In life, bad things happen to all of us. Adversity knocks on all doors. But there are people who respond with resilience and try to take charge of their own destiny by focusing on what they can change while others embark on the path of victimization.
The problem is that playing the role of the victim leads to assuming a passive attitude supported by an external locus of control . Believing that we have no power and complaining about what happened will leave us completely at the mercy of circumstances, causing us to lose faith in our ability to move forward.
Tel Aviv University psychologists consider that the tendency to victimize is a personality trait that influences the way people make sense of the world. They called it Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV).
What is interpersonal victimhood tendency?
We can all feel victimized in certain circumstances, especially when we go through situations that we consider unfair. However, when it comes to a recurring interpretation, often unrelated to what actually happened, it can refer to a thought pattern or a personality trait.
These researchers define the tendency to interpersonal victimhood as “the continuous feeling of being a victim, which generalizes to different types of relationships”, which is why it ends up determining how we respond to the world and, above all, to interpersonal relationships.
This personality trait influences in a special way the feelings, thoughts and behaviors we assume in the face of life’s painful situations. A person with a tendency to victimhood will feel powerless to respond to adversity and will have a tendency to seek external culprits.
What are people with a tendency to victimhood like?
Without a doubt, interpersonal transgressions are unpleasant and sometimes even unwarranted. But some people are able to ignore them and process them and move on while others think about them all the time, taking on the role of the victim.
Through a series of studies, these psychologists have found that the tendency to victimize is related to other personality characteristics:
- Lack of empathy. Although people with a tendency to victimhood claim recognition of their pain and suffering for themselves, they have difficulty putting themselves in others’ shoes. Lack of empathy prevents them from realizing that they are not the only ones suffering and from understanding the possible reasons that others have for behaving in a certain way.
- Need for recognition. The victim needs them to recognize her role. This is why we are often dealing with people who proclaim their pain and misfortune in life, with the often unconscious aim of validating the image they have formed of themselves.
- Ruminations. People with a tendency to victimhood also tend to ruminate about their problems. They think about them all the time, so that they can’t overcome them, instead increasing the pain and keeping themselves in a vicious cycle of suffering.
- Anxious attachment. It is characterized by the fact that the person feels insecure in interpersonal relationships, which may be a sign that the tendency to victimization may have developed early in life, starting from the relationship with the parents.
- Moral elitism. People with victimhood tend to believe that their discomfort and pain puts them above others, so they can develop a kind of moral high ground.
In one of the experiments, participants had to evaluate scenarios involving another person treating them unpleasantly, either by reading a cartoon in which a classmate was described with a negative criticism or by having them play a game in which the opponent he almost always won.
Interestingly, in both experiments, people with a higher tendency for interpersonal victimization were more likely to want to take revenge against anyone who hurt them. In the case of gambling, the desire for revenge resulted in aggressive behavior as people were more likely to take their opponent’s money when given the opportunity, even though they were aware that this decision would not increase their profits .
Participants with a fairly high interpersonal victimhood tendency also reported experiencing more intense negative emotions, which reveals that they tend to experience problems more intensely than others. Furthermore, they believed they had a greater right to behave immorally. In practice, the greater the tendency to victimize, the more negative emotions they experienced and the more they felt entitled to behave immorally with others.
In a general sense, these people have a tendency to interpret social situations as if they were a personal offense or attack. They suffer from what is known as interpretive bias (interpretative bias), which also has a projective character because they apply it before events occur, which gives rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Basically, they assume in advance that others will behave badly towards them, which leads them to practice defensive behavior that actually ends up generating friction that can cause emotional wounds.
Obviously getting out of that vicious circle is essential if we want to regain control of our lives. We all experience negative events and are exposed to injustices, but if we fall into pathological victimhood , we will not be able to overcome those experiences and they will continue to exert their unhealthy influence on us. Stopping being victims is, after all, a way to gain power and give us a new opportunity to overcome what has marked our lives so far.