Hey, what's up? You're listening to Healed as fuck and I'm your host, Erin Javins. As always, this podcast discusses topics and uses language that may not be suitable for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.
Today I want to talk about victim mentality versus survivor mentality and how those labels can be a direct pipeline to the toxic positivity culture. Chances are at some point in time you've heard people refer to someone or themselves as a victim or a survivor, and you've probably heard a lot of dialogues surrounding those words and how they're used and the connotations surrounding them. So let's start by breaking down what is the victim and what is a survivor and how do you become one or the other and what those labels actually are referencing. Let's start with victim. So there's a lot of negative connotations surrounding the word victim, but just like everything surrounding a healing journey with trauma. Victim and victim mentality is morally neutral. The moment that you recognize that you've experienced trauma, you're a victim. Being a victim is morally neutral, but how you react from that moment can have long term impacts on your healing journey. Victim centric behavior is harmful to the victim as well as everyone around them. So what does it mean to be a victim or to have victim centric mentality? Being a victim is often described as being led by the past. You tend to blame others for the things that happen to you. You have a sense of helplessness. You don't feel in control of the way that you're reacting to the situation that you're in. Victim is often used as an insult. It's used with a very negative connotation. If
you're using the word victim to describe someone. That is an example of weaponizing trauma. Someone identifying as a victim just means that that's the place where they are in their journey. It doesn't mean that they're wrong or identifying as a victim, it just means that they haven't moved past that stage into the next stage. And so to use that as an insult is weaponizing their trauma against them. And if someone is doing that to you, that person is weaponizing your trauma against you. And that's a good place to set a boundary. On the other hand, being a survivor just means that you have taken the steps to move past your victim stage. And you are in a different place in your healing journey now. So the steps to becoming a survivor what you have to do in order to feel empowered through your trauma. The first one is acceptance. You have to accept whatever the situation was that made you feel like a victim. The next is to recognize whatever the situation was that made you feel victimized. And the third is to identify how you're going to respond to the situation that made you feel victimized. Now. Victim and survivor. Is a fluid mindset. You will experience both of these mindsets immediately. Following your trauma. But you can also experience these mindsets later in life. If something, for example has triggered you. You may be well along in your healing journey and you may be living in a survivor mindset and then you get triggered by something and you suddenly feel like a victim again. It's not a static situation. Just like with everything,
there's an ebb and a flow. Things are going to constantly change. So when you start to identify that you are again feeling victimized, you'll go through those same steps again to get yourself out of that victim mindset. Being a survivor does not mean that you no longer struggle, or that you no longer have bad days or bad periods of time, or that you no longer have to process your emotions or do the hard work on your healing journey. It just means that you have taken the steps to identify and that you have recognized what your trauma responses were. And that you have used that self-awareness. To alter your behavior the next time that you are triggered or the next time that you feel like a victim. That self-awareness. Gets applied the next time that you feel like a victim and you change your response based on that level of understanding that you have gained through your journey.
Being a victim is not a choice. But being a survivor is. So now we understand that the difference between being a victim and being a survivor is simply the understanding of how you respond to the trauma and the things that make you feel like a victim. It's taking the behavior that you exhibit or your trauma response that we talked about in a previous episode. And altering your behavior in those trauma responses. So an example. If you are in a domestic violence situation. And your response. Is to. Freeze. The next time that you feel victimized, you're able to recognize that your trauma response was freeze and to recognize the behavior that you exhibited in that response and to adapt that behavior and to alter that behavior and to do something different the next time.
People often mistake or misrepresent toxic positivity as being healed or being a survivor. Toxic positivity. Is. The equivalence of emotional avoidance. It is a type of gaslighting, both internally and externally. It means that you're gaslighting yourself about your own emotions and your gaslighting the people around you about your emotions. Toxic positivity invalidates feelings. And avoids truly processing trauma and actively hinders your healing process. It is a maladaptive coping mechanism used to avoid processing your emotional response to your trauma. There are many landmines on the road to healing, and toxic positivity is one of them. A lot of people subscribe to this toxic positivity culture because they believe that acknowledging when things are going wrong or acknowledging that they are struggling is a sign that they have not processed their trauma or that they're not healed, and that the best way to respond to the negative things that are happening is to simply avoid it altogether. Acknowledging when **** is going wrong is a healthy and important part of transitioning your mindset to feel empowered as a survivor. You need to process and evaluate in order to gain clarity and insight so that you can learn healthy coping mechanisms. Avoiding the negative feelings stunts your emotional growth. Healing from trauma and managing your mental health is about power. It's about taking the power back and feeling empowered to
process and make decisions regarding your own well-being.
Going through the process of transitioning from a victim mindset to a survivor mindset is one of the ways that you take that power back. Subscribing to or surrounding yourself by people who subscribe to toxic positivity. Is just a way to avoid processing the negative emotions surrounding your trauma. And. It's just a good way to gaslight yourself into avoiding your healing journey. Recognizing and validating that life is ****** and that you're struggling emotionally. Is not playing a victim. And. Avoiding. Negative emotions altogether, and only ever focusing on the positive. Does not mean that you're a survivor. Being able to listen to our thoughts and our feelings and using that insight to adjust our reactions in the future is empowering and one of the most important steps that we can take in order to recover and heal.
I want to thank you for being here with me on this journey again. I know that I say that every time, but I sincerely mean it from the bottom of my heart. I also want to take a minute to address the length of my episodes. They're very short. You probably notice that by now. That's intentional. When you're talking about trauma and healing from trauma and really difficult topics, it can be really hard to sit in those feelings for a long time. All of my episodes won't be short, but. The ones that are are designed to be that way on purpose. It's so that you can listen to them and then reflect on them. And it's so that if you need to listen to them more than once, come back to them, you can. And it doesn't make you have to sit with bad feelings that may arise or trauma response for a long period of time.
Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad to be doing this and I am overwhelmed with the amount of support that I've received. As always, check in the show notes or important links or the transcript. And for any other details that may be coming up. I hope that you have a great week and I can't wait to spend time with you again next week. Thanks.