– Having survived without feeling it –
Preface: This short series of articles is explicitly not about the practicalities of dealing with victims of crime or political arbitrariness. My aim here is to gain a deeper understanding of victimhood as an inner 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 III: The Impact of the Present
Being a victim means: ‘I am powerless, I can’t do anything. Consequently, I am incapable of acting and therefore innocent. During the constellation work with the stages of life (time in the womb, childhood, adolescence and adulthood) I came across an astonishing parallel: the childhood experience, as shown in Wilfried Nelles’ Life Integration Process, corresponds very closely to the inner dynamics of the victim status. In the following I will therefore examine the victim status of childhood as a stage of life and consciousness.
Even if there are exceptions and gradations in individual cases, children are in principle not self-determined (because they are deeply dependent on their parents), not responsible for their own actions (i.e. not capable of acting) and therefore in principle innocent. Every child experiences existential powerlessness, pain and transgression, often at the hands of their own parents. It just happens, often without any particular intention. A child can only cope with these experiences and remain in the family by doing something strange: taking the blame. This activates inner mechanisms that allow them not to feel their powerlessness and not to feel the pain. Objectively she is always innocent, but subjectively she feels guilty. The reason for all this is that it is completely rooted in its childlike loyalty, in an unconscious love for its parents and family. He follows them to the point of self-sacrifice. He still finds the anchor of his existence – his self – in his parents.
The mechanisms described are childish survival strategies and patterns that were successful at the time. If they are not really seen, they can remain like a fundamental tone in the body and in its mirror, the soul. They work incessantly, for example as frequent alarms, as hyperarousal, as constant readiness to fight, flee or freeze. These survival patterns only relax when the child that one was at that time is looked at, perceived and seen without evasive manoeuvres (pity/iconisation). From the heart. In principle, only a mature person can do this. Adults are grounded in the present. This removes all the dependencies that were previously necessary. This anchoring, or in other words the open contact with the present moment, marks the constitutive status of adulthood and at the same time the end of victimhood.
This has far-reaching implications. One of them is that by being anchored in the present, adults are for the first time able not to fall into the pain of the past when a life situation brings their inner child onto the scene, so to speak in victim mode. They remain able to act in their concrete present, unlike the child they once were. They also do not fall back into the past when they meet someone in victim mode, because they can see what is going on with their counterpart – and that they themselves have survived.
In constellation work, especially in the Life Integration Process, we stage the ‘seeing and being seen’ of the victim, their survival achievement and the skills they have gained in the process. We do this strictly from the inner status of the adult, from the present moment. As a companion in this process, one is again confronted with the chicken-and-egg dynamic. People in the inner state of a child are, by definition, just as incapable of acting as people in the victim state. Both the child state and the victim state correspond to each other. It is possible that their basic dynamics are identical. Similarly, the state of no longer being a victim corresponds to inner adulthood. The crucial dynamic underlying both is open contact with the present, with the relatively safety of the now.
Another consequence is that working with the ‘inner child’ (as a representation of the child self of that time) is basically about dealing with one’s own victim status. It makes little sense, therefore, to take special care of the inner child or even to give it a special place. Pity and deification are two sides of the same coin, and that coin says: ‘I don’t really want to see you as you are. Not seeing gives extra energy to one’s victim status and makes it more permanent. It would be equally counterproductive to treat the inner child in an authoritarian or ignorant way, as one’s parents may have done during childhood. This would be a repetition of how the victim is denied from the outside, e.g. ‘Pull yourself together’ or ‘It wasn’t that bad’. Again, these are two sides of the same coin.
The inner child relaxes when it is seen in its entirety and when you really allow yourself to connect with the pain you felt at the time. Similarly, the victim status relaxes when it is seen in its entirety and when you allow yourself to connect with the pain you felt at that time. But this connection, this basic empathy, is only possible from the relative safety of the present.
For constellation and counselling work, this means that connecting to the present is the linchpin of all efforts. Connecting to the present inevitably leads to the dissolution of victim status. It interrupts the chicken-and-egg dynamic. Presence ensures seeing and being seen. The present opens the prison door, sometimes it just blows it open. It already moves a little when a person allows themselves to be anchored and held in the present, in their actual age, in the here and now, even if only for a moment.
To use a metaphor, when a person begins to rely on the anchor to the present that has been handed to them through the bars, the prison of victimhood begins to crumble. Time in their cell can begin to flow for the first time. This usually marks the beginning of a kind of open prison, and that is perfectly fine. The extent to which contact with the experiences once perceived as devastating can be measured in drops or chunks depends on how narrow or broad the anchorage in the present is. In order to leave victimhood behind, one needs to experience that the devastating experiences of the past are no longer threatening in the present because they are over and done with. This requires measured contact with them from the safety of the present. When you can feel, physically feel, that you have actually survived, the open prison becomes a life of freedom.
