How to Kill the Victim Mentality…

As I was preparing the first coffee of the day early in the morning, I found this picture in one of my friend’s histories on WhatsApp, and to be honest I frowned.

Maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but as innocent and profound as it might seem, the message I got was something along these lines:

It’s the mobile phone’s fault that we are addicted to it.

And then I was like:

— “Wait a minute, the last time I checked, nobody was pointing a gun to my head forcing me to buy a mobile phone, that was my choice”.

All of us — yes, you included — at one time or another, seek to “outsource” our responsibility to someone or something else, and you can identify it because you are the victim of and evil plot to keep you down, for example:

· I am angry at life because of this crappy job that sucks the joy out of me, but I do it for my family — so, your family is the one to blame.

· I really want to lose that extra weight that I have hanging over my belt, but unfortunately my parents never taught me to be disciplined — so, your parents are the ones to blame.

· I must do some business “under the table” because that’s how the system works in this country — so the system is the one to blame… this cycle can go endlessly.

And of course, once we have an excuse to validate our faulty behavior, we continue to roll in the mud of our bad habits, validating the story that we are victims of some evil plot.

You DO have a Choice

Let’s go back for a moment with the example of the telephone. I don’t know you, but I still remember being on the phone for hours until my Mom or Dad would scream from the top of their lungs:

— “Hang up the freaking phone now! It’s been more than two hours since you called!”.

So, let’s not deceive ourselves:

It has nothing to do with the cord and more to do with us making wrong choices.

The problem when we “outsource” our responsibility to a person, a thing or a situation, is that we give away our freedom of choice and we lose all control over our own circumstances.

In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Viktor Frankl explains that those prisoners who had a reason to live were more likely to survive the tortures and the hardship of the concentration camps even if they weren’t so strong physically. They made a choice and decided that there was something worth living for, at the other side of their current situation.

There is a great quote from Albert Einstein that says:

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe”

The next time you feel that there is an evil plot agains you, remember this:

There are no victims, only decisions to be made…