Let go of The Victim Mentality

We know your story! We’ve heard it plenty of times and can repeat it to you word by word. How many times are you going to re-tell it? You know, the one about how you were picked on in first grade? Unfairly laid off from your job after 15 years of devoted service? And oh, let’s not forget about the guy who broke your heart in 1995.

I don’t mean to minimize your experiences, but I’ve got to ask you, what purpose does holding onto the pain serve? Rehashing the past and holding onto the bitterness and anger we sometimes allow to take root in our hearts, only robs us of our joy and delays our healing. It also consumes a lot of our thought life and uses up energy that could have been expended on something worthwhile.

We sometimes naively assume that holding onto our pain makes our perpetrators suffer. The truth is, it is we who suffer and unfortunately set ourselves up to reap and attract more pain into our lives. Long after the incidents, some often forgotten by those who wronged us; we remain their victims and allow them to continue exerting power over us. The only way we can truly reclaim our joy, sanity and power is by forgiving our perpetrators no matter how difficult it might prove to be.

When you forgive someone, the main benefactor is you; you finally free yourself from the shackles that have held you captive thus rendering your perpetrator harmless. You relinquish your strength when you choose to continue seeing yourself as a victim and telling your story from that standpoint.

We at times are our own enemies and create our own suffering when we knowingly make choices and decisions that aren’t self-supporting or right for us. As long as we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge our part in creating our problems or take responsibility for creating our current reality, we run the risk of making similar mistakes in the future and not learning from our experiences.

WE are responsible for our actions and reactions. I guess the person we sometimes really need to forgive, is our self. Forgive yourself for not honoring yourself, for not trusting yourself, for not listening to your inner voice and most of all, for sometimes knowingly making wrong decisions.

© Yvonne Kariba and http://www.schoolcalledlife.wordpress.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Yvonne Kariba and http://www.schoolcalledlife.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.