Victim mode: Having survived without knowing it
Preliminary remark: The specific treatment of victims of crime or political arbitrariness is expressly not the subject of this short series of articles. My aim here is to gain a deeper understanding of victimhood as an internal state with its own physical, emotional and systemic dynamics. In my view, these dynamics seem to influence large areas of our attitudes to life and our quality of life.
Being a Victim, Part I: The Survival State
Victim mode is a kind of inner survival space. It allows us to continue to exist after experiencing certain events as devastating. In general, it is not possible to leave this survival space until you are truly seen in your powerlessness, pain and struggle to survive. Thus the victim mode, which is necessary for a while immediately after the devastating experience, often becomes the victim status as a kind of permanent institution. This status is the subject here in the narrower sense.
Victim status is like a prison cell with the key inside. The victim is his or her own jailer. The prison of victim status functions like a time machine: inside is the past. Inside’ includes the moments of past devastating experiences, including all the survival mechanisms that were effective at the time. Outside is now. Outside is the relatively safe present moment. In terms of time, there is usually a great distance between now and then; it was a long time ago. But time can only heal wounds if its flow is truly perceived. This is impossible within the cell. Time stands still there.
The status of victim keeps a person away from their own present, and thus from their present life. This can sometimes feel like a glass bell, a mist, a black hole or a bag over the head. Healing the victim begins with being seen – and allowing oneself to be seen. However, there is a catch: allowing oneself to be seen and being seen are interdependent, like the chicken and the egg.
I can think of three status characteristics of being a victim. The first status characteristic is being overlooked by one’s environment. In addition to ‘unintentional overlooking’ (the blind spot) and ‘intentional overlooking’ (ignorance), there are two other ways in which the environment can avoid seeing the victim: pity and exaggeration. Both attitudes avoid contact with the victim’s experience and survival. Both attitudes probably arise from fear of the victim and the echo within oneself. Both attitudes cement the victim’s status: pity (marginalisation) reinforces the victim’s powerlessness, while iconisation (elevation) fixes them in their pain.
The second status characteristic is a blind spot in the victims themselves: they do not realise that they have survived and that the threat is over. They continue to believe that they are threatened. The realisation ‘I have survived, the threat is over’ would immediately shatter the victim status, pulverising the prison door so to speak. Once this realisation sinks in, it often has the effect of an explosion.
The third characteristic of victimhood is the tendency to hide. The victim is ashamed of his powerlessness and hides his pain. They live under the spell of the devastating experiences that triggered the victim reaction in them at the time. They remain in survival mode, both in terms of their physical, emotional and rational readiness to fight or flee, and in their efforts to hide their perceived powerlessness – their victimhood. They make themselves invisible behind various masks: combativeness or desire for harmony, dependence or emancipation, helplessness or sovereignty.
All three status characteristics are based on the fact that both the victim and his environment do not look at what is, or refuse to perceive it – and at the same time do not allow themselves to be seen, i.e. prevent themselves from being perceived. In this way, both sides constantly recreate the victim status. The victim status arises from – and at the same time thrives on – the mutual refusal to see and to be seen. For me, this means that healing the victim begins with this basic process: seeing and being seen. When the victim feels fully seen – and at the same time allows those around them to see them fully – they discover the key to their prison door. Then their (self-)liberation from victim status begins.
In order to make ‘seeing and being seen’ possible, it seems useful to give the victim an anchor in the present (outside the cell) in his frozen time (inside the cell). It is, of course, up to them whether they accept this anchor or not. It is up to them whether they feel able – even for a few minutes – to trust the present moment and their relative safety. Of course it helps to have a loving, resilient relationship with someone who lives in the present, who moves outside the prison and is not afraid to come close to the prison gate. Sometimes this is a partner or friend, sometimes a therapist or counsellor. Whether or not the person outside the prison is trustworthy to the victim depends not only on loving care, but also on whether their appearance reminds the victim of possible triggers of previous devastating experiences (transference) and how they deal with them (countertransference).
