How I Left the Victim Behind

What happens when you stop letting your past define your future?

In this episode, I share my journey of leaving behind a victim mindset and stepping into a life of healing, personal responsibility, and hope. This isn’t about ignoring pain or pretending difficult experiences didn’t happen, it’s about discovering the strength to move forward, reclaim your voice, and choose growth over staying stuck. If you’re ready to break free from the stories that have held you back, this conversation is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the reset series. Today's episode is called How I Left the Victim Behind. Have you ever felt like life just kept happening to you? Like no matter how hard you try, you're always carrying someone else's decisions, someone else's pain and someone else's trauma. Well, that was me for years until I realized I wasn't surviving anymore. I was living from a victim mindset. I hope after you listen to this episode that you will feel empowered just like I did to step away from the victim mindset, that you will see that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that just because trauma and hurt has happened to you, that doesn't have to define the rest of your life. It's something that happened to you in your past, but it doesn't have to be something that you do to yourself in your future. The reality of trauma is people who have trauma and suffer any kind of trauma, and my trauma is childhood abuse, they feel powerless. For most of my life, I felt powerless as a child and into adulthood. I felt powerless. I felt like I didn't have a voice and I didn't have any decisions to make in my life, that I had no say on what happened to me, and that people could do or say what they wanted to me because I didn't matter, nobody cared. I blamed a lot of my circumstances on other people. I felt like everything bad just happened to me, and I was oblivious to the fact that bad things were happening to other people too. Because I was so hurt and I was in the victim mindset, all I could see and focus on was the fact that I was hurt, I was traumatized, and I couldn't imagine that anyone else in this world was going through what I was. I was actually emotionally exhausted. When I reflect back on it now, I don't know how I survived. I really don't know how I survived. The emotional exhaustion was real. I was on high alert every single day, and I was so tired and so drained just from living. Like I wasn't even living, I shouldn't call it that. I was existing. I woke up every day, I went through the motions, but I went through them without any emotion. So motion with no emotion, and that's the truth. I literally just woke up, lived my life, did what I needed to do, and went to bed, and every single day was spent like that for way too long, then I care to admit. Then one day, like I didn't just wake up and decide to be a victim. You know, it was a role I slowly slipped into after years of pain. I didn't wake up one day and say, Oh, today I think I'm gonna call myself a victim and I'm gonna operate like one. Life actually showed me how that was and how that how that should be. Life showed me how to be a victim and how to sit into the victim mindset so easily. Then there was a turning point for me. I had spent so much of my life living in sadness and living in hurt. I spent so much of my life telling myself the same narrative every day, and what happened was I inflicted the pain upon myself much longer than the person who had caused me the trauma. They were long gone, but what I was left with was the hurt and the disgust and the trauma of what happened to me. So I started to abuse myself every day, and this was done through words and through actions. So I would put myself down every single day, I would tell myself that I wasn't enough, I was ugly, nobody liked me, I didn't deserve this place in the world. Multiple things like that, hundreds of times a day. It was exhausting, and I remember thinking one day, like, how can I live like this? How can this be a life? God gave me this life, and I've been given this life for a reason. What is the reason? This can't be the reason. And I had a loving family, I had wonderful friends, and I just thought this isn't the person that I'm meant to be. And I obviously had gone through years of therapy, and I it was through that therapy that I came to this point because I do believe you have to go through your pain to get to the end, and I went through years of therapy, and I I got to the point where I actually just couldn't live how I was living anymore. I accepted that you know this was just an existence, and it wasn't how any of my friends or family or anyone deserved for me to be around them, and I finally accepted the truth that I was never ever ever going to be able to change what happened to me, and that made me really sad, and I mourned that because for a long time I tried to erase my past, I tried to undo what had happened to me, but the day I accepted that I could never change what had happened, all I could do was control what happened in the future. That was very empowering for me because it was the first time in my whole life that I actually felt like I had control. Part of me could now control the future. Therefore, the person who hurt me had no control over that. That was empowering for me, and that was the day that everything changed for me. That was the day I realized that I now could decide how my future was going to play out, and that's the day I decided to start working towards a better life for me and a better life for my family. There was things I had to let go in order to do that. I had to let go of the blame. I'd held on to blame for a very long time. I blamed myself for a huge part of my life for what happened to me. I always asked myself, why me? And I've spoken about this before, the why me. Why did that happen to me? And people who are victims of anything trauma, hurt, abuse, whatever it might be, they always ask the same question, why me? And the reality is I had to let go of this because I was blaming myself, but I didn't do anything wrong. The reason that happened to me was it was opportunistic, who knows? I'll probably never know why it happened to me. But the reason is it just happened, I couldn't control that it happened, and I'll never know why it happened. A lot of people asked me, you know, did I not want an apology? Did I not want some kind of you know, sorry or statement that I could move on from? And the reality was I accepted that I didn't because I asked myself the question, if I was to get that, well, what would that change for me? And ultimately it wouldn't have changed anything for me. So if you want to move out of the victim mentality, you have to let go of the blame and you have to stop expecting an apology or the need for an apology because they're two things that'll probably never come, and if you're hanging on to them, you're never ever ever going to move out of the victim mentality. I forgave myself, and you should too. I forgave myself for what happened, and I forgave myself for all the hurt and pain and trauma that I caused myself in the years that followed my hurt, my abuse, because long after the abuse stopped, I caused my own pain to myself. I should have treated myself with kindness and love and compassion, and I didn't, and that's because I was young and I didn't know any different, and I didn't have the skill set that I have today, but I forgave myself for how I treated myself, and then I started to set boundaries. I set very strong boundaries because you're a victim and because you're in the victim mentality, you will recognise this if you are a victim in the victim mentality. I had friends in my life that were not nice people, I had people in my life that were draining the life out of me, were sucking everything good out of my life and wanted to keep me on a low-level play, low playing field because that's where they were, that's what made them feel good. And I started setting boundaries in my life, I eliminated those people from it, and the boundaries for me were if people weren't going to bring any value into my life, then they weren't going to be in my life. If people weren't there to help me push myself forward and build myself back up, then they weren't going to be in my life. And people didn't like that, they didn't like it, and they turned on me. And that's what people do when people see you trying to change and move out of the victim mentality, they won't like it, they'll try and keep you there because that's who and what they know. You have to be very strong. I had to be very strong, I had to be very resilient to pull myself away from those people because ultimately I knew that they were the part of my story at that stage of my life. But if I wanted to move out of the victim mentality, they couldn't come with me into the next chapter, they just couldn't. So sometimes you really have to be brutal and you just have to cut people out, and you have to trust your gut instinct. That's what I did, and I accepted full and total responsibility for my healing. Full, it was no longer up to anyone else, it was never up to anyone else. But my opinion up to that point was it was up to other people to heal me. The moment I decided to change, I took full responsibility for my healing. Because responsibility isn't the same as blame. I wasn't responsible for what happened to me, but I came responsible for what happened to me next, and that's so important. Is that so so many people don't realize they have the power to write their own future, regardless of what their past has been written as. They have the power to write their own future, so I became fully responsible for my healing journey, and that in itself was liberating for all the exciting things that were to come for me: the therapy, the sound bats, the walking, the running, all the things that were going to make me feel better. I became responsible for all of them. And what life looks like now for me, it's just a million miles away from where I was, and sometimes I forget to reflect back, and then sometimes I'm met with a picture of me as a child. I don't have that many of them to hand because it's hurtful to look at, um, because when I look at the pictures, I see a very sad little person who looks like she's lost and needs someone to hold her hand. But when I think about that and I think about my current life now, I cannot express how different they are. I just have so much peace in my life from being where I am and letting go of the victim mentality. I sleep at ease, my brain rests at ease, I'm calm in myself. I used to feel like I was constantly on a boat, you know, I didn't know whether I was coming or I was going. I just have this sense of calmness about me. I'm so confident as a person. I'm confident about my place in this world, I'm confident about who I who I am, what I am, what I stand for. I have nobody in my life that is not aligned with who I am or where I'm going in my future. I'm excited for the future. I have so much confidence in every single thing I do. I fully believe in myself and I fully believe that I am going to go wherever I want to go. But I never would have felt like that before. The relationships in my life are so healthy because they're full of boundaries. I don't take disrespect from people anymore. Don't get me wrong, people still try and disrespect you. It's not a magic wand when you move into this mindset. People will still try and do things because it's human nature, that's what people do. But the difference is I don't stand for it. I have such strong boundaries, so I've much healthier relationships in my life, and everyone who's in my life now, they're all nearly on the same journey as me. They're just good people, have had their own trauma, their own life. Because remember, everyone in life has suffered their own trauma. Mine's not unique to me. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have suffered like I have. The difference is not everybody tries to deal with it, some people can never deal with it, and that always also makes me very sad to think that people carry that through their whole life. I can say no now with no guilt. I used to feel so bad saying no to people, so I said yes to everything, and I'm not joking when I say yes to everything. When they say someone would go to the opening of an envelope, um I would not because I wanted to, but because I felt so bad letting people down, and the times I did say no, I'd over-explain myself. I'd say I can't go because of XYZ, you know, like why did I do that? Because I felt like I had to. Now I just say no, sorry, I can't, and I've no guilt because it's just something I'm not able to do at that moment, and I think the biggest thing for me is I'm actually emotionally free. I was emotionally tied to my trauma for a huge chunk of my life, like more than I ever wished to think about. I was so tied to it, it was who and what I was, whereas now they're separate. My trauma is my trauma, but emotionally I'm so much more than that. I'm Amanda, but I'm so much more than Amanda the victim. I'm Amanda who's made up of all these wonderful things, whereas before I stepped out of the victim mindset, I was just Amanda the victim. All those other things were in there somewhere, but I had to dig really deep to find them, you know, and I continue to heal every single day. I do not strive for perfection. There is no day that will be perfect for me, and at every single day there's a point in my life where I'm reminded about what happened to me, and that could be a smell, it could be someone I see, it could be some trigger in memory, or it might just be my mind just takes me right back there. But I have all the tools now to deal with that, so I can never stop myself from going back there, but I can control how long I stay there and what I think about when I'm there. Leaving the victim behind didn't erase my past, it actually changed my relationship with it. I now can look at my past. Yes, we're hurt, it's still trauma, it still hurts, it still saddens me, but not with the level of pain and hurt it did before. I can look at it now and I can feel sorrow without feeling so upset that I can't control myself. If you're listening today and you're still carrying the weight of your past, know this. Your pain deserves compassion, but it doesn't have to become your identity. Healing isn't about becoming someone else, it's about coming home to who and what you were always meant to be. I'm telling you now, I've come home, and that might sound cliche to loads of people, but if you're listening to this today, and if you've been a victim from any kind of abuse in your life, when you let it go and you remove the weight of that, you will know what I say when I say you're coming home. I've come home to myself, I've come home to that little girl, and I've given her the biggest hug, and she now sits within my chest, safe and warm and happy, and she knows that no matter what happens, I'm always here to protect her and keep her safe. So I'll leave you with this. Ask yourself what's one story I've been telling myself that it's finally time to release? Thank you for listening to the reset series. I hope you found this beneficial.