Signs You Are Suffering From A Victim Mentality

Many people in our industry suffer from this debilitating thought disease called “The Victim Mentality”.

It's a thought process that essentially refuses to take responsibility for your actions.

The first key toward getting success in anything you do is eliminate the thought that everything is everyone else's fault when you fail to achieve your desired result.

In order to attain success, or attain a worth while goal that you are shooting for, recognizing the victim mentality when it pops up is the beginning of the process.

While searching around and doing some of my own research to understand this way of thinking a little better, I found some incredible information on Wikipedia.

The following was taken from Wikipedia and I think it will give you some great insight so you can begin to over come it.

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Victim mentality is an acquired (learned) personality trait in which a person tends to regard him or herself as a victim of the negative actions of others, and to think, speak and act as if that were the case – even if the absence of clear evidence. It depends on habitual thought processes and attribution.

A victim mentality may manifest itself in a range of different behaviors or ways of thinking and talking:

• Blaming others for a situation that one has created oneself or significantly contributed to. Failing or being unwilling to take responsibility for one's own actions or actions to which one has contributed.
• Ascribing non-existent negative intentions to other people (similar to paranoia).
• Believing that other people are generally or fundamentally luckier and happier (“Why me?”).
• Gaining short-term pleasure from feeling sorry for oneself or eliciting pity from others. Eliciting sympathy by telling exaggerated stories about bad deeds of other people (e.g. during gossip).

People with victim mentality may develop convincing and sophisticated arguments in support of such ideas, which they then use to convince themselves and others of their victim status.

People with victim mentality may also be generally:

• negative, with a general tendency to focus on bad rather than good aspects of a situation. A glass that is half full is considered half empty. A person with a high standard of living complains about not having enough money. A healthy person complains of minor healthy problems that others would ignore (cf. hypochondria).
• self-absorbed: unable or reluctant to consider a situation from the point of view of other people or to “walk a mile in their shoes”.
• defensive: In conversation, reading a non-existent negative intention into a neutral question and reacting with a corresponding accusation, hindering the collective solution of problems and instead creating unnecessary conflict.
• categorizing: tending to divide people into “goodies” and “baddies” with no gray zone between them.
• unadventurous: generally unwilling to take risks; exaggerating the importance or likelihood of possible negative outcomes.
• exhibiting learned helplessness: underestimating one's ability or influence in a given situation; feeling powerless.
• stubborn: tending to reject suggestions or constructive criticism from others who listen and care; unable or reluctant to implement the suggestions of others for one's own benefit.
• self-abasing: Putting oneself down even further than others are supposedly doing.

This information was taken from the following Wikipedia page.

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Be honest with yourself and evaluate this list and compare it to your own processes and ways of thinking. If you can see some of these traits, you might want to start changing them.

I recently did a MLSP wake call referencing this exact topic and these exact points on Wikipedia. The audio is a little broken, but you can still hear it well. Enjoy it!

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