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Overcoming Victimization

victimization

Standing Up For Ourselves

If we do not learn to stand up for ourselves, old patterns of victimization will continue to plague us and we run the risk of being repeatedly mistreated, used, and shamed. If the chronic recurrence of our patterns of victimization occurs, they will siphon off our power and cause further distortions in our psyche. Whatever imbalances we have will become more severe, and the unconscious beliefs that govern much of our experience will become more oppressive. Our sense of victimization will increase.

If we can find and face our repressed emotion and the events that caused them it makes it much easier to stand up for ourselves and release our patterns of victimization. When we do the right things in the right sequence, taking the next step is always much easier because we are building upon an established structure of accomplishment. Standing up for ourselves is very different when we have freed ourselves from our victimization complex than it is when the victim mentality still controls us. In the first case, we have eliminated our toxicity, regained our power, and become whole. In the second case, we are still toxic and powerless, and the our pattern of victimization will be as self-destructive as ever. Patterns of victimization are not easy to overcome. But with discipline and consistent effort they can be cleared and overcome. To heal your patterns of victimization you must find them, face them, feel them and forgive yourself and all others in involved in their creation.

Setting Effective Boundaries

boundaries

Stabilizing The Psyche

The purpose of the Integration Zone is to stabilize our system, build effective boundaries, protect our psyche from psychological and emotional exploitation, and guard our energies from being drained by others. In the Integration Zone, we consolidate our strength, develop our self-worth, and focus on building a positive future.

As we enter the Integration Zone, our first task is to establish healthy and effective boundaries. We create effective boundaries when we construct a psychological “line in the sand” that allows us to maintain our wholeness and protect our sense of self. In effect, effective boundaries are similar to a “Do Not Enter” sign, a warning of what will happen if you trespass. One of the boundaries by which I live has six words: Abuse me, and you lose me.

The Big Stick

Effective boundaries allows us to be kind, decent, pleasant, and thoughtful most of the time, but when conditions warrant, effective boundaries will prod us to have some sting to our voice and a measure of bite to our bark. Teddy Roosevelt put this idea in very succinct language when he said, “Speak softly but carry a big stick.”

What Won’t Save You

Being nice all the time will not save us from being exploited or abused. A bully usually picks on someone nice and meek who won’t offer much resistance or fight back. That’s what makes him a bully. He instinctively knows that the nice, meek person doesn’t have good boundaries and is too afraid to stand up for himself. However, when we are whole and in our power, we will be able to establish healthy boundaries that allow us to calibrate our responses to other people’s behavior. We will be nice and decent when people are decent to us. When people are abusive or manipulative to us, we will modulate our response accordingly. Instead of being nice and compliant, we will be firm and formidable. A strong boundary requires a strong backbone to defend it.

Imbedding Shame

We should never permit anyone to abuse us. Suffering ongoing abuse destroys our self-esteem and wounds us deeply. Once the shame of being abused is imbedded into our system, it will draw more shaming experiences into our life. If we are to be free of toxic shame in the future, it is important to set clear boundaries and stand up for ourselves.

The Negative Ego

negative ego

We Are Not Our Shame

The strategy of the negative ego is to keep us occupied in vain pursuits that feed it but do not feed us. If it can keep us focused on our greed and desire, the negative ego is assured of maintaining its power. To defeat the negative ego at its game, we must realize that we are not our shame. The territory of toxic emotion that the negative ego tries to hide from the world is not who we are. It is what prevents us from being who we are. To identify ourselves with our shame is to keep ourselves from our freedom. It is the error of identification that the negative ego wants us to make. It is the mistake that drives us to utilize our desire nature to flee from facing whatever false self we have erected and have come to believe that we are.

The whole rationale behind the power of desire is that if we succeed in fleeing from the pain of our shame, we can hide ourselves in material pleasure. The problem with that rationale is that pleasure always ends. Sooner or later, our pain will return and overwhelm us. As long as shame exists, it can never be entirely silenced.The strategies of the negative ego have a short shelf life.

The Adversaries of the Soul

What we must eventually realize is that what we fail to confront is much more dangerous to us than that what we choose to face. What we shrink from facing shrinks us. While we can actualize our desires, our desires cannot actualize us. Our soul contains our identity, our path, and our purpose. The negative ego only contains our unhealed wounds. The negative ego and our desire nature are the adversaries of our higher connection.

When we finally realize that the three forces of alienation- fear, greed and desire – are a dead end and lead nowhere, we are finally ready to enter the Elimination Zone and begin the path of personal evolution. What we need to keep in mind as we enter the Elimination Zone is that when we stand up to our fear, our fear will stand down. We regain our power when we confront the inner darkness and the negative ego that would otherwise diminish us.