When The World Is Allergic to Victimhood

on living in a mystery & victim-averse world that hates vulnerability

Modern spirituality has become obsessed with ensuring that no one ever identifies as a victim.

Spiritual gurus make blanket statements about victimhood, insinuating that if someone claims to be a victim in any way whatsoever, they have no chance at healing or becoming whole.

If you have any ounce of the victim disease within you, you need to think more positively, meditate harder, listen to some Joe Dispenza, do some sauna cold plunge, and bio-hack your way out of it.

Victimhood is not allowed.

To be accepted into the cult of modern “enlightenment,” you must bleach it out of your being, or get cast out of the tribe.

Oh and if you were victimized, it was all your fault.

You weren’t strong enough. You were weak sauce. Made yourself too vulnerable. If you were impacted by something, it’s cause you haven’t yet become numb enough to cut off your humanity to be un-fuck-withable like the rest of those enlightened, transcended masters.

We live in a culture that avoids victimhood like a kind of leper-ish black plague, and that does not understand the eco-systemic nature of reality, where we are all interdependent on one another. Where the health or sickness of each individual impacts the whole. Instead, we gaslight victims into believing that their victimization is a moral, personal failure or lack of strength, rather than a sign of a collective, diseased culture (or family, relationship, etc.)

And what is also interesting to me is that no one ever focuses on the one causing harm — instead we spotlight, blame, ostracize, and spiritually gaslight already vulnerable victims into toxic positive cesspools of New Age religious jargon and self blame — where “high vibrational forgiveness” and “compassion” are prioritized over rightful and sacred rage, accountability, and boundaries.

We ask victims of abuse what they did to attract it, but rarely do we ever even think about having conversations with the ones who caused the harm.

We preach forgiveness and tell victims to “let it go” but rarely do we ever offer practical tools and support for traumatized people to have stronger boundaries and a more solid sense of self, so that next time they will have more internal resources to stand up for themselves.

We are living in a time where “What did you do to attract this?” is the new “What were you wearing?”

The truth is, is that we are/were all victims at some point. There is no way around it. You cannot walk in this world unscathed, unharmed, untouched, totally pure and clean, totally above being a victim. To do so would be to deny your humanity.

This does not make you weak. This makes you human.

And this is a very important distinction.

Owning that you were/are a victim is very different than living in a state of perpetual victimhood. But we have become so obsessed with healing, overcoming, analyzing and personal developmenting ourselves to death, that many of us never get the chance to own the ways in which our victimhood was very real, and might still impact us today.

To own our victimhood means to revere, and treat as sacred, the most tender and vulnerable parts of ourselves. To find wholeness, the victims within us must get a seat at the table.

In her essay Victims and Losers, A Love Story, Mary Gaitskill writes:

“…Whatever the suffering is, it's not to be endured, for God's sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It's to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the "story" must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life.”

As for me, I grew up in a house with lots of beauty and also some seriously rank physical and emotional violence.

And I’ve avoided owning the fact that I was a victim like the plague myself — because of the belief that being a victim makes me weak. Owning that I am anything other than an all powerful bad ass bitch who does nothing but slay demons and has all the answers your devouring mind could desire, makes me weak.

“I should have been stronger,” I’d hear the self deprecating thoughts in my mind say. But I was literally a child, then a teenager, and then a young adult. How the fuck could I have been stronger?

The same compassion and forgiveness that we preach, is the very same Puritanical religious mindset that causes people, mostly women, to be abused in the first place.

When a woman is taught to have an external locus of power, meaning she is taught to prioritize the wellbeing and feelings of others over her personal autonomy, “forgiveness” is more poison than medicine. It brainwashes women out of their power and intuition and into the deathtrap of other peoples twisted agendas.

Would I look at my child self and ask, “Emma, what did you do to attract this abuse?”

No. I would throw her over my shoulder and say this has nothing to do with you, this is NOT your fault, and we are getting the fuck out of here.

Notice how insane and violent it would be to deny victimhood where it is warranted.

The Cult of Transcendental Patriarchal Spirituality says that everything we attract into our lives, we asked for or called in on some level. We are so mystery-averse to the point where we now believe ourselves to have total control over all of reality.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe we are creators of our worlds to an extent. But as for the the rest, it’s one big grand old mystery that I personally relish in. What would be the fun in having all the answers?

It’s horribly boring. But we live in a culture that seeks to dominate, control, and solve that mystery every chance it gets. It sucks the magic right out of the room.

This is the essence of patriarchy, and of transcendental spirituality.

Instead of living in harmony with Nature, one must master, dominate, make meaning out of, and finally, rise above it!

This ideology says if you attracted a psychopath into your life, it was because you were a match to it and asked for it, not because that person is a dark magician who has studied persuasion and knows how to manipulate and gaslight someone to smithereens and could capture the mind of any highly intelligent woman.

If you were in a car wreck, it must be because God doesn’t need you on the planet anymore, or that you were thinking negative thoughts to draw it to you.

If you were born in an abusive or poor family, or for the love of God in a war zone, it must be because you did something in a past life and now you have karma to clean up.

People are so fucking terrified to say “Hmm, actually, I don’t know,” or “It’s just the way of things” because we live in the age of certainty, the age of answers, the age of needing reasons and evidence and facts.

We need something or someone to blame. And so often we blame the weakest, aka the most vulnerable of them all in others and in ourselves, while protecting what we have been brainwashed to see as power: domination and control.

True power has nothing to do with either.

And so we are answer and meaning addicted and mystery-averse, as well as victim-averse, as mystery and victimhood are both states of the total loss of control vulnerability.

So really, at it’s core, we are a culture incapable of owning the fact that at our core, every one of us in bodies, living on Planet Earth, are living in a state of utter and complete vulnerability at all times.

We are vulnerable to other humans and the government and the elements and to disease and sickness and STDS and death and violence and car wrecks and war and poisonous bugs and shitty air quality and marketing and social media and toxins in the air and in food. We are vulnerable to our own shadow, to our own minds, to our own patterns.

I often think about how much of a miracle it is to still be alive at all, after everything that could possibly have killed me up until this point.

To be human is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to let go of control and realize that you never had much anyways in the first place.

And we hate victims, we scapegoat victims, because we hate this fact.

We hate our own vulnerability. Our own lack of patriarchal, good ole boy strength. Our own inability to pull ourselves up by our bootsraps, push through, get the fuck over it, and be something other than a precious human being with very real emotions, feelings, and heart.

Because in the Age of Progress, vulnerability is a liability.

Control is the new religion.

And victims are the dirty, leper scapegoats.