Victimology

I've come to the conclusion there are three potential responses to being victimized. Granted I am not basing this on anything remotely empirical. Just my own gut feelings and experiences.

Obviously the healthy response is to work through it and move on with life. That is the easy answer and not as easy to practice, especially when you've been through something terrible. But it's really the only way you'll be actually living life again.

There are also the people that take on the role of victim. They adapt the belief that life isnt fair and that it will always be that way. We all know people like that. They wind up being victimized again and this just leads to them further taking on the status of victim. I want to compare them to Eeyore. These people also tend to have an external locus of control which means they attribute their failures to external sources... it's never their fault.

The opposite are the people that refuse to see themselves as a victim. It's as destructive as those that take on the victim role but often times people see them as being strong since they refuse to let being a victim keep them down. However, these people take it to the extreme and become reckless in an attempt to prove to themselves and to others that they are not victims. They are surviving life, but aren't really living it.

For a long time my motto was "No fear." I refused to let anyone else have power/control over me. I had sex with random men just to prove I was psychologically over being sexually assaulted. I engaged in a LOT of reckless, extremely destructive behaviour. I ended up being victimized time and time again because of that attitude. I walked into a number of bad situations. I knew better... but my attitude was basically that no one was going to beat me. I had a huge chip on my shoulder. For the most part I didn't care if I lived or died. I saw myself as a survivor. The problem with just seeing yourself as a survivor is that you never get away from that. There is a huge difference between surviving life and living life.