ARE YOU A VICTIM OR A SURVIVOR?

“If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.”
Richard Bach (Running From Safety)

Eugene O’Neill was addicted to alcohol; a short-cut to creativity that he was introduced to when he was only fifteen. His addiction had a detrimental effect on his writing but he was able to stop drinking before surrendering his talent and he went on to claim four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and in 1957 posthumously winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From his experiences of growing up in an addicted and co-addicted family he wrote the semi-autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which he describes as “a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.” It portrays a dysfunctional family riddled with addiction, guilt, blame and denial; each person making allowances for one another’s enslavement to drugs and alcohol.

Mary, the mother in the story, is addicted to morphine that a doctor had prescribed to ease her pain after the difficult birth of her youngest son. She protects herself from the criticism of her family with denial. “How could you believe me – when I can’t believe myself? I’ve become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself.”

She becomes enslaved to the drug, losing her dreams, her cherished memories, her faith and eventually succumbing to the greatest loss of all; “I’ve never understood anything about (my addiction), except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own.”

She withdraws from life, distancing herself from reality, and her son says, “You can’t talk to her now. She’ll listen but she won’t listen. She’ll be here but she won’t be here. You know the way she gets.”

Mary sees herself and her family as victims of circumstance and of the past. Their addictions are something that has been thrust upon them; something that has been done to them.  

“But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it,” speaking of her eldest son. “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self for ever.”

When we allow The Victim archetype to direct our thoughts and actions we shrug off responsibility for who we are and what we do. We blame external events and people; our parents and genetics, faulty wiring in the brain or the hard sell of societal influences, refusing to take responsibility for our own actions.

If we change our mindset and become a survivor everything changes. Suddenly we realise that we have more control over how we will deal with our childhood abuse, addictions and mental challenges. All at once our mind will extend itself to find solutions and ways to recover from what the world has done to us. Immediately we will notice that coincidences are not coincidences as all, that nothing is ever just a coincidence; that everything is meant to be exactly how it is. The great divine spirit of the universe will give us serenity in the knowledge that we are not isolated, that all people are interconnected, and that what we feel and what has been done to us is more universal than we ever imagined. A Higher Power will lift us up and make anything possible.

Try it and see for yourself.

(Mixed Media: The Victim Archetype by Carlton)
© Carlton Carr 2013
http://othervoices.blog.co.uk/