The Positive Potential of the Victim Archetype

We all know what it's like to engage in the Victim archetype. It's the one that brings that instantaneous feeling of hopelessness and self-pity, as though the light has gone out of everything and all your efforts are being sucked into a void. It's even easier to spot this energy at work in others as they spin tales of woe and a string of complaints, often without any accompanied positive action. And it's not as though we aren't victims in some sense. All of us are victimized at one time or other, most often when we are children because childhood is a naturally powerless state during which we cannot choose much at all about our external lives. However getting stuck in victim energy as adults can be highly problematic and keep us from progressing.

So what is the positive side of the Victim, the useful insights that it can provide? At least part it involves recognizing where we ourselves can take appropriate responsibility for some of the things that have happened or continue to happen. That is the job of the Victim archetype as it matures, to recognize where we are wrong or have wronged others, or where we have been complicit in our own suffering. Those times when we accepted a situation that we needed to take action to change or when our actions injured someone else. This is not about taking all the responsibility by any means, but it's also not about taking zero responsibility. (Please note that there are isolated incidents whereby people are victimized through no fault of their own and that is not what I refer to here).

When I look back on my own life, it's easy for me to recognize the ways in which I was a true victim but it has taken longer to see the ways in which I co-created further victimization through poor choices and lack of positive action. At the time I often felt that I simply had terrible luck and that God Himself was out to get me. A lot of the relationships I chose and the opportunities left unexplored are almost inexplicable when looking back on them. But for me, the more insidious part of the Victim that has been harder to recognize is where I have at times done outright injury to other people, often in seemingly small ways. This seems the final layer of truth that many of us never reach, because if we become too entrenched in being a victim, we will never see ourselves as anything but justified in our actions and refuse to recognize what we perpetrate. We get stuck in a pattern of everything being the fault of someone else.

Photo Credit: Adi Goldstein

"When you think everything is someone's fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy." -Dalai Lama

Most of us, if we're not careful, will take control where we can get it. It may be through being hyper-critical or refusing to engage or holding a grudge. It may be through deflecting blame or through storytelling that paints us as perpetually hard-done-by. Many of us can tell a story in which the same person is either saviour or villain depending on our agenda in the moment. It's no wonder then that we so often don't know our own true minds.

Of course it is important also to recognize when we are doing the opposite of accepting responsibility, which is to take on the blame for what someone else has done. So often we seem to get it all backwards, excusing someone who ought to take their own responsibility and refusing to take responsibility for ourselves when that is appropriate. We may beat ourselves up endlessly for faults that are trivial while ignoring the things that we actually could change to improve things for ourselves. It's almost as though self-flagellation becomes a substitute for problem-solving.

So how can we accept appropriate responsibility without excusing ourselves or turning against ourselves? One idea comes from the writer Gabor Mate who wrote about his experience with marital issues in one of his books. He stated that he chose to take exactly 50% of the blame for those problems, no more and no less. I was astonished when I read this, simply because it seemed a rare position to take. Most of us spend a lot of time shifting blame to one side or the other. We villify or we self-flog. Rarely do we just take half the pie and deliver the other half.

I've come to see the wisdom of 50%, particularly for relationship issues. After all, we are constantly co-creating our lives, in a push-pull negotiation with everyone around us. It makes sense that we are 50% responsible, at least as adults, for many of the situations we find ourselves in. It's at least something to consider. Try taking 50% of the blame for a situation and see what comes up for you. You may instantly feel that that is too much or too little and perhaps in some situations its is, but it's a great starting point. Because here is another truth: if we cannot and will not see where we may have gone wrong, we cannot act any differently in the future and we become well and truly stuck. In order for the inner Victim to become empowered, there must be a lesson learned.

So think of your own life and where you yourself, Victim though you may have been, are finding ways to shift blame, seek power or refuse to take power in your own life. This is where the Victim becomes empowering rather than disempowering because it shows us how we can grow up and level up and become better human beings. This is where we can begin to show grace to other people because we're no longer invested in making them wrong and yet still have boundaries to prevent victimization of ourselves; that elusive and tricky balance where we protect ourselves without malice or fear. That is a place of freedom.