Why me? And why does everyone let me down? How to get out of the victim role

We all fall victim to victimism and become suspicious, sceptical and discouraged, but the more we complain, the more lonely and stressed we feel.

“That’s it, I don’t trust anyone anymore”; “As soon as you give this much, everyone takes advantage”; “I don’t believe in good faith any more”; “When I really needed something, everyone disappeared”; “Yes, but where’s the catch?”; “Animals are better than humans: at least they don’t turn their backs on you”; These sentences are very popular, and by repeating them, they become acquired knowledge. This means that when a series of stereotypical phrases gather around a specific theme and spreads through language, a phenomenon is underway that must be taken into account.

However, these stereotypical sentences tend to become solidified in mind and become layers. To frame even new and unprecedented events, we end up being suspicious of everything, especially of what could instead constitute a fundamental change of course. So how can we get out of it?

It is necessary to understand that those who adhere to a stereotype talk about others as if they were something different from themselves, and worse: The others who are disloyal, unreliable, absent – they say – while they are victims of society. But if the stereotype is such, it means that many think so, and therefore that it is society itself that has now lost internal cohesion and no longer trusts itself. The ones we do not trust, therefore, are ourselves, reflected in others. Of course, there are untrustworthy and unreliable people to watch out for, but it is our idea of ‘ourselves in society’ that has fallen apart.

Now, in what period of life do you feel misunderstood by the world, experience great disappointments because your encounter with reality and life turns out to be different from your enthusiastic idealisations?: In adolescence. Victimhood is like endless adolescence.

This stereotypical distrust expresses somewhat adolescent psychology. Then, as an adult, one should learn that reality is by its nature contradictory and full of imperfections; that ‘others’ are actually human like us and therefore fallible by nature. Instead, in many cases, by not seeing or not accepting in ourselves the coexistence of good and bad points, of inconsistent and contrasting thoughts, we cannot accept them in others. We want everyone to be like us in being ‘right’ and ‘fair’. But we also cause pain; we also create disappointment. We forget about it because we need to keep a positive image of ourselves. We erase from the autobiography those aspects that, seen in others, would induce mistrust and distrust.

We need to be honest with ourselves. Recognising we blame others for and integrating it better into the personality is the key to recovering a positive relationship with the world. In practice: to get back to being proud of others, we have to be proud of ourselves without hiding our imperfections and flaws. Were we left alone when we needed help? Does nobody help us? Do they talk down to us? Let’s be honest: it wasn’t always like this. We prefer to forget the times when others have been there for us. And those when we have not been there for others. We would not be here if at least someone had not given us something important.

Let us stop thinking that everything we have is thanks to us alone. Let us first of all be true to ourselves: only then will we have the clarity to understand when we really cannot be trusted. And we will discover, with relief, that those moments are less frequent than we think.