FREEDOM FROM VICTIMHOOD
FREEDOM FROM VICTIMHOOD
The brighter you shine the more agitated they become. When people are acting out and addressing you defensively, negatively, and targeting you; it’s not really behavior directed towards you. It’s an instant replay of how they were belittled, bullied, dominated, traumatized, or abused by someone in their past. And they are treating you like that because you just happen to be a mirror for whatever is unresolved in their traumatic memories. They are acting out their own personal story of fear and suffering, and you are simply privileged to be a detached compassionate witness.
We all have personal stories of victimhood and suffering driven by survival fears shaped by the values and standards of our culture and delivered by our parents, schools, advertisements, and governments which then interact with our personal biography and experiences to become hardened as a self-concept.
To better understand these origins you might ask yourself, “How did my caregivers and communities see the world? How did they see me?”
Why do fear stories persist?
You are habituated to believing your thoughts, narratives, and stories – particularly negative stories. In this regard, you are hardwired to be Velcro for negativity and Teflon for positivity as an evolutionary bias for survival. Your brain builds an identity around fear stories by rehearsing these stories to code them into you’re your autobiographical memory. Fear stories can protect you up to a certain point but eventually they sabotage your ability to open to being vulnerable and having positive connections. Your ego functions as an identity gatekeeper to prevent you from searching beneath the woundedness and pain and willingness to share these stories with others. The more you keep them to yourself the more they become part of your identity. This is the way your stories give you a sense of control over perceived threats.
When people are acting out of their fear-based trauma narratives or insult you they are not actually talking to you. They are appealing, at a subliminal level, to the higher self within you who they hope can end the cycle of their abuse. In victimhood, we either wake up or drown. In a sense, abusers are really saying, “Feel my pain and liberate me in some way because I don’t know how.”
So now we have another example of the dialectic of being incarnate. What is happening is that two energy fields of conscious awareness are merging in conversation and confrontation. When a person with a predominantly fear-based negative orientation to life meets a person with predominantly love based positive orientation to life there can be a deep disconnect. Negative people are very confident about their negative, dangerous, and even cruel world view. Positive love centered people are less confident and try to protect themselves by shutting down or putting up a shield to survive in conversation with the negative person. The sensitive love centered person may not have learned to fucus their love as power.
What to do?
You need to be as confident and focused about blessing and offering love to others as they are about being hurtful and lashing out. If they blast you with some negative energy, you counter with a compliment and a blessing, whichever is most honest. Quite often this strategy will cause negativity to soften. One sign that negativity is softening is that they will likely go from anger to skepticism or sarcasm (from aggression to passive aggression). The world you are afraid of is only so scary as your ability to be shut down by powerful forces of negativity. For ever and ever the old paradigm has been that positive people must work hard to convert negative people to a more positive view of life. A newer paradigm is emerging from mindfulness and all forms of transpersonal work. The new paradigm is that positive people use their interactions with negative people to raise their own conscious awareness and loving compassion. And in response, over time, the negative people will begin to change.
One very different and powerful thing you can say to a negative comment that will bring you into loving heart centered confidence is “Thank You.” If there is pain in your body from the lashing out, say, “Thank you for showing me where more love should go.” When someone hurls insults at you, just respond with, “That’s interesting. That’s interesting how you see me. Tell me more.” All you are doing is being the Light of Love that says, “I will accept you just as you are with all your fear. May you be safe, happy, well, and free from suffering and fear.”
The formula is: Everybody deserves more love, not less. And the people who don’t seem to deserve it need even more.
Judgements from another only hurt and penetrate because of your failure to bring compassion to them. Their words are the defense they put up to keep from intimacy. Your loving response can allow for as much intimacy as they are willing to let into their heart.
The compassionate awareness of their pain frees you from being their victim. That’s the living evidence of forgiveness. It will help if you can remember that each person is a piece that completes the cosmic puzzle of the universe and that we all want to be safe, appreciated, and loved. Honor yourself and honor others until nothing but the Light of Love remains. Acts of love can break the cycle of abuse. This is the essence of healing.
