Overcoming Victim Mentality and Taking Responsibility

If you are feeling hopeless, sorry for yourself, lacking control and wishing that things are somehow going to get better, while secretly feeling angry at the world, god, the universe, destiny… or anything outside you that seems to have caused your disastrous situation, then it’s very likely you are playing the role of a victim. You are blaming others for your problems and thus keeping them in place by shying away from your own responsibility of them. 

If you have found yourself in such a situation now, you feel sorry for yourself, nothing seems to work and a feeling of stuckness looms over your life –  don’t worry about it. Do not resist the life situation that has been presented to you – resistance will only make it worse.

There is nothing wrong with feeling the way you do, so allow yourself to feel the way you are feeling. If you feel like you are the victim, if you feel that someone else is to blame and you even have logical, rational reasons to believe that way, then you have every right to feel the way you do.

But consider this – taking responsibility for your thoughts, emotions, actions and every part of your life means you have the ability to change it and take back the steering wheel.

It may seem easy at times to feel helpless but it feels far from good when compared to the feeling of empowerment, which is the hallmark of taking responsibility for your life and your inner state (from which all your actions and outer circumstances arise).

From a higher perspective, your whole life is your own creation. Whatever happens to you through your own actions or through seemingly random external events, has been created by you, consciously or unconsciously.

On a deeper level, you are connected with the rest of the Cosmos and through this connection you interact with the totality of reality. Thoughts, mental and emotional patterns, actions…all of these have effects on your life. In the case of actions it may be obvious, in the case of thoughts and emotions, it is usually less apparent. Depending on your fundamental inner state, you are a match to certain external circumstances and you will automatically take actions that will lead you into situations that are a match to that inner state (in esoteric circles this is usually referred to as “The Law of Attraction”, which is frequently very misunderstood in modern spirituality and taken out of context – fundamentally it is the law of resonance, you will interact with the situations, people and events that resonate with your current total (surface and deep) state of being).

It does not mean you are to blame for anything or that you need to feel guilty – responsibility does not imply guilt.

The majority of your life gets created for you, by you, unconsciously. We can call this karma. You are like an arrow that has been shot from a bow that is traveling on a certain trajectory. The trajectory you are traveling on is the karmic path that is set before you and with it the situations that will manifest seemingly spontaneously through your subconscious mind, through you, by you.

As much as a certain karmic destiny does exist and one can feel this throughout their life – there is also an abundance of free-will given to you. Your free will is who you are, it is the awareness, the consciousness that you are. By waking up and becoming more aware you begin to change your trajectory, you are given the gift of freedom, of freedom to choose and change your future trajectory.

The more conscious you become, the more you weaken the trajectory of the karmic arrow – your destiny is thus altered.

The force and current of your conditioned subconscious mind and the limiting patterns it contains can be so strong, that your thoughts, emotions and actions (which stem from your thoughts and emotions) can be incredibly destructive for you and those around you.

However you cannot blame yourself for making those mistakes or for not being conscious enough from preventing those mistakes to manifest. Many times you simply do not have the power to stop a powerful conditioned response (a karmic energy really) from coming into the physical world – in other words, many times you will choose an action based on strong anger, fear, hatred… or another negative emotional imprint, which will lead to results that are undesirable for you and everyone involved. Even though in retrospect it might seem you could have done something, that is simply not true, because you were not conscious enough to stop it.

If you could have stopped it, you probably would have.

Sometimes things happen, whether it is for good or bad. And even if you didn’t consciously choose the actions that got you into the negative situation, it would usually be almost impossible for it to be different than it was, after the event has occurred –  simply because the energy and mind patterns that pull you into these situations can have such a powerful momentum they can be very difficult to stop, especially if you don’t have enough presence.

Even if they can be stopped, this is much easier said than done. It can require tremendous will (and with it, presence) to stop a strong current of habitual energy from manifesting – so don’t beat yourself up for it when it happens –  and learn from it when it does.

Taking responsibility for your life means primarily deciding to be responsible for your inner state in this very moment, simply to the best of your ability, however much that may be. It is deciding to become aware of your inner response to everything that happens in your life and changing it so that it is not based on resistance, but instead on allowing and flow (which then allows for positive constructive action). From that, true positive and constructive outward action can arise, from there you can set yourself on the path of improving everything that is under your control and whatever you do have the power to change on the outer level.

Remember, all your actions flow from your current state of consciousness, how you feel and who you are (or perceive yourself to be) at any current time – thus taking responsibility for your current inner state will flow into your thoughts and actions automatically. The inner precedes the outer.

When taking responsibility it is also very important that you are kind and forgiving towards yourself. Even when you take responsibility for your own life, your past habits and negative tendencies can be so strong that they may still overwhelm you and cause you to act through them in a way that is destructive towards yourself and others. These things may still happen, because the past has a powerful momentum. if they do, let them go, forgive yourself if need be and move on.

You ARE under control of your inner state, your focus and your response to everything that happens outside you. And if you can change your inner state (mainly by accepting and not internally resisting anything that happens to you), you’ll find that very often your outer situation will change very dramatically (either by itself, or by your actions which will now come from a deeper, clearer, more intuitively guided place).

And even if it doesn’t change, it’s still foolish to resist it. Why cause suffering to yourself by creating an inner hell, if your external situation is already in turmoil?

Rather than that, accept the situation in whatever way, shape or form it manifests and simply allow it to be as it is, accepting the external and internal (your emotional reaction) response to whatever is happening.

Realize that it’s silly to resist something that already is and accept it for what it is. As you do this, you will find that you can now take positive action to change the situation, or simply remain at peace and acceptance within if there is nothing you can do to improve it any way.

From there on, overcoming victim mentality will be a much easier thing to do.