Chronic victimhood: living in a state of permanent complaint

There are life experiences that hit us so hard that we feel powerless, unable to react. We have all lived it; are moments in which we adopt the role of victimalthough sometimes there is nothing or no one in particular that we can identify as the source of discomfort.

Thus, self-victimization can appear even when it is impossible to attribute the bad that happens to us to someone we consider an attacker.

In these cases, we feel like victims, not because we know that someone is looking for our downfall, but because we We feel that what happens to us is beyond our control. and that we are just the part that takes the hits without being able to do anything about it.

This process of self-victimization is totally irrational. and in itself it does not help us develop useful strategies to face adversity. Fortunately, in most cases this phenomenon lasts for a short time… although this is not always the case. There is people who live installed in a state of chronic victimhood.

What are people with chronic victimhood like?

People with chronic victimhood are those who are constantly interpreting reality as if everything bad that happens to them was the fault of others. Their day to day is one fictitious aggression after another, and they unconsciously shift all responsibility for what happens to others.

Unknowingly, people who become accustomed to chronic victimhood they deny themselves the possibility of improving their situation at the same time that they establish relationships with others based on resentment and guilt.

Thus, victimhood damages both the ability to face problems and personal relationships in general and affective relationships in particular.

Some of the characteristics of these people are as follows.

1. They blame the rest of the lack of help

They assume that the normal thing would be to constantly count on the help of others and they get frustrated when they don’t receive it in the desired quantity.

2. They create “ad hoc” explanations

Even in the most obvious failures, these people invent explanations that allow them to shift the blame onto others. If they injure themselves using an instrument, for example, they hold the person who bought it responsible.

3. They show limited self-criticism

Although their self-esteem tends not to be high, this does not mean that people who are chronic victimizers are constantly judging their actions and decisions; in fact, the opposite is true. They rarely engage in self-criticism because they have assumed that what happens to them is not their responsibility.

4. They focus their imagination on their misfortune

These people feel a kind of fascination with what they interpret to be their victimhood, and they often think about the bad things that happen to them and what they have to suffer. They often talk about this with others, offering a dramatic and somewhat exaggerated reading of the facts.

5. They manipulate unconsciously

Chronic victimhood involves an exchange: a wide comfort zone is gained based on not assuming responsibilities in exchange for adopting a feeling of hopelessness and low self-esteem.

To maintain the former, these people adopt a clear victim role not only before themselves, but also in the eyes of others.

In this way, one acts assuming that others have to help with everything and, when this does not happen, sadness or resentment is manifested. This causes many people to offer help that in normal situations they would not offer, giving in to emotional blackmail.

A problem that lasts forever

Although chronic victimhood is not a disorder in itself (although it can be a symptom of a paranoid disorder in which everything is interpreted as a secret plan to attack us), this phenomenon causes the person to adopt problematic thinking and behavioral dynamics which with the passage of time get worse.

Like a snowball that keeps getting bigger and bigger, at first everything usually starts with a phenomenon known as learned helplessness. When we do what we do, we notice that our situation is not improving, this kind of helplessness appears; We just stop trying to improve because we see that there is a disconnect between our efforts and the results obtained.

This can happen to us at specific moments, and in fact it is very common for it to happen to us at some point in our lives, but it can also last relatively long seasons in which emotional pain accumulates.

People who see how this situation goes on for a long time begin to assume that the condition of a victim is a part of their own personality, something that will always be with them. Of course, that has a detrimental effect on your self-esteembut it also makes you begin to anticipate the failure of everything you try to do.

At the same time, acquaintances, friends and relatives of this person also assume that he has reached a dead end and that he will not improvesimply by noticing that you act in a manner consistent with this belief.

In this way, the expectations of the person himself and of the people around him reinforce a very clear idea: bad things always happen to that person, and those bad things are not his responsibility.