There are many times that I have a conversation with someone and we end up discussing something involving a crime, wrongdoing, a failed relationship, punishment, what have you. When we discuss these things I will often get a comment about my abject lack of empathy for someone’s situation.
Yes, of course, I have a lack of empathy for them. It is how I am wired. I tend towards personal responsibility, and as cruel as it may sound given the situation, yes, I think that you bear responsibility. Now, these conversations, as I said, have bridged large swaths of information, even going to the point where the other person is looking to test when I consider someone a “victim”. This is a very rare event. Nearly always, if you are an adult and your life is off the rails, the first place you need to look is the mirror. Harsh? Yes. Incorrect? Not even slightly.
Being a victim lately is not only desirable apparently, it is also a realm of competitiveness, This is a losing strategy with a psychopath. If your want to bemoan the horrors of your life and how harmed you have been by the people that you have invited into it, I have little interest in your complaints. This might come across as dismissive, and it is. I don’t make excuses about that. I consider “victim blaming” as a dodge of personal responsibility. I do not have time for people winging about their oh so unfortunate circumstances that they have spent decades creating.
You have no idea how many times in my life it has been pointed out that there are circumstances, as a psychopath mind you, that I cannot possibly understand. To that I say, there are circumstances, that you as a neurotypical cannot possibly understand and that is because your emotions are leading you to keep feeding the beast. So many of the problems in a person’s life are due to the decisions that they make.
Athena, don’t you consider anyone to be a true victim? Yes, I do, and it is a very high standard. As I have mentioned in the past my history being around the survivors of unimaginable abuse. When you are a child, you are powerless. What happens to you is not under your own control. Those individuals are victims in the truest sense. As they grow and try to adapt to the world absent that abuse, they are apt to carry it with them and cause damage if they don’t work through it. It is never easy, and it is never pretty. It has to be done, so it is done with great pain and difficulty.
Likely due to this experience I am less willing to ascribe a true sense of victimhood to a person that dated a crappy mate. I get it, they sucked, and you hurt, but that hurt is very much like a child crying about falling down to me. Yes, to that child it is the worst pain imaginable. They are suffering through something that they have no point of reference for that pain. The same is true for the person frantically looking on Love Fraud for advice about their supposedly psychopathic, sociopathic, narcissistic, schizophrenic mate. It hurts, and it isn’t pain that they are used to, so to them it is the end of the world. Without there being something greater in suffering to compare it to, it seems like there is nothing worse in that moment.
I am not dismissing that there is pain there, what I am dismissing is the absolute willingness to nurture that pain into a social wound that will never mend. It may seem that I am overtly cruel to people that are suffering, and you may think how unfair that is. After all, I don’t suffer like you, do I? You’re right, I don’t. Not emotionally anyway. Physical pain is the pain that occupies my life, and let me tell you this. I have absolutely no empathy for myself either. It is one thing to sit on a throne of judgment while secretly nursing my own wounds and garnering sympathy and service from those around me. I have no interest in that, and I have no time for the complaints that my body deems worthy of serving up to me. I do not want to hear one bit of it.
Lack of empathy means a complete lack of it. I do not have one bit of self-pity in my being. If I committed a heinous crime I would not have one moment of feeling sorry for myself. I decided what came my direction and I have no one else to blame but me. I have been told numerous times that I take on too much, I push myself too hard, that I need to be kinder to myself.
No.
I will not.
There will never be a time when I am sidelined by suffering unless that suffering literally removes my ability to function. I am stubborn to a fault, and to those of you that may think that I have an unreasonable standard when it comes to personal responsibility, understand it is no different from that one I hold myself to on the things that matter. If I am not totally broken I have no excuses but to keep on.
Someone that suffered unimaginable pain once said to me:
Pain is not a slave nor should it ever be your master
If you cannot see through it you will forever be crippled
When you read my writing, if it ever seems to you that I have unreasonable standards when it comes to suffering remember that they are the standards by which I live when it comes to the limitations that demand to be adhered to and are ignored utterly by my stubbornness. I do not apply standards to people that I myself do not expect myself to comply with.
When bad things come for me, the first place I look is to where my role contributed. What could I do better, what could I avoid next time. You’re right to say that I do not know your emotional suffering, and I also know that the level of suffering is different from individual to individual. What I also know, however, is that the fire of pain is simply forging new resistance. I have seen it time and time again that the human spirit can keep going when it is required to.
Suffering will take as much as it can from you if you allow it to do so. It is normal to experience pain, it is not wise to dwell in it. If you allow it to construct its house around you, you will find that door locked and freedom inaccessible. Feel your hurt, do not feed your pain.
Physical pain, emotional pain, I am sure that there is a difference. I have seen the ragged remains of living lifetimes through both have left behind, and even in their eyes, there is still the spirit and will to keep going. Do I expect others to match that determination? No, of course not. That hell is not something to be wished on anyone, and it is only through that hell that sort of will is created, and it is only through careful guidance later that those same people can see the world as anything other than an enemy.
Instead, remember when you are suffering that this is a moment in time. It will not last and you will get through it. When you think that the world has collapsed inwards upon you, you can keep going, there is a path there waiting. You just have to have the desire and determination to look for it. The path may not be in the slightest bit easy, but it is better than allowing that pain to become your master. One step at a time is the only way out of hell.
I very much agree with the general sentiment here. However, I invite you to try to reverse engineer the chains of causality, by observing the results and back-tracking from there to infer the intensity of damage incurred. This is very much what full-fledged empathy does.
I believe I can frame the subtler emotional aspects in a more rational, clear-cut way. Here's a frame of reference of your own, to get started:
"There will never be a time when I am sidelined by suffering unless that suffering literally removes my ability to function."
Let's apply this sound logic to the emotional stuff. One might thus surmise - When a person gets caught up in victim mentality, that suggests the level of emotional suffering indeed has removed their ability to function. For decades I have been there, done that, became that, I can assure you it's not fun. It took me several years to turn things around and open my eyes to reality; I literally nearly had to die in the process. Looking back - I'm not sure change would have actually been possible, otherwise.
These days, I do think very much along the lines of what you wrote here.
But all there while, I clearly understand how complex emotional challenges can be, and I have tremendous respect for people who are stranded in a dark hole, seeming unable to escape. I can see how one can simultaneously be their own prison cell and prison guard and prison key, while simultaneously supposing to have absolutely no say in the matter. I very much know what it *feels* like. That is the gist of having been accustomed/indoctrinated/trained to give away one's personal power.
Overcoming such a position certainly is possible, but it's a tremendous challenge.
It's not any different from learning how to walk again after a debilitating cord injury. There be towering adversarial odds stacked against us, there will be core beliefs sustaining the underlying mentality that need to be re-routed, there will be the need to create and strengthen new neural pathways, there will be a quite compelling tendency to just slide back into old patterns.
Thinking things through as I write it out - I don't think there is at all any difference between physical pain and emotional pain. Pain is pain, and debilitating pain debilitates.
The paradox of the whole victim mentality is that developing resilience is indeed the solution, but lacking resilience was what caused the whole predicament, in the first place. This paradox belies the dangers of the victimization culture - since it cannot fix anything by its own, and can potentially make things worse, on the long run. It would behoove victims to learn a lesson from their abusers, and vice-versa.
Compassionate wallowing is an absolutely necessary part of the healing process, but unless it's followed up with practical accountability, it will inevitably degenerate into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like trying to build a house in shaky ground.
Then again, trying to enforce practical accountability without allowing oneself room for compassionate wallowing will be akin to trying to grow a garden in sterile harsh ground. Change would hardly flourish.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.