The Challenge of the Victim Identity

It is not unusual for individuals facing divorce to feel victimized by their circumstances. In many cases both spouses enter my office feeling this way. It is easy to understand why; each spouse can easily feel victimized by the other, by the law, by the judge, by custody evaluators or other experts, and by former friends or family members. We have all felt victimized at times in our lives. The difficulty I can see with clarity, from my perspective outside of the circumstances being faced by my clients, is that the sense of feeling victimized can lead people into a disempowered state, which I like to think of as taking on a victim identity.

Taking on a victim identity can feel justified and even empowering under the circumstances people often face in a divorce. However, in my experience, when someone takes on a victim identity it inevitably leaves that person in a disempowered state, which often leads to unproductive and harmful behavior. Ironically, aggression and even abuse can sometimes get doled out by a person inhabiting a victim identity.

When even just one party firmly inhabits a victim identity, it is hard to make any progress toward mutually satisfactory resolution. Dialogue is unproductive. The victim identity is mostly reactive. Settlement scenarios are not evaluated rationally, but are received by the victim identity as offensive. Collaboration is basically impossible.

In contrast, I have seen time and again how releasing a victim identity can benefit not only the family facing a divorce transition, but also the individual who makes the movement from victimhood into empowerment.

When working with someone who feels victimized, I’ve found it is not an effective approach to directly convey that the victim identity is unhelpful. 

So how can a mediator (or anyone) successfully work with a victim identity? What if the person inhabiting this identity is yourself?

What follows are a few approaches I’ve learned to transmute victimhood, in yourself or another person, and thereby open a pathway to creativity and possibility in whatever context a victim identity is creating blockage.

Acknowledge without Engaging

First, there is a delicate balance to strike: acknowledging the victim story without engaging with the story. 

Most of our upsets as humans arise when it feels like we are not being seen. If you or someone around you is feeling victimized, helping the person feel understood and heard in their anguish is a step that can’t be bypassed. Simply acknowledging that the story feels painful, validates the person’s experience. Defenses are often relaxed in the face of this simple validation.

On the other hand, once you engage with the victim story, it gets concretized. Engaging with the details and content of the story is generally unhelpful in supporting someone to move beyond the story.

Hold a Vision for the Liberated Self

Holding a vision for someone means helping them to see something they can’t presently perceive. Most of the time a victim story is a tangle of projections, assumptions, and conclusions about other people and the world. From a liberated perspective, there is no single, monolithic truth to arrive at with a firm conclusion. A liberated perspective is always curious. The tangle of thoughts that is causing pain and grief can be likened to the static “noise” we used to see when a television signal is disrupted.  

There are many interpretations of any particular set of facts, and some are empowering and some are disempowering. After we’ve helped them feel seen and heard for how they were victimized, we can sometimes help a person release a victim identity by gently holding a vision of alternate interpretations, ways of being, or ways of responding to the realities of any situation. This looks different in every situation, but there is always a creative response to the world. There is always a way to build with what we have in front of us. There is always a way to recapture agency, as opposed to feeling like a powerless victim.

Hold Space for Heartbreak

Once someone has relaxed their myopic focus on the content of the victim story, there is a pathway for them to access the feelings underneath. Feelings are trapped when we are fixated on thoughts. Thoughts, such as the story we tell ourselves about events in the world, are sometimes a vehicle for endless suffering. In contrast, when you slow down and allow yourself to feel the sadness or anger under the story, there is a release, and suffering dissolves. 

Sometimes, if not most of the time, there is a component of heartbreak underlying the victim story. Heartbreak is a vulnerable place to be in. Most of us want to avoid heartbreak. This is likely to be especially true in the context of divorce, and in the physical presence of our soon-to-be ex-spouse.

Holding space for someone to drop into their heartbreak, perhaps privately but even perhaps in the presence of a spouse, is an unconventional move for a mediator to make. Even in less emotionally charged moments than this, I’m sometimes told I’m like a therapist. And maybe something therapeutic is in fact happening. What I know is that holding space for people’s emotions is appropriate in the mediation process, and a mediator who can do this artfully can best help parties move to resolution. 

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Working with someone inhabiting a victim identity is the biggest challenge I’ve faced as a lawyer or mediator. I hope the approaches explored here are helpful to other professionals as well as to individuals who find themselves trapped inhabiting a disempowering victim identity.

John Hoelle is Co-Founder of Conscious Family™ Law and Mediation, serving people in all forms of intimate relationships with mediation, legal advisement, and coaching.

Image credit: Justin Veenema