When Avoidance Becomes Your Identity: Victim Mindset, the Fear Ladder, and How to Finally Break the Pattern

There's a version of avoidance so sophisticated that the people living inside it never see it for what it is — because it doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels like the truth.

In Part 2 of this series, Jim unpacks the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV) — a 2020 personality construct from Tel Aviv University that explains why some people organize their entire identity around being wronged, and why that makes accountability feel impossible. He also delivers the full clinical picture of the Fear Ladder, including the two things most people miss when they try to use it on their own: safety behaviors and pacing. Finally, Jim walks through five concrete strategies for going into hard conversations with a plan instead of a reaction.

This episode is about what it costs you to keep playing not to lose — and what it actually looks like to start playing to win.

Topics covered:

• The four dimensions of Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV)
• Why victimhood identity is a nervous system pattern, not a character flaw
• The Fear Ladder: full clinical picture and common mistakes
• Safety behaviors and why they cancel your progress
• Five strategies for high-stakes conversations
• Playing to win vs. playing not to lose
• Your three-part homework assignment

References: Gabay et al. (2020), Craske et al. (2008), Foa & Kozak (1986), Nolen-Hoeksema et al. (2008), Gollwitzer (1999), Ok et al. (2021)

The Unscripted Mind — real therapy, real talk, no fluff. Hosted by Jim Cunningham, Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC). Each episode delivers practical tools and honest mental health insight to help you gain self-awareness, make better choices, and feel more in control.

Transcript

Avoidance As A Life Story

Jim Cunningham 0:01

Last time I left you with a question, I told you there was a version of avoidance so well disguised, so sophisticated that people can live inside it for years, sometimes an entire lifetime, and they never see it for what it is. This episode is about what happens when avoidance stops being a behavior and becomes a story when the pattern that is quietly running in the background becomes the very thing you've built your whole sense of self around when avoiding accountability isn't something you do anymore. It's who you are, and here's what makes it so hard to talk about and so hard to shift. Is that it doesn't feel like avoidance. It just feels like the truth. I'm Jim Cunningham. I'm a licensed professional counselor, and this is the Unscripted Mind. A lot to cover today. So let's get into that. In part one, we talked about how avoidance works, the nervous system, the logic behind it, and why dodging threat feels like survival, even when the threat isn't real. We talked about little Albert Seligman's dogs learned helplessness, and the core of it was this. Every time you avoid something and your anxiety drops, your brain logs that as a win. If you do it enough times, you stop believing you can handle the thing at all, even when the door is wide open right in front of you, instead of leaving, you just decorate the cage. We also talked about four tools for breaking that pattern, naming it, specifically building the fear ladder, killing the open-ended timeline, and counting what avoidance is actually costing you Today I'd like to dive deeper into some of those, especially the Fear Ladder, uh, which I'd like to give you a full clinical picture on not only what it is, but how you use it in a real conversation, for example. But first I wanna spend some real time on something I teased in the end of part one. Because there's a pattern sitting underneath a lot of what brings people into my office. Underneath the relationship struggles, the stuck careers, the same arguments that never go anywhere. And it's one of the most significant things I encounter in this work. Not because it's rare, but because it's everywhere and almost no one is talking about it in plain language. Researchers call it the tendency for interpersonal victimhood. Kind of a mouthful, and when I describe it, some of you're gonna recognize this in somebody in your life, maybe even yourself. In 2020, a research team out of Tel Aviv University published a study in a journal called Personality and Individual Differences. What they introduced was a personality construct. They called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, or TIV for short. Here's how they defined it. An enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. Let me unpack that a lot, because this really matters. This isn't a reaction to one hard experience. It's. A temporary response to something genuinely painful. It's ongoing, it's stable, generalized sense of being wronged across relationships, across time, regardless of what's actually happening. And what the research found is that this isn't just a mood, it isn't just low self-esteem. TIV is a stable personality trait, meaning it shows up consistently across different situations and in different measures. Researchers found four dimensions to it. I'll go through them one by one. The first is the need for recognition. Someone with high TIV doesn't just want acknowledgement that something happened. They need it persistently for multiple people, and it's never quite enough because the acknowledgement isn't really about the event anymore. It's about their identity. The second is what we call moral elitism. People in high TIV see themselves as the morally superior party in any conflict. They were the ones wronged, the other person was at fault. Full stop. There's real rigidity there. A deep resistance to any version of that story where they might have played a role in how things went. The third is a lack of empathy. I know that surprises people, but when your own victimhood becomes the organizing story of who you are, there's not much room left for what the other person might have experienced. Their pain gets filtered out or reframed as less legitimate or not even registered at all. And the fourth is rumination. People in high TIV replay the wrongs done to them. Over and over, not to process and to let go, but to confirm every replay tightens the story and the research shows that this kind of rumination actually decreases the motivation to forgive and increases the drive toward revenge. That's why they keep repeating the story over and over again. Now I wanna be clear about something important because this concept is easy to misuse and misunderstand. The researchers were explicit about it. TIV is not the same thing as having experienced real trauma or genuine victimization. Real victims exist. People get hurt, people are wronged. This is not what we're talking about. This is not being a victim. This is a victim stance. What TIV describes is the pattern where victimhood stops being something that happened to you and becomes the lens through which you interpret everything else that happens to you. Where the story of being wronged becomes the primary way you make sense of yourself and your relationships. And here's the piece I find most clinically significant. The research showed that TIV is linked to anxious attachment, the attachment style that develops when early relationships felt unpredictable. When connection felt unsafe. The person who learned early relationships are fundamentally threatening, often develops a hyper vigilance to being wronged because they were trained to expect it. So the victimhood identity. Isn't a character weakness. It's not laziness or a manipulation, though it can function in that way in a lot of situations. It's a nervous system that learned to find a threat in everything interpersonal, and then build a story, a whole story around that threat to make it make sense. So here's why this matters for avoidance specifically, when you're always the wronged party. When the story that the problem is always out there, always someone else is doing, you never have to face the one thing avoidance wants to protect you from. You never have to risk being wrong. You never have to risk accountability. You never have to sit with a possibility that you played a role in how things went because the story that you're the victim. The one who was done to it makes all that unnecessary. That's why this is such a sophisticated version of avoidance that I was describing. Not dodging a hard conversation, but dodging the entire category of conversations where you might not be the hero of the story. The behavioral data in this research is striking. When people high in TIV felt wronged in a controlled lab setting, just a simple economic game, they sought revenge even when that revenge didn't benefit them at all. They took more money away from their opponent knowing that they wouldn't receive it themselves. The stronger the negative emotions, the more likely they were to retaliate. Not to solve the problem, but to punish. That's what unprocessed victimhood does to relationships. It turns pain into currency, and avoidance is what makes that possible. Because if you never face the full truth of a conflict, you never have to update the story. So how do we make all this practical. If any of what I just described connected with you about yourself or somebody that you're in a relationship with, the question is the same. What do I actually do about it? I wanna go deeper into the fear ladder from part one that I described briefly. Um, I gave you the concept but didn't give you the full clinical picture and how it actually works. So I'll describe it briefly and what it looks like and then some practical application, uh, that you can use. So in exposure therapy, the Fear Ladder, is one of the most well supported tools we have for breaking avoidance patterns. The basic structure is simple. You list the things you've been avoiding. You rate each one from zero to 10 based on how much distress it would cause you to actually face the thing and you start at the bottom, the lowest rated item, just the thing that's uncomfortable, but not overwhelming. Here's what the research consistently shows. The goal isn't to eliminate the anxiety before you act. The goal is to act while the anxiety is present. Lemme say that again.'cause it's really important because people want to do things without the anxiety. The goal isn't to eliminate the anxiety before you act, the goal is to act while the anxiety is actually present and you let the experience teach your nervous system that something is new. The amygdala, which is your brain's threat center, doesn't update its files based on what you tell it. It updates based on what you do. You can't think your way out of avoidance. You have to move through it. But there are two things that most people miss when they try to use this tool on their own. The first is what research calls safety behaviors. These are these subtle moves that we do when we, uh, we try to stay technically in a situation while still avoiding the actual fear. The person with social anxiety, for example, who goes to the party but spends the whole night on their phone, the person who has the hard conversation, but only by text, never face to face the person who always brings someone along so they never have to sit with a discomfort alone. Safety behaviors feel like progress, but they're actually not. They prevent your nervous system actually getting the correct experience that it needs if you show up to the situation, but use every tool available to manage your anxiety while you're there. You leave having confirmed that the situation still required management of some kind and that you couldn't handle it without doing that kind of management. The research is clear. The most effective exposures happen without the safety behaviors. That's not cruelty. It's how learning works. You need full experiences, including the discomfort, to get the full update. This is why I often say that it's not always a good thing to deprive people of the struggle that they're in. Letting them struggle creates strength and resiliency, and a lot of times it's easier to try to rescue them, and I think oftentimes that is more for us than it is for them because I don't like seeing someone struggle. So I'm trying to alleviate my own discomfort, which ironically is just another type of avoidance. The second thing people miss is the pace. The ladder is graduated, but graduated doesn't mean slow. What matters is that you don't skip steps. Think of it like an actual ladder. You can climb faster, slow, but what you can't do is jump rungs, because if you start skipping the middle steps, there's nothing gonna catch you when a higher step is too much. That research also shows something important about where to stop when you hit a step that generates real distress. Don't retreat. You stay with it. Anxiety peaks, and then it drops. If you leave. When it peaks, you confirm that it's a real threat. If you stay long enough to feel it, come back down though. You give your nervous system what it actually needs. It was uncomfortable and nothing catastrophic happened. I came through it, nobody died. That's the update and that's how the pattern breaks. One more thing on the ladder before we move on, especially for the kind of interpersonal avoidance we've been talking about today. The research supports building values-based hierarchy alongside the fear hierarchy, not just what am I afraid of, but what am I not doing because of that fear The relationship, you haven't fought for the conversation that would change things. The version of yourself that requires you to be honest about your role in something. When the ladder connects to what you actually value, not just what you're afraid of, the motivation to climb, changes. It's not about managing anxiety anymore, it's about getting your life back, and that's the most important thing. So. How do we use all of this? Uh, let me give you a practical example, with conversation strategies, because the Fear Ladder is, is great for building tolerance and resilience, but it's also the practical question of what do I actually do when I'm in a room and I'm dealing with that anxiety straight up. So an example is hard family conversations. Everybody hates those. Um, there's always a lot of baggage that comes into the room even before we go into the room. So one of the biggest mistakes I see is going into a room and reacting rather than going in with a plan, and that is being proactive. And when you're an avoidant person, Reacting to something is almost always the default. so I'll give you five ways to kind of approach this example. First, decide what you want people to know before you walk in. Not what you want to say in response to everything they bring. Three points. That's it. What is the clearest, truest version of where I stand? And you write those down. That's your message. This reduces anxiety because you already have the answers to the test before you go in the room. Every question they ask, every challenge, they raise every attempt to take things sideways, distract, you return to those three things. You don't have to answer everything. You just have to respond and come back to the things that you want them to know and the things you want them to hear. This is not manipulation to be clear. It's clarity. And clarity is the antidote to the back and forth that never resolves. This keeps us focused and centered on what we're trying to do. And when people start trying to lead that astray, it is something I can always fall back on when things start going sideways. The second thing is less is always more. In these situations, explanation almost always leads to more negotiation. If you set a boundary for your child and they break it, and you try to explain why that boundary existed, again, they're gonna start trying to punch holds into that and try to invalidate it. The more you justify your reasoning, the more you give the other person to push back on. You simply state your position and then stop talking. It's that simple. Silence is uncomfortable for most people, but it's something you can use. Research on negotiation and conflict consistently shows that the person most comfortable with silence holds more power in a conversation. Most people will rush in to fill it, so let'em, you don't have to do that. The third thing is slow down physically. Literally like move slower. When we're in high stakes conversation, our nervous systems tend to speed up. Thoughts start racing. We say things we didn't mean to say because we're responding to anxiety, not the actual moment, and we end up saying things we actually haven't thought of yet. That's a problem. The antidote is deliberate, slowing down, waiting two to five seconds longer than you feel comfortable before you respond. The fourth is set the terms upfront. Have a plan. Before the conversation even starts, set some ground rules, and that means naming what you want and what you're not willing to participate in. Something like this. I want this to be a real conversation. I'm going to stay calm and I'm asking everyone else to do the same. If things escalate to name calling or threats, I'm gonna step out and we can come back to it when things settle down Then if that actually happens, you have to do it. The person who can walk away calmly from a heated conversation, not in anger, not in drama, just matter of fact, is the person who isn't playing the game anymore, and you can't win a game against someone who won't play. Now, the caveat to this, of course, is when you start enforcing your boundaries, it tends to escalate people. They tend to get more upset because you're not playing the game the way you always have. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do that. Stay calm, do what you need to do and let them worry about their reactions. Finally, and I think this is the one that changes things the most. When you go in. Know how you want, feel when you leave, not what you want them to say. Not whether they're going to approve of you. How do you wanna feel about how you showed up? If you can answer that going in, then your standard isn't their reaction anymore. It's your own integrity, and that's something that you can actually control. So I wanna end with a reframe. I come back to a lot in my work and I find it lands differently than anything else I've described today. Most avoidant people aren't just avoiding a hard thing. They're playing not to lose instead of playing to win. And that makes a big difference. You've seen this in sports all the time. The team that has the lead, um, and they try to sit on it. And you feel the momentum shift and they never get it back. Keeping the peace managing, trying not to make things worse is playing not to lose. And I get it. If your nervous system has learned that relationships are dangerous, the safest strategy is to minimize the risk. Don't push too hard. Don't want too much. Don't take up too much space. Just stay in bounds and hope nobody gets upset. Play it safe. But here's what playing not to lose actually costs you playing it safe isn't gonna win you the game. It keeps you permanently reactive. It puts other people in charge of how the conversation goes, how the relationship goes, and ultimately how your life goes. Over time, the people who only ever play not to lose, start to disappear. From their relationships, from their own goals, from the version of themselves they actually wanted to be. So when I see people who have done this for a very long time, the hardest question for them to answer is, what do you want? They don't know. They're too busy focused on what everybody else wants, and they've lost themselves. Playing to win looks a lot different though. It's not aggressive, it's not reckless, it's just clear. Going into hard conversations with a position, not just a hope, saying what's true, even when you're not sure how it's gonna land with other people. Being willing to let somebody be disappointed or angry without treating it as evidence you've done something wrong. Connection does not require agreement because their reaction is information about them. It's not a verdict on you. Something happens in relationships when one person stops playing the game. It's really strange. When you start trying to change the game, things often get worse before they get better. Somebody often escalates. Because the pattern changed and the system is trying to restabilize. Systems like homeostasis. So when somebody gets outta line, the system does everything it can to pull that person back into proper alignment with the system. You should expect that. Do not interpret it as failure, though it is actually confirmation that you're probably on the right track because something real just shifted. Here's what I know from a lot of years in this work. People who do best, who actually change the patterns they came in wanting to change are the ones who decide at some point that the cost of staying the same is higher than the cost of changing. For most people, what you want has to be greater than what you have, and sometimes it takes people a long time to realize that, and at that point they stop asking whether they can handle it and they start doing it. Not because the fear's gone. You don't have to wait for the fear to be gone. You don't have to wait for the anxiety to go away. You can feel every bit of it and still move on. That's not reckless, that's courage. And it's the only thing that actually updates the file. So here's how I'd like to wrap things up. And, and remind everyone that avoidance isn't weakness. A victim identity isn't evil. These are patterns that made sense at some point, but they've outlived their usefulness. The question is never whether you develop them. The question is whether you're willing to see them for what they are and start choosing something different. So your homework for this episode, and I mean actually do this, give it a shot, write it down. It has three parts. The first one is identify one thing that you're avoiding right now. And this is hard because we don't like to admit this, and this is part of the bigger problem with avoidance, is that most people don't recognize what they're avoiding and what they're doing as the avoidance. So if you can identify one thing you're avoiding right now, name it specifically, put a number on how comfortable it would be to face it from zero to 10. Then step two, ask yourself honestly. Is there a story attached to why you're not doing this thing? A story that puts responsibility for the situation somewhere outside of you? Not to beat yourself up over the story just to see it. And finally the third step is identify the smallest step. First baby steps 1% better a day. As James Clear says, it's not the whole thing, just the first move. And then ask yourself, what would it look like to go into that with a plan instead of just hoping it goes, okay, hope is not a plan. So it's really this simple start with one step at a time. It's that simple. That's it. And that's how the road to getting some power back in your life begins one step at a time. Until next time, if you've enjoyed this two part series, share it, subscribe, follow, leave, a review or a comment. That's how more people find the show. And remember, life does not come with a script. Embrace the unexpected, cherish the unplanned, stay curious, And most of all, have an amazing day. We'll see you next time on the unscripted Mind.