard.
People might falsely accuse you of playing the victim if they don’t want to hear what you have to say. How can you tell if they’re right? How do you know if you’ve gone too far?
There are four signs that you are playing the victim. Four signs that result in at least four negative consequences.
First, you are playing the victim if it is impossible for your offender to make any meaningful restitution. I’m not saying you have to accept any half hearted apology, I’m saying that you can’t complain about something without giving the person a chance to make it right. She can never meet your terms for reconciliation because you have elevated them to an unattainable level. You require a down payment no one can afford when you expect someone to accept all the blame.
Second, you are playing the victim if you do not see that you have some power to change the situation. One consequence of playing the victim is that you end up feeling powerless because you refuse to see the extent to which you have power. This powerlessness is incompatible with being able to take action on your own behalf. You fail to recognize your own efficacy. You victimize yourself through inaction and indecisiveness.
Third, you play the victim if you have lost your humility; if you fail to admit that there is often a very fine distinction between the abuser and the abused, between the perpetrator and the injured party. You forget that, if not for the grace of God, or random circumstances, you could’ve been him.
Let’s take a marital argument, for instance, an ugly confrontation that results in yelling, name calling, throwing dishes, slamming doors, and sore feelings for days afterwards. Someone started it, someone yelled first, called the first name, threw the first dish, and slammed the first door. One person held on to their hurt feelings longer than the other. It’s seldom the same person who escalates or de-escalates things at each step. The person who called the first name may not have been the one who slammed the first door. It’s often hard to say who started it, or even, when it started. When one person throws a dish; we’ll never know, if she didn’t, that the other might have thrown a dish a minute later.
The fourth sign is hard to explain. Imagine going to a restaurant and getting a waiter who is so attentive, so obsequious, so unctuous, so over-the-top in his waiter-like flourishes that he seems to be a caricature of a waiter. When he praises you for the entree you selected from the menu, you wonder if he’s being sarcastic. You don’t trust him because he doesn’t seem real. He actually is a waiter, but he still seems to be playing a part. There is something inauthentic about him, something that seems faked or forced, something of bad faith.
So, the fourth sign that you are playing the victim is when you are more intent with keeping up the part you play than in just being yourself. You’ve got a mask on so no one can see who you really are.
It comes down to this: you don’t need to play the victim if you are the victim, but you might end up doing so, anyway. You then lose touch with yourself, your feelings, and values, again. You have confused yourself with the part you are playing.
In some cases, when you stop playing the victim and get real about your contribution to the problem, you may just find that you’re really an abuser, all along, and all your complaints were just distractions for the harm you have done. This can be disconcerting, to say the least. No one wants to admit they behaved badly, much less that they are guilty of covering it up. However, when you stop playing the victim, then you are able to see the problem clearly and do something about it.
So, get real and avoid playing the victim. Don’t take yourself so seriously that you lose yourself in the process.
Keith Wilson - Counseling