ShareLast time we began looking at two wrong mentalities. We saw that the way we think has a far reaching effect on us than we can imagine. We saw that a major component responsible for what we are today is our thought life. We looked at the destructive defeatist mentality- a mindset that sees defeat in everything.

A close relation to defeatist mentality is victim mentality. A victim mentality is one where we blame everyone else for what happens in our world. When we see ourselves as a victim and we feel life has not treated us fairly. Life truly is not fair but when we blame everybody and anything for our misfortune we are stepping into the mucky waters of victim mentality. When we get into this kind of thinking, our self esteem gets battered and we feel trapped by the “wickedness and insensitivity of people”. Life and people just seem to be unduly unfair to us and to make matters worse we feel there is nothing we can do about it. We wallow in self pity, resentment, bitterness and helplessness.

When we are ruled by victim mentality we feel people are always taking advantage of us. We feel people go out of their ways to manipulate us and to take undue advantage of us “because of our vulnerability”. We go about life expecting to be pitied, understood and compensated but it seems people just do not understand our position and what we are going through.

Victim mentality makes a man shift blame and never take responsibility for anything. He thinks life and people owe him something and when he does not get it, the way he wants it, he thinks people are just “difficult, uncooperative, insensitive and wicked”. A person with victim mentality always complains that others get a better deal than he does- that whenever it gets to his turn he is always victimized. The result of victim mentality is anger against people, the society and even against the person who has the victim mentality himself.

If we keep making excuses for ourselves instead of seeking solutions to whatever might not be right in our lives, then we set ourselves up to being shackled by victim mentality. Life is simply problems and solutions, questions and answers so when we have problems or questions all we need do is to seek for solutions and answers. In the process of seeking solutions and answers, we will falter or fall but if we are to succeed in life, we must learn to take responsibility for our lives and make every faltering or fall as an educational incident. If we fail to learn these lessons then life will keep repeating them. A winner learns by experience.

Victim mentality blocks the mind from receiving and acting on information that will resolve issues so, a man with a victim mentality will keep doing the same things and will keep receiving the same results. This further compounds his problem as he keeps wondering why things are not changing – he forgets that madness is doing the same thing every time and expecting to get a different result.

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(To be continued next week) Share