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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…