Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “Feelings aren't facts.” Though this is true, they’re still real, and they matter. The point behind this saying is that feelings don’t need to rule your life. Take your feelings into account, but don’t necessarily use them as the only guide to your actions.

I used to let my feelings rule my life – if I didn’t FEEL like doing something I didn’t. If I was afraid of doing something, I didn’t do it. If I felt like indulging in a hot fudge sundae I did.

I now understand that just because you feel something, doesn't mean you should act on that feeling. We also want to consider facts when deciding on a course of action, not just our feelings.

Feelings are often based on the past rather than on what’s currently going on. This is particularly so for people who have any kind of trauma. When that’s the case, you’re likely to have feelings that are out of proportion regarding something that’s happening in the present.

I think of it like this - it's like trauma creates a kind of “fault line.” When something happens in the present, it bumps up against that trauma fault line, which causes a reverberation through your system. The way that reverberation gets expressed is through our feelings.

The problem is that when you don't know any of that is going on and something happens in the present moment to trigger you, you think it's the current situation that’s causing your feelings. Perhaps someone does something mindful of the past, so you think it's them who has caused your big giant feelings. If that’s the case, you might think “If they stop doing that, my big feelings will go away.” But what’s really going to help with the feelings is dealing with the original trauma. That will help get those feelings to be more “right-sized.” More about that in a moment.

Feelings are real. They matter. They tell us something about ourselves. Where we get into trouble is when we act as if it's a fact that our feelings are always coming from the current person or situation. When I decide you’re the cause of my problems, I then deal with my feelings like they’re facts.

What we need to do, instead, is focus on what we want, not on what we don't want: the shitty feeling. For example, I want peace. That means I need to ask myself what I need to do to get to peace. Focusing on other people and what they're doing is not going to get me to peace. It’s going to get me to focus on them and what they’re doing, which I can’t control. Trying to control them is impossible, so it’s fruitless and an endless drain on energy (i.e., not peace).

What I can control is me. I can control what actions I’m going to take regarding the things that are happening around me. This can be hard to do when we’re feeling triggered, but it is possible, especially when you pause before responding. Take a few deep breaths to get the signal to your body “I’m safe” so that instead of responding from your lizard brain (as I call it,) respond from your frontal lobe or the higher-order thinking part of your brain. If you need help with learning how to pause, I get it. It was monumental for me to learn how to do that, and I explain that here in this podcast episode. When you pause like this, you come out of fight-or-flight mode and can then look at the facts of the situation (e.g., he is not my mom scolding me for doing something wrong. He is my coworker, and I’m an adult).

I'm not saying you always need to control your feelings. It’s important to feel your feelings, to allow them to exist rather than resisting them. That resistance is much more of a problem than the actual feeling. Feelings are energy, which continually morphs and changes. They will not last forever. But it’s hard to remember that when you’ve been triggered.

Resisting those feelings makes them even bigger! When you couple that resistance with the fact that they’re often based on traumatic or dramatic incidents in the past, our feelings can seem HUGE! 

If we let the emotions go through us, they will dissipate. But if we resist, they build and create tension in our bodies. So allow yourself to feel those feelings, just don't let them rule you. We should allow feelings to inform us, but not the exclusion of facts, especially if those feelings are rooted in the past. 

It’s important to honor your feelings. You were given them for a reason. But it’s also important to make sure you’re not treating them as facts. They’re not necessarily indicators of what’s really going on. You won’t know until you’ve done some investigating. If your feelings are way out of proportion, it may be that you’re dealing with trauma. If that’s the case, you may very well need the help of a therapist who specializes in the treatment of trauma.

For most blog posts like this go to FridayFragments.news

photo credit: Kyle Nieber

One afternoon at the beach nearby, I happened to sit next to a couple of women who were just bitching up a storm. Before recovery, I would have stayed there and been pissed off that these assholes were sitting next to me. It would never have occurred to me to get up and leave.

BTW, that’s called victim mentality—when we feel like we have no choice other than to put up with stuff.

Instead of listening to those women bitch and complain, I moved. Here's where my Higher Power rewarded me for having the “courage to change the things I can,” as the serenity prayer says: I sat near a young mom with her two little kids and a friend. I witnessed some of the most incredible parenting I had ever seen in my life.

Through my recovery journey, especially the reparenting aspect of it, I learned that healthy parents nurture, affirm, and set boundaries with their children. That was precisely what this young mom was doing!

She was nurturing her two and four-year-old by speaking very lovingly to them and continually referring to them with loving names like sweetie, honey, baby, and darling.

She set boundaries by saying to her four-year-old, who was playing by the water, “In about 15 minutes, we're going to go home and have lunch.” Then she gave the child a 10-minute and a 5-minute warning. When it was time to go, the kid threw a fit.

She affirmed the child by saying, “I know. You’re having so much fun. We're going to come back later, but it's time to go home for lunch, so we're going to go now.”

The child continued to throw a fit, and she said, "Yeah, I hear you. You're having so much fun, and it's really difficult to leave when you're having fun. But we're going to come back later. Right now, we're going to go home and have lunch.”

I was so flabbergasted by this beautiful display of healthy parenting that I took notes! I wanted to capture what she was saying so I could remember it for my own reparenting journey.

When she acknowledged that her child was having so much fun and that it's hard to leave when you're having fun, she was affirming that child's feelings. That’s what most of us want, especially children. When she set boundaries by staying firm to the deadline for when to go home and have lunch, she also added some hope by giving them something to look forward to by saying, “We're going to come back later.”

As they got up to leave, I walked over to her and told her that I’d been listening to her interacting with her children and that she’s a fantastic parent. I told her how I’d grown up in a dysfunctional family and didn't hear things like what she said to her children.

I told her about what I’d learned about healthy parenting through my recovery—that healthy parents nurture, affirm, and set boundaries with their children—and that she just gave really perfect examples of that.

Her friend agreed that she is an amazing parent, and the mom got tears in her eyes. She was extremely grateful and said, “This means so much because I often wonder if I'm doing and saying the right things.” I told her she absolutely was!

I said, “The most important thing I think you did was validate your child's feelings.” I didn’t get that as a child, and it’s affected me deeply. I also mentioned the importance of letting them know that you're in charge by setting the boundary about going home for lunch.

I’ve carried that encounter with me for years. It’s a perfect example of recovery in action. If you’re sitting in the chaos, drama, or negativity that’s going on around you, get up and leave! You don’t have to stay there and be victimized by the situation or by your thoughts about the situation. You just might get rewarded by a beautiful display of what healthy relationships look like, so you can use that as a model for your relationships.

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Part 5 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

The mentality I’m speaking of is referred to as victim mentality. There are a lot of misconceptions about what this is, which means so many people don’t even realize they have it.

Just because you have victim mentality doesn’t mean you…

• are a pessimist
• think the world is against you
• have a “woe is me” attitude all the time
• think things will never work out for you
• were taken hostage or some other egregious form of victimization

Truth be told, when you have victim mentality some or all of those things may be true for you. But they weren’t for me. This mentality can be very hard to see in yourself, and that’s especially so when you don’t present as the typical “victim.”

The biggest problem with victim mentality is that there is no impetus to action. If you believe you’re the victim of circumstances, you’re not going to take any action to change the situation. You’ll just accept it as “the way things are.” If we truly believe we’re not at fault, or cause, we are not going to DO anything to change things.

There’s a difference between being an actual victim and having victim mentality. Your inner life is not subject to the whims of other people. You have a choice about how to see things, how to deal with your life, what to focus on, etc. 

Victor Frankl was in concentration camps in WWII, which is one of the most victimized situations a human could be in. He said, “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation” (emphasis mine). He could still choose to help others, and he did.

Even if you have a reason like Frankl did, you don’t have to feel like a victim. Feeling like a victim relegates you to the position of non-action. Nothing will ever change if you think you’re just a victim.

If you’ve ever asked yourself “Why does this always happen to me?” or “Why won’t he ever…or why doesn’t she ever…” these are indicators of this mentality. Some people go through life asking questions like this, wondering why all these bad things keep happening to them. Instead, you might want to ask yourself: 

“Am I allowing situations in life or events to manage me or am I determined to manage them as best I can?” 

You’re obviously not in control of everything that happens to you, but you can control how you react. If you react as a victim (i.e., thinking you have nothing to do with the situation) you’re doomed to be stuck in that position because you see no reason for action. If you truly want a life that is happy, joyous, and free, then you’ll need to take action!

As we say in recovery, “act as if.” That is, act as if you have the ability to change a situation – even if you think you don’t! You’ll be surprised at how things change when you make that one little step toward action.

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Part 4 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

The Drama Triangle is sometimes also referred to as the Victim Triangle. It’s a model of dysfunctional interaction first delineated by Stephen Karpman in 1968. It includes the roles of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

When I first learned of it, it explained so much of the dynamics of my life – within all of my relationships. If you’ve had dysfunctional relationships at any point, it will be familiar to you in terms of how it works, if not by name.

That said, healthy people participate in this dynamic from time to time too. They just don’t live in it all the time. I’ll explain these dynamics in more detail below.
The Drama Triangle is a dysfunctional pattern of interaction that perpetuates dysfunction rather than changing it. In the Drama Triangle, the three roles, Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor, represent ways we interact with others. When engaged in this dysfunctional pattern, we typically bounce around from one of these roles to the other taking on the behaviors of each role as we move in and out of them. This can occur in one conversation.

Even though we may alternate between the three roles regularly, most of us have a favored role. That is, you might tend to mostly be a Rescuer, a Victim, or a Persecutor. My favored position is Rescuer, but it was spotting my stance as a Victim that was the biggest paradigm shift of my 12-step recovery.

Luckily for us, in 2006 David Emerald came up with the antidote to the drama triangle which he calls The Empowerment Dynamic or TED. It’s described in his book by the same name. It’s written in the form of a parable, so it’s an easy read. I’ll share briefly about that below as well.

When participating in the Drama Triangle dynamic, we create misery for ourselves and others. We end up creating a lose-lose situation. The trick is to notice this dynamic, and then transform it into a more positive outcome for everyone. This is where Emerald’s TED model comes in.

I’ll now briefly introduce the three roles, then give a sample conversation that most of us will easily identify with, and I’ll point out how each participant in the conversation is moving around the Drama Triangle.

The Victim
When in this role, we see ourselves as helpless and deny any responsibility for our negative consequences. For example, we may believe we’re responsible for all of the good things in our romantic relationships but believe “if only my partner would change everything would be great” (i.e., they are responsible for all the “bad” things in the relationship). This may not be a conscious belief.  It’s classic victim mentality to think you have no responsibility for anything negative in your relationships. Here’s the detrimental part – if you think you have no responsibility for something, then you won’t do anything to change it!

The Rescuer
When in this role, we focus our attention on the Victim. We neglect our own needs, working hard to help other people. When we embody this role, we’re often exhausted, depleted, and perhaps resentful. We constantly apply short-term repairs to the Victim’s problems.

Sometimes we use guilt to get our way, perhaps saying things like, “After all I’ve done for you, how could you…” We see the Victim as hopeless and helpless and in need of our assistance.

The Persecutor
When we inhabit this role, we blame the Victim and criticize the Rescuer for enabling the Victim. However, we don’t typically provide any guidance or solutions to the underlying problem. We’re usually pretty critical or unpleasant when in this role, and we’re good at pointing the finger and finding fault.

Underneath all of this, we may feel inadequate. Therefore, we exhibit controlling behaviors like threats, being rigid, and sometimes being a bully.

This dynamic keeps these roles in place because the Victim depends on a Rescuer who yearns for someone to take care of. Persecutors need a scapegoat, and so the dynamic continues. Keep in mind that healthy people will perform these roles occasionally. However, pathological role players actively avoid leaving the familiar and comfortable environment of this “game.” The only way to escape the Drama Triangle is to not participate in the “game,” which is where Emerald’s TED comes in.

An illustration of moving around the roles of the Drama Triangle

Here’s an example of parents Jose and Tawanna and how they both move from one role to the other within one brief conversation.

Jose says, “I can’t believe you burnt dinner. That’s the third time this month.” [Persecutor]

Tawanna replies, “Little Antonio fell and skinned his knee, it burned while I was busy getting him a bandage.” [Rescuer]

If Jose then says, “You baby that boy too much” he’s Persecuting Tawanna for taking care of him. Then perhaps Tawanna jumps into the Victim role and says, “You wouldn’t want him to get an infection, would you? I’d end up taking care of him while he was sick.”

If Jose jumps back into the Persecutor role he might say, “He’s big enough to get his own bandage” to which Tawanna might reply, “I just didn’t want him bleeding all over the carpet.” [Rescuer].

If Jose says, “That’s the problem with these kids, they expect you to do everything.” [Persecutor] then Tawanna may say, “That’s only natural honey, they’re young.” [Rescuer].

Perhaps then Jose might say, “I work hard all day at my job…’ [Persecutor]

That snippet of conversation should have given you enough of a taste of what bouncing around the Drama Triangle might look like within one conversation. Now let’s talk about how to get out of it. Using TED, we learn to shift from reacting to life’s events to choosing our response to life events (which I call Living on Purpose).

In TED, instead of taking on the role of Victim, you become a Creator. Instead of being a Rescuer, you become a Coach (which explains why I became a Coach, given the well-worn groove of being a Rescuer). Instead of being a Persecutor, you become a Challenger.

Victim >>> Creator
To shift from being the Victim to becoming a Creator, you shift from reacting to choosing Creator behaviors like taking action toward your desired outcomes. You become okay with taking baby steps to get there. You take responsibility and make choices.

Rescuer>>>Coach
To get out of the role of Rescuer or hero and shift into the role of Coach, instead of telling people what to do, ask what they want or what they think about something. Use curiosity and inquiry to help others develop their own clarity and vision. This is more likely to empower and develop them so they can acquire skills rather than doing things for them. When they stumble you might say things like, “I know you can do it.”

Persecutor>>>Challenger
The way to shift from the Persecutor or villain role to becoming a Challenger is you shift from putting down to building up. Challengers inspire others to take action (which is what Creators do, they take action).

The point of The Empowerment Dynamic is to get everyone to see themselves as a Creator, and to become Creators ourselves.

That’s what it looks like to go from enacting the Drama Triangle to enacting The Empowerment Dynamic. If you’d like a copy of a handout about moving from The Drama Triangle to The Empowerment Dynamic, email me here with the subject “Drama Triangle handout” and I’ll send it to you.

For most blog posts like this go to FridayFragments.news

Part 3 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

1. Realize you have victim mentality
This mentality can be super hard to see because it's deeply entrenched. Having this mentality  doesn't mean you're bad or weak. You've internalized a mode of thinking that was useful to you at one time, likely because you were victimized somehow.
If you continually think, “If __ would just __ then everything would be okay” you likely have victim mentality. In thinking like that, you act like you can’t do anything about the situation or don’t have any options. But everyone has options, they just might be shitty options.

“Victims” act like things are happening to them, they’re not just happening. That means you’re unlikely to take action because you don’t feel you have agency.
 
2. Stop blaming
If you constantly blame others or circumstances, you likely have victim mentality. When you stop blaming, you can start to take responsibility for your life. This doesn’t mean no one has done anything or that circumstances don’t suck. It just means that it’s your responsibility to change things if you want them to change.

Actively search for the things you can do to change the conditions you’re not happy with. Maybe you’re in a relationship that hasn’t been working for years. It only takes one person to change a relationship. Most of us know that, but we believe that the “one person” is our partner, not us!

You’re the only one you can control. So stop blaming your partner (or the circumstance) and waiting for things to change and take the reins yourself.
 
3. Become proactive instead of reactive
This is another way to say that you feel as if life is happening to you, it’s not just “happening.” When you feel like that, you react to life as opposed to acting on life.
Many of us develop this pattern because we’ve been in fight or flight mode for much of our lives. That means physiologically, we have no access to the frontal lobe of our brain where reasoning occurs.  The “lizard” brain takes over because it senses danger, and when we’re in that state, we’re not supposed to think; we are supposed to fight or flee.

Your system wasn’t built to stay in fight or flight mode. In that mode, it’s  very hard to think clearly, so you react with your lizard brain as if you were in danger. When you can't think clearly, you can't live proactively.

Learning to pause is by far the most important tool that you can use to stop being a reactor and become proactive. When you pause and take deep breaths to calm yourself, it lets your body know you’re safe and it’s ok to get out of fight or flight mode. This increases your chances of thinking clearly and being proactive.
 
4. Making decisions ahead of time
When you’re clear about what’s important to you (i.e., your values), it’s easier to live your life in alignment with those values. Then you can make decisions ahead of time based on those values. When situations arise, you’ve already made your decision and it doesn't matter so much what's going on in the moment. That’s because what’s important to you is important to you, no matter what’s happening. Of course, shit happens sometimes, and you might be required to make a decision at the moment, but most of the time that’s not the case.

Here's a basic example: you decide you’re going to exercise three days/week. The decision has been made so it doesn’t matter how you feel when it comes time to exercise. You made the decision when you were thinking clearly with your rational brain. This makes it much more likely that you’ll live in alignment with your values. You won’t be reacting to life like a victim, you’ll be acting on life proactively.
 
5. Reach out for help
It’s important to seek help from people who are willing and able to help you. Before recovery, on the rare occasions when I did ask for help, it was from people who’d often burn me. If you’ve been reaching out to the same person for years and they've been unable or unwilling to help you, stop fucking reaching out to that person! Find somebody else to reach out to.

If you’re looking for a coach or therapist, talk to their former clients or read their testimonials. Find out if they can help you in the ways that you want to be helped. If you don’t see some improvement in a certain period of time, move on to someone else.
 
6. Set boundaries
Most people think of boundaries as something we do in response to others’ actions. That’s the case for very few of our boundaries. We decide most of our boundaries ahead of time. That is, we decide the standards for our lives (that’s my definition of boundaries) and then live that way.
 
Boundaries help us understand what’s ours and not ours, who’s in charge of what. Most people with victim mentality have very poor boundaries. They think they’re not in charge of anything to do with their life. They may blame others for walking all over them. Meanwhile, they haven’t set any boundaries!
 
7. Make choices 
Victims don't perceive choice. They often say things like “I didn't have a choice.” It may feel like you don't, but you do. If you stay at a job you hate because you need to support your family, that’s a choice. You're choosing your family over contentment.
 
Once you see that, you come out of victim mentality. Perceiving choice means you recognize what it's costing you so you can decide whether to take action. If you choose not to take action, that’s fine, but recognize going forward, “This is a choice I’m actively making. I’m choosing to stay in this job I don’t like because it allows me to support my family.” Then stop complaining about it because you chose that.
 
There are many benefits of coming out of victim mentality. Primarily, you get to live like a mature adult who lives their life the way they want.

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Part 2 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

If you have the mentality of victimhood, you likely got it from being victimized in some way. For me, it was from growing up with the dysfunction of my childhood. It wasn’t something egregious like being kidnapped; it was the continual drip-drip-drip of emotional invalidation and abandonment I experienced. When you internalize victim mentality, it permeates every area of your life and just about every decision you make.
There’s a difference between actually being victimized and internalizing the mindset of victimhood or victim mentality. This is not a value judgment. It’s a description of what happens to us and its effects. Below, I’ll share about how to get out of that mentality.
Even if you were egregiously victimized, you don’t necessarily internalize victim mentality. Two notable examples of people who were horribly victimized but didn’t take on victim mentality were Nelson Mandela and Victor Frankl. It didn’t define who they were.

Someone who has victim mentality is stuck in victimhood, it’s like an identity they’ve internalized. I know because I had victim mentality and didn’t realize it until I was in my 50s!! I didn't appear like, or act like the kind of person that you probably think of when you think of someone stuck in victimhood. The most telling sign of my victim mentality was that there were many areas of my life where I didn't recognize I had choices.

Here's why that matters: when you believe you have no choices, you will not see the choices available to you. You’ll truly believe, “I have no options.”

The choices you have available to you may all be shitty, but you still have choices. So often when we say, “I don't have a choice” what we really mean is that if we don’t do the thing that we feel is the only option then something bad will happen.
The belief that we have no choice can have far-reaching effects on the future. One of my clients was reflecting on when her children were little. She was divorced, had her own business, and worked constantly. She told me, “I worked constantly because I didn't have a choice.”

I challenged her on that. It may have felt like she didn’t have a choice back then, but she did. There may have been really shitty options to choose from, but she did have choices. While we were talking, I rattled off some choices she could have made. Mind you, I did this with no forethought:

• close the business and work elsewhere
• partner with someone else on her business
• hire someone to grow the business to cover their salary and take over some of her responsibilities

Now, if I spent zero time thinking about it and came up with those options, imagine what she could have come up with back then if she’d put some time and effort into it. But she didn’t. Because that’s what victim mentality does to us - we devote ZERO time to thinking about other options.

That client grew up in a family that owned that same kind of business, so she watched her dad run his business and work constantly. This was modeled for her as “what you do” so she was taught, “There are no other options.”

It was bad enough that back then, she felt like she had no choice. But the fact is that now, decades later, she still feels that she didn't have any other choice but to work so much back then. That mentality is affecting her now and will continue to affect her future if she truly believes she had no other choices back then.

This is why I’m doing this series  - look at the untold years this woman spent believing she had no choice. And all the possibilities she could have created with her children if she’d spent more time with them when they were young.

Victims use language that implies no choice, (e.g., never, always, everyone). They think things like, “I will never be able to do to X” or “Bad things always happen to me” or “Everybody hates me.

So, how do you move past this mentality?

What we need when we have victim mentality is a new perspective, so start to actively look for choices. When you find yourself in a situation that feels like you have no choice, force yourself to brainstorm a bunch of options. Then evaluate the choices. You can also talk to others to get their perspective on the choices they suggest.

Even if you don’t choose any of those new options, there’s a relief, a freedom, that comes from having choices.  When we feel like we’re being forced to do something (i.e., have no choices) it can be very hard to take. But when you feel like you have a choice, it changes how you experience that thing.

One of the greatest freedoms of my recovery has been the freedom of choice. And for me, by far, the greatest is the freedom to choose what to think.

I choose to believe I have choices.

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Part 1 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

This is part 1 of a 5 part series on what victim mentality is and how to get out of it. In this essay, I’ll share how understanding “your part in things” (as we say in 12-step recovery) brings you out of victim mentality.

If you’re not familiar with victim mentality, it’s a way of thinking that’s so deeply internalized that we don’t realize we have it. You might call it a paradigm, which is a framework for thinking that includes some basic assumptions about what is taken to be “true.” For example, the idea that the world was flat was a paradigm that informed many areas of life. There was a paradigm shift when it was understood that the world was a sphere. There’s often a lot of resistance to shifting paradigms because the assumption that the original paradigm is “true” is so deeply embedded.

That can be true of victim mentality as well. That was definitely true for me! This mindset shift was the most important one of my recovery, and I continue to come out of victim mentality to this day. The thing that helped me the most was doing step 4, where we take a “searching and fearless moral inventory”, or in plain language, come to understand “our part in things.”

In other words, we start looking at the things we’ve been doing in our lives that have created chaos, drama, and unmanageability. Instead of assuming all the bad shit in our lives was because of someone else, we start to entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, I had something to do with the muck and mire of my life.

When you have victim mentality, it means you’ve internalized the belief that you don’t have anything to do with the fucked up things happening in your life. The biggest problem with that mentality is that if you think you have nothing to do with it, then there’s no impetus to change.

If you really think the shitty things going on in your life are the fault of another person, group of people, organization, or public institution, then you’re not going to do anything to change them. The problem with that attitude is if everybody else is really the problem, you’re fucked! Coming out of victim mentality means you start to realize you actually have choices.

One clue that might help you see if you have victim mentality is this: if you think you’re responsible for all the good things in your life, and someone/something else is responsible for all the bad things, you might have victim mentality.

When you take a searching and fearless moral inventory of your life in step 4, you’re forced to look for your part. And guess what happens when you’re forced to look for your part? You find stuff! You find out that all that shit was NOT always someone else’s fault! It doesn’t mean nobody did anything, but it also means YOU did something to create drama and chaos, or at least make the existing drama and chaos worse.

And this is GOOD news! It’s good news because, when you know what you’ve been doing that’s been creating the dysfunction in your life, YOU CAN THEN STOP!

You can stop doing those things. You have choices about what to do in the future. You have a sense of agency in your life. Having agency means you realize you have the capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior. You become an actor in your life rather than a reactor. You come out of victim mentality.

When you look for your part in things and see what you’ve been doing, you start to ask yourself “What could I do differently in the future? Where can I make change and have an impact on my life and the lives of those around me?” This takes us out of victim mentality because victims don’t feel like they can have an impact.

Keep in mind that most of us with the victim mentality have been victimized in some way or other in our lives. So it makes sense that you have this mentality. It came from somewhere. But you don’t have to stay in that mentality. I’ll be addressing how to come out of victim mentality even when you’ve been victimized in a future essay, so be on the lookout for that.

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If you’re constantly pissed off at things like the barista getting your coffee order wrong or that there’s traffic on the highway, you might need to learn acceptance.

That was my problem for most of my life. Once I started to understand that lack of acceptance was my problem, things began to change. I came to understand that it wasn’t the coffee order or the traffic – it was my thinking was the source of all my problems.

It became clear that my difficulty was because, deep down, I had a belief that these things SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING!

That thinking IS the problem!

We don’t get to decide if something SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be happening. It IS happening. What we get to do is decide what we’re going to do about it.

Acceptance means focusing on what is actually happening, not what you think SHOULD BE happening.

“You cannot solve a problem by condemning it” is a quote that comes to mind here.

When you get pissed off that you got the wrong coffee or that there’s a lot of traffic, you’re condemning these “problems.” But the problem is actually your thinking.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to like it. But it does mean you stop resisting what’s happening.  

Perhaps you’re like me and you’ve heard these sayings before…

“Don’t take a snowstorm personally, put on boots.”

“Better to put slippers on your feet than to carpet the world.”

I had no fucking idea what those sayings really meant until I got into recovery and really, deeply learned the meaning of acceptance at how to do it.

They’re basically reminding you to focus on what you can change and accept what you can’t as the Serenity Prayer says. You can focus on the world around you – or –  you can adapt yourself, adapt your thinking.

If you resist the situation, then you won’t do anything about it. But if you accept it, you have some hope of affecting the situation because you might actually take action. If you’re busy fighting against what is, it’s hard to take meaningful action.

A couple of areas in which acceptance has been really profound for me are emotional acceptance and self-acceptance.

Our emotions build on each other. If I felt worried, then gtt angry that I was worried, those emotions combined and my worry was multiplied.

But…. if I feel worried and accept that I’m worried, then I only have the original feeling without adding additional emotion to it. So if you’re worried, just be worried. It will pass. Emotions are energy and they will morph and change.

The most important kind of acceptance for me has been self-acceptance. Remember, you can’t change something by condemning it. When you learn something about yourself that you don’t particularly like, remember – it’s info, not ammo!

You’re never going to beat yourself up into being a sane, rational, functional mature person. If you accept that you have certain traits or you did that thing instead of fighting it, it will allow you to face reality and work toward the kind of life you want. Starting right now, in the present moment.

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