Through learned helplessness, at an early age. It's much, much harder to undo than to set in. It's arguably the exact same process used to train victims.
Once the elephant grows, it will be help in place by a puny string of rope that it could very well break off - if not for the underlying conditioning.
Once the victim mentality takes root, removing it is like trying to remove a pebble from your shoe. You remove the shoe and shake it upside down - only to realize the pebble is actually stuck inside your heel.
Except it's not a pebble - it's your personal irresponsibility. It was handed to you victim as part of the victim taming process.
It was given to you in place of the scalpel of personal responsibility that could have empowered you, and made you better suited for life. And you have grown blunt and accustomed to that uncomfortable pebble you never knew was there. Injury was added to insult. So now what?
Now you need to do something about both the insult AND the injury AND get yourself a scalpel.
-----------------------------
My point: personal responsibility is indeed the secret sauce to overcome a victim mentality... but there are obstacles that shouldn't be realistically ignored.
One who sets out to such undertaking still needs to excise the deep-rooted irresponsibility from within, they still need to at least grab hold of a scalpel, and they still need to learn how to use it properly going forward.
It won't be easy. It could be the hardest, most daunting thing one has ever tried doing. But it will also be the most worthwhile.
Mar 8, 2022·edited Mar 8, 2022Liked by Athena Walker
And here I thought you were just going to talk about being sick of NTs crying about stupid crap they created themselves! I'm not a psychopath, but I have noticed that emotionally my temperature is a lot cooler than other NTs I know and I think about that all the time. I spent many years trying to get my friends to realize things that would have been obvious with some objectivity. (I was an asshole in my own right, and I know it.)
My mom felt like that about women and how men are so terrible and selfish. It took me years to rid myself of that crap and do things my way. I've wasted a lot of years afraid she was right.
You were so lucky to have such a positive influence in your life, your SO. Or at least you were smart enough to find him and keep him. Having a person who understands what you don't understand and what you need to be taught is priceless. The people in my life when I was growing up only made things worse for me. They couldn't speak my language and make me see what I couldn't see on my own. The only thing that worked for me was reading The 48 Rules of Power and struggling for years trying to understand how this game works. I could have achieved this years ago and I would have accomplished so many more of my goals. But no point in having regrets. Better late than never.
Athena, thank you for this. There is a particular subject in my life where it seems almost impossible for me to take responsibility and still understand that I can't change the outcome. I can't change the outcome of anything, really, but I can take responsibility for my part, my actions, even my thoughts. That last bit from parents to sons really hit home. It is difficult to realize i have accepted victimhood because I did not think I would be honoring other humans by not acknowleding their trauma. I can acknowledge and thrive. I have before. I will again. The hey for a lot of us is being fine with your feelings. Validate their existence. And move the fuck on. Brava! You are a terrific writer.
Your topic of discussion reminds me a lot of the book, 'The Gift,' written by Edith Eger, a holocaust survivor. She details the points of victimhood and how people tend to stagnate because they are still frozen in that moment. I'm not a feminist, but I remember as a child having a lot of resentment towards the manner that women were referred to as lesser than men by both genders in many ways (more.often by women than men.) I'm sure much of this was due to my own vulnerabilities being a child that had an extremely abusive father and a girl that had been raped at age 7 and 14. Experiences made me angry and defensive over my gender, and it took me many years to digest and reflect on the fact that anger wasn't serving me. It did warp my sexuality, but I came to accept that side of myself too and move forward.
Accountability in this world... it's degrading due to much of what you pointed out. People are comfortable with living to suffer and coddling behaviors that imprison one inside their personal trauma over pushing them to see these things happened, but they are not the defining factor in your life. Happiness is a choice, and deciding to be happy isn't something someone else can give you as it is your responsibility to pull it to the surface for yourself. I think one of the biggest deficits in the world today is that many people just fail to reflect. Whether about themselves, their actions and desires, or the world around us.
It was a nice post. When you said about blaming others I recalled a phrase I heard "when you look for villains you punish innocents". It makes sense when people pull the victim card because it is like they are the center of the world and not a part of a system anymore. We are part of a much bigger system than ourselves and the answers to our misfortunes are not simple, so looking for someone to blame for our own emotional misery is not going to solve anything.
I recall toward the ending of the movie "Suicide Squad" Harley Quinn castigated El Diablo for his self pity and general mopery and she told him "you have to own that shit" I was impressed and actually ended thinking the movie wasn't that bad almost entirely on the strength of that scene.
Then the introduction of Birds of Prey ruined it all by excusing Harley of pretty much everything.
Taking responsibility is in itself really powerful when dealing with other people and I've noticed that in the modern world some seem to be unable to accept it and will wonder what 'game' you're playing and that's all on them
I think there is a false dichotomy here. While getting bogged down by ones own bad circumstances or choosing victimhood is going to be terribly unhelpful when making change, it doesn't necessarily follow that the social forces that limit people are not real. Including sexism. Believing in you own agency and power for many people is just a useful fiction, along with believing in free will, or that life has meaning. It might all be bunk, who knows, but it's necessary to act as if these things are true, to get the best outcome.
I think it's a very UNuseful fiction that western society provides people with every opportunity. For some, yes it does. And it may be the best type of society we have yet invented, but its got a long way to go and victim blaming just makes it too easy to overlook structural problems. "You can do anything if you put your mind to it!", says starry eyed person. "OK, so I guess I could have been an Olympic gymnast? At 6 foot 2." "Umm, well....". OK this is an absurd example, but people believe similarly absurd things. 'Anyone can do it' has somehow transmuted into 'everyone can do it', the distinction has been lost.
Any discussion of feminism is troubled by definitions and too many people think it's anti-men. It is possible to root out and discuss women's issues without characterising women as powerless permanent victims. That some people unfortunately choose to do that does not mean that the more balanced analysts are not onto something big and important.
And mysoginy is a continuum. As it is undeniable that women in some societies suffer terrible oppression and abuse, I don't see why the forces (historical, dark human nature, social lag) that create that situation will be entirely absent from other societies, even the middle class West. And since in the West, legal equality of voting, pay etc is a very recent phenomenon, I don't see why the forces that operated for so long would suddenly have disappeared just recently rather than linger on in social attitudes and institutions. So it occurs to me, at what point was feminism no longer required? And why then exactly? I think it is still important, we are not there yet.
Sure there have been powerful women in history. That does not mean that 'women (generally) have always been powerful'. Most people were not Cleopatra or Boedicea. The prevalence of domestic abuse even now in our regulated and enlightened society is a good indication of what things were like when (even a generation or two ago) women had few options of escape. Historically, women have only had power within the framework allowed to them.
Unequal physical strength could hardly not produce male dominance. However civilised the society, there is always that knowledge that physical strength can be used against you. The power that you personally feel in your own right is surely partly because of your psychopathy. If you never lack confidence, never feel fear, never have any negative emotions, well that confers great power that just need not apply to women generally.
Although I grew up in the West, entrenched sexism was very much a part of my region and era. There was a huge contrast between the positive messages about our ability that we were given at school, say, and the way we saw society actually operating. We snorted and thought our teachers were idiots, but on reflection they were well-meaning, just encouraging us to do our best.
CRUCIALY, feminism gave me explanations for a lifetime of observation and experiences, and most importantly, gave me the insights necessary for personal growth and the knowledge necessary to work within the system as best possible. I grew up knowing the limitations of my power long before I was old enough to view myself a 'victim', it was just the way things were.
Limits to physical strength and the particular ways women have to move through the world has been a lifelong limitation. The need to be on guard for ones physical safety, the things women can't safely do that men can, it's been a constant concern because I have been an adventurer. Talking to men about this can be an eye opener for them, it just isn't on their radar. The difference between the elaborate choices I make for my safety and what they would consider necessary can be stark. But physical safety is only one thing out of so many.
It's interesting to me that good men that I know are highly aware of 'what men are like' and it has been a major concern in raising their daughters. Not the old-fashioned blunt tool of curbs on their sexuality, but an awareness of the detailed and far reaching complications of just being a woman in this world and having to navigate the system and what the difficulties can be. They get it.
The most unexpected case is my partner. Years ago I called him Dinosaur and Victorian Papa because of his strangely old-fashioned views that were at odds with the genuine respect he had for women academically and professionally. I just thought he didn't get it, didn't understand people, had blind spots, sheltered life etc, but as long as we got on well, never mind.
Then over the years something happened. He is a voracious reader of history, culture, politics, and for a change piles of feminist books started passing through the house. He'd email me articles out of nowhere to discuss. Things suddenly occurred to him about female friends from his youth that would never have been on his radar before. He started saying insightful things about my life and past that were out of character. He reassessed the the country we live in. His profession has shown him the dark underbelly of society. Travels in places where women were powerless, and in places where they did all the work, and in places where the power balance just took a different form from what we are used to, all sorts of permutations, all this had an impact on him. Emerging feminism has been a revelation for him, and a surprise for both of us, and it wasn't my doing. Now we can really talk about this stuff, yay. And I find that my old dinosaur is now an actual feminist. This cannot be dismissed as noise.
Powerful female songs (or movies or what have you) are great but they don't represent reality. Sometimes the extent to which they differ from reality can verge on the offensive, or at very least seem trite. They are enjoyable because they are fantasy, escapism, wishful thinking. There is some truth in them, of course. Partial truth. We know we are good and worthy. They can be useful spurs to action and a good way of concieving of oneself, like imagining you are Xena the warrior princess while lifting weights at the gym (yeah, I do that). But whether it's Goddess paganism or the Spice Girls' girl power, it's very nice, yes, a vision of a possible future maybe, but not an indication of how being female really is. I love the Hu song, it's stunning. It may be sincerely meant, but I'm too cynical to think it speaks real truth. An emotional truth perhaps. As works of art are meant to do.
Do you know how elephants get tamed?
Through learned helplessness, at an early age. It's much, much harder to undo than to set in. It's arguably the exact same process used to train victims.
Once the elephant grows, it will be help in place by a puny string of rope that it could very well break off - if not for the underlying conditioning.
Once the victim mentality takes root, removing it is like trying to remove a pebble from your shoe. You remove the shoe and shake it upside down - only to realize the pebble is actually stuck inside your heel.
Except it's not a pebble - it's your personal irresponsibility. It was handed to you victim as part of the victim taming process.
It was given to you in place of the scalpel of personal responsibility that could have empowered you, and made you better suited for life. And you have grown blunt and accustomed to that uncomfortable pebble you never knew was there. Injury was added to insult. So now what?
Now you need to do something about both the insult AND the injury AND get yourself a scalpel.
-----------------------------
My point: personal responsibility is indeed the secret sauce to overcome a victim mentality... but there are obstacles that shouldn't be realistically ignored.
One who sets out to such undertaking still needs to excise the deep-rooted irresponsibility from within, they still need to at least grab hold of a scalpel, and they still need to learn how to use it properly going forward.
It won't be easy. It could be the hardest, most daunting thing one has ever tried doing. But it will also be the most worthwhile.
And here I thought you were just going to talk about being sick of NTs crying about stupid crap they created themselves! I'm not a psychopath, but I have noticed that emotionally my temperature is a lot cooler than other NTs I know and I think about that all the time. I spent many years trying to get my friends to realize things that would have been obvious with some objectivity. (I was an asshole in my own right, and I know it.)
My mom felt like that about women and how men are so terrible and selfish. It took me years to rid myself of that crap and do things my way. I've wasted a lot of years afraid she was right.
You were so lucky to have such a positive influence in your life, your SO. Or at least you were smart enough to find him and keep him. Having a person who understands what you don't understand and what you need to be taught is priceless. The people in my life when I was growing up only made things worse for me. They couldn't speak my language and make me see what I couldn't see on my own. The only thing that worked for me was reading The 48 Rules of Power and struggling for years trying to understand how this game works. I could have achieved this years ago and I would have accomplished so many more of my goals. But no point in having regrets. Better late than never.
Athena, thank you for this. There is a particular subject in my life where it seems almost impossible for me to take responsibility and still understand that I can't change the outcome. I can't change the outcome of anything, really, but I can take responsibility for my part, my actions, even my thoughts. That last bit from parents to sons really hit home. It is difficult to realize i have accepted victimhood because I did not think I would be honoring other humans by not acknowleding their trauma. I can acknowledge and thrive. I have before. I will again. The hey for a lot of us is being fine with your feelings. Validate their existence. And move the fuck on. Brava! You are a terrific writer.
Your topic of discussion reminds me a lot of the book, 'The Gift,' written by Edith Eger, a holocaust survivor. She details the points of victimhood and how people tend to stagnate because they are still frozen in that moment. I'm not a feminist, but I remember as a child having a lot of resentment towards the manner that women were referred to as lesser than men by both genders in many ways (more.often by women than men.) I'm sure much of this was due to my own vulnerabilities being a child that had an extremely abusive father and a girl that had been raped at age 7 and 14. Experiences made me angry and defensive over my gender, and it took me many years to digest and reflect on the fact that anger wasn't serving me. It did warp my sexuality, but I came to accept that side of myself too and move forward.
Accountability in this world... it's degrading due to much of what you pointed out. People are comfortable with living to suffer and coddling behaviors that imprison one inside their personal trauma over pushing them to see these things happened, but they are not the defining factor in your life. Happiness is a choice, and deciding to be happy isn't something someone else can give you as it is your responsibility to pull it to the surface for yourself. I think one of the biggest deficits in the world today is that many people just fail to reflect. Whether about themselves, their actions and desires, or the world around us.
It was a nice post. When you said about blaming others I recalled a phrase I heard "when you look for villains you punish innocents". It makes sense when people pull the victim card because it is like they are the center of the world and not a part of a system anymore. We are part of a much bigger system than ourselves and the answers to our misfortunes are not simple, so looking for someone to blame for our own emotional misery is not going to solve anything.
I recall toward the ending of the movie "Suicide Squad" Harley Quinn castigated El Diablo for his self pity and general mopery and she told him "you have to own that shit" I was impressed and actually ended thinking the movie wasn't that bad almost entirely on the strength of that scene.
Then the introduction of Birds of Prey ruined it all by excusing Harley of pretty much everything.
Taking responsibility is in itself really powerful when dealing with other people and I've noticed that in the modern world some seem to be unable to accept it and will wonder what 'game' you're playing and that's all on them
OK, big block of text coming.
I think there is a false dichotomy here. While getting bogged down by ones own bad circumstances or choosing victimhood is going to be terribly unhelpful when making change, it doesn't necessarily follow that the social forces that limit people are not real. Including sexism. Believing in you own agency and power for many people is just a useful fiction, along with believing in free will, or that life has meaning. It might all be bunk, who knows, but it's necessary to act as if these things are true, to get the best outcome.
I think it's a very UNuseful fiction that western society provides people with every opportunity. For some, yes it does. And it may be the best type of society we have yet invented, but its got a long way to go and victim blaming just makes it too easy to overlook structural problems. "You can do anything if you put your mind to it!", says starry eyed person. "OK, so I guess I could have been an Olympic gymnast? At 6 foot 2." "Umm, well....". OK this is an absurd example, but people believe similarly absurd things. 'Anyone can do it' has somehow transmuted into 'everyone can do it', the distinction has been lost.
Any discussion of feminism is troubled by definitions and too many people think it's anti-men. It is possible to root out and discuss women's issues without characterising women as powerless permanent victims. That some people unfortunately choose to do that does not mean that the more balanced analysts are not onto something big and important.
And mysoginy is a continuum. As it is undeniable that women in some societies suffer terrible oppression and abuse, I don't see why the forces (historical, dark human nature, social lag) that create that situation will be entirely absent from other societies, even the middle class West. And since in the West, legal equality of voting, pay etc is a very recent phenomenon, I don't see why the forces that operated for so long would suddenly have disappeared just recently rather than linger on in social attitudes and institutions. So it occurs to me, at what point was feminism no longer required? And why then exactly? I think it is still important, we are not there yet.
Sure there have been powerful women in history. That does not mean that 'women (generally) have always been powerful'. Most people were not Cleopatra or Boedicea. The prevalence of domestic abuse even now in our regulated and enlightened society is a good indication of what things were like when (even a generation or two ago) women had few options of escape. Historically, women have only had power within the framework allowed to them.
Unequal physical strength could hardly not produce male dominance. However civilised the society, there is always that knowledge that physical strength can be used against you. The power that you personally feel in your own right is surely partly because of your psychopathy. If you never lack confidence, never feel fear, never have any negative emotions, well that confers great power that just need not apply to women generally.
Although I grew up in the West, entrenched sexism was very much a part of my region and era. There was a huge contrast between the positive messages about our ability that we were given at school, say, and the way we saw society actually operating. We snorted and thought our teachers were idiots, but on reflection they were well-meaning, just encouraging us to do our best.
CRUCIALY, feminism gave me explanations for a lifetime of observation and experiences, and most importantly, gave me the insights necessary for personal growth and the knowledge necessary to work within the system as best possible. I grew up knowing the limitations of my power long before I was old enough to view myself a 'victim', it was just the way things were.
Limits to physical strength and the particular ways women have to move through the world has been a lifelong limitation. The need to be on guard for ones physical safety, the things women can't safely do that men can, it's been a constant concern because I have been an adventurer. Talking to men about this can be an eye opener for them, it just isn't on their radar. The difference between the elaborate choices I make for my safety and what they would consider necessary can be stark. But physical safety is only one thing out of so many.
It's interesting to me that good men that I know are highly aware of 'what men are like' and it has been a major concern in raising their daughters. Not the old-fashioned blunt tool of curbs on their sexuality, but an awareness of the detailed and far reaching complications of just being a woman in this world and having to navigate the system and what the difficulties can be. They get it.
The most unexpected case is my partner. Years ago I called him Dinosaur and Victorian Papa because of his strangely old-fashioned views that were at odds with the genuine respect he had for women academically and professionally. I just thought he didn't get it, didn't understand people, had blind spots, sheltered life etc, but as long as we got on well, never mind.
Then over the years something happened. He is a voracious reader of history, culture, politics, and for a change piles of feminist books started passing through the house. He'd email me articles out of nowhere to discuss. Things suddenly occurred to him about female friends from his youth that would never have been on his radar before. He started saying insightful things about my life and past that were out of character. He reassessed the the country we live in. His profession has shown him the dark underbelly of society. Travels in places where women were powerless, and in places where they did all the work, and in places where the power balance just took a different form from what we are used to, all sorts of permutations, all this had an impact on him. Emerging feminism has been a revelation for him, and a surprise for both of us, and it wasn't my doing. Now we can really talk about this stuff, yay. And I find that my old dinosaur is now an actual feminist. This cannot be dismissed as noise.
Powerful female songs (or movies or what have you) are great but they don't represent reality. Sometimes the extent to which they differ from reality can verge on the offensive, or at very least seem trite. They are enjoyable because they are fantasy, escapism, wishful thinking. There is some truth in them, of course. Partial truth. We know we are good and worthy. They can be useful spurs to action and a good way of concieving of oneself, like imagining you are Xena the warrior princess while lifting weights at the gym (yeah, I do that). But whether it's Goddess paganism or the Spice Girls' girl power, it's very nice, yes, a vision of a possible future maybe, but not an indication of how being female really is. I love the Hu song, it's stunning. It may be sincerely meant, but I'm too cynical to think it speaks real truth. An emotional truth perhaps. As works of art are meant to do.