The Six Victim Habits. Are You In One? | Ep. 66

Ever feel stuck in the same loop, even when you know you want things to change? I get it!

Today we’re talking about something I see all the time in divorce, conflict, and life transitions. I call them the six victim habits. They’re not about calling yourself a victim. 

They’re about spotting the patterns that quietly keep you stuck, keeping you from moving forward.

In this episode, I’ll walk you through the six habits and help you figure out if one of them is showing up in your life right now. Once you spot it, you can fix it.

We’ll chat about:

• The thrill of attention and when support turns into a trap
• Self-imposed helplessness and why “I can’t” can become a default
• Playing small and not growing because it feels uncomfortable
• The “get them before they get you” mindset 
• The “can’t say no” habit and how over-giving really leads to burnout
• And some real life examples 

Next episode, I’ll show you what to do with this once you spot your habit, because awareness is totally step one, and change is the goal.

Resources:

MEDIATION STARTER GUIDE: https://mailchi.mp/2939c428981d/mediation-resources

KELLY'S BOOK: Victim Is Not Your Name – https://a.co/d/e4VguRk 

LEGAL: Legal & Mediation Help: https://saperelawfirm.com 

INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/saperelawfirm 

FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/saperelawfirm

Transcript

1:17

Hey, do you ever feel like you're stuck in a pattern of behavior that is just keeping you from moving forward, or maybe it's a relationship issue or a career stall, or overall, a general sense that your life just isn't going the way it should be? Well, if that's happening to you, chances are you are in what I call a victim habit. I'm going to be talking to you about the six victim habits that are described in this book that I wrote a couple of years ago called Victim Is Not Your Name, and Victim Is Not Your Name was written for anyone who's going through some life trauma, life challenges where you just all of a sudden feel stuck and you feel like you can't move forward and get on to a productive road. And really the impetus for this book was, I wrote it with our family law clients in mind when I really sat down to go over these principles, because when you're going through family law challenges- family challenges, divorces, separations, marital issues, partner issues, child issues - it's really easy to get in this stuck place, and a lot of times people start getting into these habits where you might not call yourself a victim or think you're acting like a victim, but there are certain behavioral patterns that really do put you in the victim capacity where you're identifying yourself as a victim versus who you really are. So this is about identifying whether or not you're living in one of these victim habits. Let me tell you about someone who lived all six of the victim habits that we're going to talk about today, and her name is Lola. The names have been changed here, but these are based on real client stories that have happened over the years. Lola described her husband as a raging alcoholic who was abusive and had driven her to financial and emotional ruin. Well, she really appeared helpless and desperate, and she even brought her young daughter to our offices, which was against our "no children" policy. We don't allow children in the law office for a myriad of reasons, but despite the policy and being told what it was, Lola brought her daughter, anyway. This was a sign of Lola's inability to respect some boundaries. Well, Lola turned that initial consultation into a three hour session, pouring out every single detail of her story, gaining energy from the attention as she talked. She got amped up as she kept talking, and all of a sudden you could see there was momentum building in the energy levels. Lola wasn't entirely truthful in that consultation. Despite claiming financial desperation, it turns out that Lola had $250,000 stashed in a bank account, but she was living in a homeless shelter, to reinforce that narrative of "I'm helpless." Lola refused to return to the family home even though her husband had been removed through a restraining order process, so this behavior screamed self-imposed helplessness, where Lola continually found reasons why she couldn't just couldn't move forward. Well, as Rachel worked to resolve her legal case, Lola began resisting every step that could possibly bring closure. She refused to let go of the conflict. Even turning against the people who were supporting her, including her legal team. Lola's tendency to lash out and push away all of us who were trying to help her... That behavior embodied the "get them before they get you" mindset. This is a defensive mechanism rooted in mistrust, and fear. Well, when a settlement was finally reached, that gave Lola far more than she could have expected, she still wasn't satisfied. She wanted to unravel the agreement the very next day after, after it was entered into.. This revealed what we call a playing small habit, being fearful of embracing a stable drama free life. The settlement threatened to take away all the attention and the validation that Lola was getting from being in a crisis. This was exposing her reliance on the cheap thrill of attention. Lola also blamed everyone else for her problems. Who did she blame? She blamed the judge. She blamed her ex-husband and she even started blaming her legal team, never, ever taking responsibility for her own choices. This was the blame game in absolute action, and this was keeping Lola from truly facing her role in her situation. Meanwhile, Lola's inability to enforce boundaries with her daughter, indulging her daughter's every whim just to avoid conflict. Well, that highlighted the, "I can't say no" habit of over accommodating just in order to gain approval. So I know that Lola's story is extreme. But elements of her behaviors show up in all of us at one time or another. And these elements were the victim habits that can keep us stuck blind to our own potential, and constantly seeking the external validation or scapegoats for our struggles. So does this sound familiar? Maybe not to Lola's degree, right? But these habits really can sneak into our lives in super subtle ways. So today we're going to take a closer look at these six victim habits and how you can tell if you might be caught in one of them. Alright, so what are they? Let me tell you what they are very quickly, and I'll give you the list. One, the cheap thrill of attention. Two, self-imposed helplessness. Three, playing small. Four, get them before they get you. Five, the blame game, and six, can't say no. Let's start with the cheap thrill of attention. This one is where you are seeking sympathy and validation from others as a source of comfort. This is a pretty common one, and it's easy to start in the right place and slide into the wrong place on this because when something really bad has happened to you, you need to have support of other people. You need to gain some validation, and empathy for what's happened to you. But when you become addicted to the comfort of the attention, that's where this becomes a victim habit. So what are the signs that you're in this habit of the cheap thrill of attention? Well, one of 'em is constantly sharing your struggles with other, in order to garner sympathy. Are you sharing your troubles and struggles over and over and over again, or just briefly with one or two inner circle people? The next sign is when you start to feel energized by recounting negative experiences. That means you're getting a little dopamine hit there from it, right? And that's what we're referring to when we say it's the cheap thrill of attention. That little dopamine hit, you feel energized. And then here's another sign. You start noticing that others are avoiding deep conversations with you. Why is this? Well, when you encounter somebody who is knee deep in the cheap thrill of attention. Victim habit, you'll notice that they're the person in group events, maybe at church who are always talking about their struggles, never seeming to do anything about them or move past them to the next level in life. And they'll tell anyone and everyone who will lend an ear. And what happens in those circumstances is people in general start to avoid those people because it becomes exhausting and there's really no change and no action and no desire for it. So if you notice that others are starting to avoid deep conversations, with you, and you're starting to see these other pieces where you're sharing your struggles, oversharing a lot, and identifying as this person who is this victim, you may very well be in the cheap thrill of attention. Remember Lola? Well, I describe Lola in more detail in Victim Is Not Your Name when we start talking about these victim habits. But Lola, in the story I gave you there, she thrived on recounting her troubles. But what was she doing? She was resisting all solutions. She couldn't quit talking about it because she got energized. Alright, let's look at the next one. Self-imposed helplessness. So this is when you're focusing on all the reasons why change and solutions are impossible and that focus leads you to inaction. This is the person who, when there is a problem to be solved, and you, and maybe your team at work are trying to brainstorm solutions and or maybe for a client, right? And that person's response is to give you every reason under the sun why that solution won't work. And after a while, you realize that there's nothing you could propose that would work because this is a person who is in the victim habit of self-imposed helplessness, and it leads to absolute inaction. So what are the signs that you're in this habit? Well, if you find yourself regularly saying, I can't, or, no, no, no, that wouldn't work, or, that's too hard. That's too hard. Check yourself because those are signs that you may be in self-imposed helplessness. If you're avoiding action by emphasizing obstacles over solutions, right? So I gotta emphasize all of the obstacles because I don't want to have to really take action on this. That's another sign that you're in this very, very negative habit of self-imposed helplessness. And when you start feeling comfortable, when you're in a state of dependency on others, watch out because this is a big sign that you are really getting ingrained in this behavior of self-imposed helplessness. How did we see this in Lola? She was an overachiever when it came to the victim habits, unfortunately. Well remember her refusal to take financial independence seriously? Despite having resources? The woman had a quarter of a million dollars in her bank account, yet she was living and chose to live in a homeless shelter with her daughter. That was so sad and she couldn't see what she was doing by imposing this helplessness, self-imposed helplessness. The third victim habit that we describe here is playing small. This is really common and it's very tragic in my opinion. This is when you start avoiding risks or you're avoiding opportunities out of a fear of failure or criticism or change. Change is a good thing in most cases, but it always comes with a risk of failing. Okay, well one of my favorite authors is John Maxwell. He's a leadership author and one of the most famous experts on organizational leadership in the world. And he wrote a book called Failing Forward. And the premise of that book was, you know, we don't reach success in life regardless of what it is you're trying to do without going through a series of failures. You don't jump out there and try something new and it's automatically successful. And that's why it's so important to work on and move past the fear of failure. We play small when we are afraid we're going to get criticized. We'll play small when we're uncomfortable with change, but change is where the big, beautiful growth moments happen in our lives. That's why it's so important to not play small and not get into this victim habit. So what are the signs that you're in that victim habit? Here's a sign that you're playing small. You're turning down opportunities because they just seem too big or challenging. And just blanket turn them down. Versus breaking them down into bite-sized chunks. Or you're using excuses like it's not the right time. Well, when is the right time? That's what I want you to ask yourself. Or I'm not ready. What do you need to do to be ready? Are you putting false barriers in the way because you're feeling a little discomfort? Discomfort isn't always a bad thing. In fact, it's usually a good thing because it signals that you're rolling into a growth moment, right? Here's the other sign that you're in this playing small habit. You start feeling envious of others who are taking bold steps, but you're also rationalizing why you can't do that, right? So that is creating an excuse for yourself. You can see by great role models that other people have done this, can do it, whatever it is you're considering. And poo-pooing. Maybe you got married and during the marriage you started nursing school. And then you had children and decided to take a step back from that. And then over time you just never really got back to nursing school. And now your kids are older, you're going through a divorce, and this would probably be a really good time to get back into your career, to take some financial independence, and establish that career you were once interested in. If you see others in a similar situation who have done that or are doing that, and you're starting to feel envious, and then you rationalize, why you can't, you're playing small. You're playing small. So the example we have here from the book about, in our story about Lola is, remember she was reluctant to pursue a fresh start even after she had a really favorable settlement. In fact, what does she want to do? She wanted to unwind the settlement. Because she was so embroiled in this habit of playing small, she'd rather stay in conflict than get on with her life with her daughter. Okay, let's hit number four. Get them before they get you. This is where you act defensively or aggressively in order to preempt what you perceive as threats. This is the, "I'm never going to let anyone hurt me again." This is the, "I went through a bad divorce. I'm not going to date again 'cause I'm never going to go through that again, or I'm never going to get married again or get into a serious relationship. I'm not going to open myself up to be hurt like that again." This can be an extremely destructive habit because it bleeds into all the areas of your life. It bleeds into being defensive and aggressive. To stave off perceived threats at work and obviously in your personal life in doing new and big challenges in your relationships. Right? So what are the signs that you're in this habit?"Get them before they get you." You start lashing out or sabotaging relationships before they get too deep. Have you ever known folks who have a whole lot of acquaintances but they don't have any deep friendships? It's usually because once the relationship starts to move to the next level of a deeper, more intimate relationship or close bond, whether it's you know, a partner in life or if it's just a deep friendship, the brakes get put on. And we've seen people do this over the years where not only do the breaks get put on, but they will sabotage and completely break up the relationship, break down the relationship because, it's too close to home. They're afraid of being hurt again like they were sometime in the past. And what do they do? They just move on to the next relationship and they do nothing but establish a pretty shallow relationship. And then when it's nature takes its course, it's going to go to a deeper level. Boom, they bust that one up and go on to the next one and the next one and the next one. And when you do that clearly. What are you doing? You are depriving yourself of the joys of those next level relationships. Yes, there's a risk, you get hurt. That's part of life, but it doesn't mean that's a reason to live in the shallows for the rest of your life. Another sign that you're in the"get them before they get you" is distrusting others' intentions without clear evidence of their intentions. This is what, we sometimes refer to as mind reading. You make assumptions about somebody's motives even though there's no evidence of their motives. And so really the rational thing to do is if you are curious about somebody's motives, first of all, don't assume that they're bad, but ask clarifying questions. What did you mean by that? When you say this, what is it you mean? Can you help me understand that better? But if we're in the defensive, get them before they get you, you're going to distrust others' intentions without any clear evidence of those assumed intentions. And also a big sign in this area is that you view vulnerability as a weakness that goes right along with "I'm afraid to get hurt again." And so if I place myself into what I perceive as a vulnerable relationship or situation, then I'm going to be weak. And those two couldn't be further from the truth. So an example here in our story with Lola is her tendency to turn on all the people in her life who were trying to help her. Even her legal team. Her legal team, who quite frankly knocked it out of the flippin' park. Even we were surprised at the settlement we were able to get in that case. We were surprised under the circumstances. But Rachel got it for her, and yet she wanted to turn on Rachel in the end because she was really afraid of what might be next here. The fifth victim habit, this is called the blame game. What is this all about? It's about that big word that starts with an A called accountability. And personal accountability. This is about avoiding accountability by blaming other people or circumstances for your personal struggles. Instead of taking a look in the mirror first, starting with the mirror and saying, what part of this is my doing? That's where change starts to occur.

Okay, so signs you're in this habit: 20:59

you're frequently saying, "It's not my fault, it's not my fault. It's not my fault." Why do you need to declare it's not my fault, right, so frequently. Now when you're assessing a situation, it is important that you not make everything your fault when it's not your fault. But I've been doing conflict for 35 years as a mediator and as a trial attorney. And I've gotta tell you, I haven't seen a single situation that I can recall where one party had absolutely zero contribution to the conflict. Okay? We're not talking about somebody who's been a victim of a violent crime or something like that, some completely unprovoked situation, but in most of life's conflicts that come up, legal or otherwise, we all have some role in it. And so your personal growth and your path to healing is really in starting with the mirror. And saying, what is my role in this and what do I need to own? Right? And that's a really fundamental piece of strengthening and healing relationships, by the way. So are you frequently saying, it's not my fault. Another sign that you might be in this habit is you're focusing on what everybody else did wrong rather than your role. So it's very similar to, it's not my fault, it's just your focus is on everybody else instead of turning back to that mirror. And the last signal or sign that you're in this habit is you start to feel powerless because you place control in everybody else's hands. So you see, when we are blaming everybody else for our circumstances, instead of saying, well, what's my role and what can I do about it? What can I control? You know, you can only control yourself, right? But what can I change? When you do that, you take your control back because you're standing in the center of control in the highest empowerment zone. That's another piece we talk about the empowerment zones in this book. When we're in the victim habits, we tend to get in what we call disempowerment zones. And so in the book, I'm going to tell you, it's on page 85. Get the book right. We talk about empowerment zones. And this circle in the very middle, I know you can't see it here on camera very well, we'll put it up on the screen. This is called the Empowerment Zone. I call this the fast lane. It's where you have 100% control over the situation. And the next one out is not a hundred percent control, but heavy influence. When you live in these zones, this is when you feel empowered. When you live, live in these outward zones, this is where you feel disempowered. And so when you place control over your circumstances in somebody else's hands, you're in those outer zones in the circles of influence, and that's the disempowerment zone. Alright, so our example here with Lola is, what was she doing in the blame game? No personal accountability. She was blaming the judge and her ex-husband for her circumstances, right? It was all the judge's fault. If the court understood and did the right thing, it was all the ex-husband's fault. But despite her own choices, everything was everybody else's fault. Alright, let's move on to the last victim habit. It's the can't say no habit. This is about boundaries. So what does that look like? Well, this is where you're overcommitting or you're people pleasing to gain approval and avoid conflict. So you're trying to gain approval and avoid conflict. A lot of people who get stuck in this overcommitment, people pleasing thing, a lot of times they're doing that to keep themselves so busy so they don't have to think about the conflict and what's driving it. And how to overcome the issues that are confronting to you, right? Overcommitting and people pleasing to get validation. So here's some signs that you're in this habit. You're saying yes to all kinds of requests, even though saying yes to that thing overwhelms you or it goes against your interest. It's not in your best interest to do that thing. Say yes to that particular thing. I will tell you. In leadership and business growth and productivity, what I've learned over the years is the most powerful thing I can do is determine what I'm going to say no to, which should be the majority of things, and focus on a very small amount of things that I'm going to say yes to in order to stay sane, keep my energy, and stay away from this terrible victim habit. That's how we remain productive and energized. Another sign that you're in this habit is if you start feeling resentment or burnout from overcommitting, pretty soon you start looking through the lens of, well, nobody else works as hard as I do. Nobody else cares as much as I do. Nobody is thankful or grateful for everything I do. You see all the victim talk in that? That's probably 'cause you've overcommitted yourself. Another signal is you're using overgiving as a way to gain love or validation. This is kind of interesting to me because, you know, I'm a person of faith and in my faith walk and in what our scriptures are teaching us is that there you can't work your way into heaven. You get into heaven by grace. In other words, you can't earn God's love. God loves you anyway. This reminds me very much of this because there are a lot of people out there in, in life and in the religious world that are trying their best to be good, work their way into heaven, and we're taught in our faith, you can't work your way into heaven. That's a gift of grace. God's love is a gift of grace that we don't deserve and we can't earn. Right? It's not on us. It's kind of the same concept here. When you get into this victim habit of, you can't say no, if you're using this overcommitting overgiving as a way to gain, love or validation, I think you're going down the road of seeking a hollow source for love or validation. It's not found there. What's found there is resentment, burnout, feeling overburdened. You know, I talked in the book on this victim habit of a lady by the name of Jillian, who was a business woman who was known as, you know, being very generous with her time in volunteering for organizations in our local community. And because she would say yes when a nonprofit would call with a very, you know, noble project and asking for her help then the next nonprofit would call and then the next nonprofit would call. And pretty soon any board you sat on that was maybe a nonprofit organization when there was some help that was needed for free, guess who'd they call? They'd called Jillian because she always said yes, but here's Jillian's story. Jillian had been in a very, very volatile marriage that nobody knew about for years and years. In fact, it was violent. There was grounds for restraining orders, and they did come, ultimately. She didn't feel very worthy in life. She didn't have a lot of self love going on, and that's what happens to you when you're living with domestic violence for prolonged periods of time. You start believing the great lies. That's the evil part of this whole syndrome called domestic violence. And that's where she was. So she was killing herself, seeking love and validation by people pleasing, and that victim habit held her back for years until she finally recognized it and got some help for it. So let's recap. Okay. The six victim habits that we talked about today: the cheap thrill of attention, self-imposed helplessness, playing small. Get them before they get you and the blame game. So friends, here's my challenge to you today. Will you take a moment after you turn off this episode and reflect on these six habits and ask yourself? Do any of these sound familiar? And if so, if you write it in a journal or whatever, write it down. How are they showing up in your life? Do these sound familiar to me? And if so, well, how are these showing up in my life? What you're going to find is you'll see the behaviors that are going on here. And you'll identify areas where your victim habits show up and it's time to take action. Right. Lemme tell you something. People talk about habits as things that are bad habits. Not all habits are bad habits. In fact, I don't know that any habit is particularly bad. They just don't serve you. Right? And we also always talk about, I've gotta break that habit. I have to break that. That sounds like we've got this big onerous project. I have to break the habit. Habits aren't things to be broken. Habits are just patterns of behavior. And the way we stop engaging in those patterns of behavior that we found over the years, and it's in neuroscience up the wazoo, take a look. Is we replace those patterns of behavior with different patterns of behavior. So that takes a disruption of the current pattern and are replacing it with a new pattern. And I'm going to show you how to do that. In our next episode, we are going to talk about the next segment of this book, which is all about how we disrupt those victim habits in order to replace them with better behaviors that serve you. I hope you've enjoyed this. If you want to get a hold of this book there's a link to it in the show notes. Just head on over to Amazon and grab a copy of it. And if you know somebody who could use it be a blessing to 'em and get that for them as well. I know it's helped thousands of people already. Well, friends, that's all for now. So until next time, remember, resolve your conflicts with intelligence and always split smart.