about no longer being a victim
How miraculous is that shift in consciousness that can come in a 12-step program - from being "done to" to "doing," from blaming others to becoming responsible for myself, from looking outside for answers to looking inside for intuition and wisdom, from feeling overwhelmed and beleaguered to feeling confident and serene.
I spent about a year in program not understanding most of what people were saying. It was a foreign language and the concepts just didn't make sense. I do remember hearing "the V in Victim stands for Volunteer" and being both angry and perplexed. Perplexed because I didn't get it, and angry because - as I now know - it hit home. I thought and talked about this concept until I finally understood it.
Then one day, it seemed like the lights went on and all of a sudden all the concepts made sense. I'd stuck around long enough for osmosis to do its work, in partnership with my own curiosity and seeking. And critical to that breakthrough in understanding, that monumental shift in perspective was my realization that I in fact volunteer to stick around for pain, abuse, dissatisfaction, frustration, and overwhelm.
The essence of being liberated from the victim role was, for me, encapsulated in this sentence: No one does anything TO me that I have to tolerate for very long, if at all. If I don't like how someone is behaving toward me, I can say something or I can walk away. And even more intense - when I start setting some standards for who and what I want in my life, I will attract those very people, jobs, and places.
Wow. That freedom was both exhilarating and very frightening. I was shedding the warm cocoon of blame, irresponsibility, and self-loathing for a life where I am responsible for my actions and choices and feelings. What those are depend on how I feel about myself.
When I love myself, I want wonderful things for myself - loving, generous people, supportive environments, pleasant and serene surroundings. When I dislike myself, I'll settle for what I think I deserve. And in my case, it was bad enough that I contemplated suicide. Luckily, I didn't pursue that "permanent solution to a short-term problem" because people in program told me that I would want and could have a better life if I worked the Steps and used the program's tools.
Part of what I learned from the Victim/Volunteer theme was that I didn't love myself, if my external surroundings were any indicator of how I felt about myself. I went to another 12-Step program where I explored, faced and came to terms with the depth of my self-loathing.
It was there that I realized why I was so angry when I heard "V in Victim stands for Volunteer." The depth of my anger was the depth of my fear of what I would discover about myself - and the depth of my inner pain. Fortunately, I surrounded myself with loving people who helped me explore in spite of the fear, and helped me turn around my feelings about myself.
The amazing thing about this process was that, for the first time in my life, I owned my feelings. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to change them or the circumstances that enabled me to hate myself. Thus, the voyage toward recovery began with deciding not to volunteer for the pain of being a victim, and instead to try out my new wings and see where I would go on this uncharted journey toward serenity.
It's been a blast so far and I'm so grateful I have a program that allowed me to find myself under all that self-pity and powerlessness.
I spent about a year in program not understanding most of what people were saying. It was a foreign language and the concepts just didn't make sense. I do remember hearing "the V in Victim stands for Volunteer" and being both angry and perplexed. Perplexed because I didn't get it, and angry because - as I now know - it hit home. I thought and talked about this concept until I finally understood it.
Then one day, it seemed like the lights went on and all of a sudden all the concepts made sense. I'd stuck around long enough for osmosis to do its work, in partnership with my own curiosity and seeking. And critical to that breakthrough in understanding, that monumental shift in perspective was my realization that I in fact volunteer to stick around for pain, abuse, dissatisfaction, frustration, and overwhelm.
The essence of being liberated from the victim role was, for me, encapsulated in this sentence: No one does anything TO me that I have to tolerate for very long, if at all. If I don't like how someone is behaving toward me, I can say something or I can walk away. And even more intense - when I start setting some standards for who and what I want in my life, I will attract those very people, jobs, and places.
Wow. That freedom was both exhilarating and very frightening. I was shedding the warm cocoon of blame, irresponsibility, and self-loathing for a life where I am responsible for my actions and choices and feelings. What those are depend on how I feel about myself.
When I love myself, I want wonderful things for myself - loving, generous people, supportive environments, pleasant and serene surroundings. When I dislike myself, I'll settle for what I think I deserve. And in my case, it was bad enough that I contemplated suicide. Luckily, I didn't pursue that "permanent solution to a short-term problem" because people in program told me that I would want and could have a better life if I worked the Steps and used the program's tools.
Part of what I learned from the Victim/Volunteer theme was that I didn't love myself, if my external surroundings were any indicator of how I felt about myself. I went to another 12-Step program where I explored, faced and came to terms with the depth of my self-loathing.
It was there that I realized why I was so angry when I heard "V in Victim stands for Volunteer." The depth of my anger was the depth of my fear of what I would discover about myself - and the depth of my inner pain. Fortunately, I surrounded myself with loving people who helped me explore in spite of the fear, and helped me turn around my feelings about myself.
The amazing thing about this process was that, for the first time in my life, I owned my feelings. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to change them or the circumstances that enabled me to hate myself. Thus, the voyage toward recovery began with deciding not to volunteer for the pain of being a victim, and instead to try out my new wings and see where I would go on this uncharted journey toward serenity.
It's been a blast so far and I'm so grateful I have a program that allowed me to find myself under all that self-pity and powerlessness.
posted by julieannerickson at 2:31 PM
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