Chronic Victimism: Living In A Permanent State Of Complaint

There are life experiences that hit us so hard that we feel powerless, unable to react. We have all lived it; these are moments in which we adopt the role of victim, although sometimes there is nothing or nobody 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 someone whom we consider an attacker.

In those cases, we feel victims not because we know that someone is seeking our downfall, but because we feel that what happens to us is beyond our control and that we are only the party that receives the blows without being able to do anything about it.

This process of self-victimization is totally irrational and in itself does not help us to 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 are 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 is the fault of others. Their day-to-day life is one fictitious assault after another, and they unconsciously shift all responsibility for what happens to others.

Unknowingly, people who become accustomed to chronic victimhood deny themselves the possibility of improving their situation while establishing relationships with others based on resentment and blame.

In this way, victimhood damages both the ability to cope with problems and personal relationships in general and affective relationships in particular.

Some of the characteristics of these people are the following.

1. They blame the rest for the lack of help

They assume that the normal thing would be to constantly have the help of others and are frustrated when they do not receive it in the desired amount.

2. Create “ad hoc” explanations

Even in the most obvious failures, these people invent explanations that allow them to shift the blame to 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, that does not mean that chronically victimized people are constantly judging their actions and decisions; in fact, the opposite is true. They seldom carry out 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 for what they interpret to be their victimhood, and they often think about how bad it happens to them and how much they suffer. They often talk about this with others, offering a dramatic and somewhat exaggerated reading of the events.

5. They manipulate unconsciously

Chronic victimhood involves a trade-off: you gain a wide comfort zone based on not assuming responsibility in exchange for a feeling of hopelessness and low self-esteem.

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

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

A problem that goes on 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 thought and behavior dynamics that with the passage of time they get worse.

Like a snowball that gets bigger and bigger, in the beginning everything usually starts with a phenomenon known as learned helplessness. When we do what we do we notice that our situation does not improve, this kind of helplessness appears; we simply 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 for relatively long periods in which emotional pain accumulates.

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

In turn, acquaintances, friends and family of this person also assume that he has reached a dead end and that he will not improve, simply by noticing that he acts in a manner consistent with this belief.

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