Playing the victim game

“Homo homini lupus”

-Plautus

We know some people who always behave like they are the victim. They never admit that they do something wrong, moreover, they blame someone for what happen in their life. People who always put their blame in others is doing something that we call playing the victim game or self-victimization syndrome.

“Why should I apologize to her if i’ve never done something wrong?” Those are the simple sentence that will lead a person to play the victim game. Should I remind us that we are a social creatures? We don’t live alone in this world, everything that we’ve done is effecting others life as well as effecting ours. I guess it will not harm you if you apologize to someone that you truly feel that something has changed between you two. If you want other to feel respect at you, you have to gain it yourself. Confront your guilt feeling, ask directly to the person who changed their behavior towards you. Be gentle, and you will save your pride.

Self-victimization syndrome is a syndrome where one feels and acts like a victim all the time. If someone acted like this person has done something wrong to him/her, person with this syndrome will try to convince other that they are guilt-free, they had done nothing wrong, moreover this person will act as if the person that hurt is the one who’s hurting them. Usually, a person with this syndrome will try to act like nothing happen, and will tell others that other people is avoiding him/her.

I know that when we tell stories of what happen in our life, we need to be in the spotlight. We always want to be in the good side, but if we hurt other in the process, it will end very bad. We have to choose what we say to others or we will hurt someone by what we’ve told, conscious or unconscious.

The next passage is quoted from here

To reiterate the underlying dynamics of this problem, I explained that many people adopt the victim role, albeit unintentionally, because they are afraid of their anger, deny its existence in themselves, project it onto other people, and anticipate aggression or harm from them. With this expectation and a high sensitivity to anger in others, they may even distort other people’s facial expressions, imagining that they have malicious intentions. The anger that they would have experienced in response to frustration or stress is transformed into fear and distrust of others and into feelings of being hurt or wounded.

and this one is taken from here

Even in the most extreme situation, such as a concentration camp, feeling victimized is not adaptive: Feeling your anger, planning an escape, attempting to survive any and all of these courses of action are preferable to indulging powerless, victimized feelings. Your attitude is a vital factor in determining whether you will survive or perish, succeed or fail in life. Viktor Frankl contended that many of the survivors of German concentration camps were able to endure because they refused to give in to feeling victimized. Instead, although stripped of all their rights and possessions, they used one remaining freedom to sustain their spirit; the freedom to choose what attitude or position they would take in relation to the horror they faced. “It was the freedom to bear oneself ‘this way or that,’ and there was a ‘this or that.'” (Frankl, 1954/1967, p. 94)

Feeling victimized is never a productive act. Even in the most depressing moment in your life, you should find something to change the situation. If we notice that something is changed from our dear friend, ask them directly. If we feel angry to a certain person of what they’ve done to us, find a way to tell them nicely. Never make a statement like “They isolate me, they don’t want me there, they hate me” but instead, ask to yourself, do they really isolate me or I make an isolation by my self? It could be that you are the one avoiding them, and you choose to believe that they hate you. Something is better spoken than hidden, dear. Please end playing the victim, now is the time for us to face the reality, bridging the problem by start apologizing!

Source :

1. –. Self-Victimization – “Playing the Victim” retrieved from http://outofthefog.net/CommonBehaviors/SelfVictimization.html (12 June 2013)

2. Firestone, Robert W, Ph.D. 2009. Don’t Play the Victim Game. retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-experience/200909/dont-play-the-victim-game (12 June 2013)

3. Firestone, Robert W, Ph.D. 2013. How to Stop Playing the Victim Game. retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-experience/201304/how-stop-playing-the-victim-game (12 June 2013)

4. Kets de Vries, Manfred. 2012. Are You the Victim of the Victim Syndrome?. 2012. retrieved from http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=50114 (12 June 2013)