The Initiates
The Initiates Podcast is an exploration of spirituality, mysticism and awakening. Join your host and guide Natalie Grace for spiritual deep dives, intuitive guidance and channeled wisdom teachings, plus conversations with others on the spiritual path.
The Initiates
Breaking Free from the Victim Mindset: Empowerment, Healing, and Identity
Is society encouraging us to adopt the identity of victim? In this episode, I explore the archetype of the victim, the pathology of victim mindset, and the many ways we choose to play victim in our relationships, work and every day lives for a psychological payoff that limits our potential for growth and betterment.
Here's what we cover:
- what is victim mentality (aka victim mindset)
- my perception of genuine, lived victim experience versus the more performative self-victimization that society is encouraging
- disempowered victim narratives relating to health, relationships, work and identity
- having a conscious awareness of when we are choosing self victimization, and taking responsibility for our own reality
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Natalie Grace:
This is the Initiates Podcast. I am your host and guide, Natalie Grace.
Join me for an enlightening exploration of spirituality, mysticism and awakening.
It's my honor to journey with you.
Natalie Grace:
Hello, my friends, welcome back to the Initiates.
On today's episode, i'm going to be diving into what feels like a compulsion that's quite common in society at the moment and is rewarded by society, and that is the compulsion to self-victimize, the trend to identify as the victim in the role of the victim.
I feel like this has been really normalized in our culture and celebrated by our culture, especially on social media, and it touches so many aspects of life. It touches health, it touches relationships, it touches our work and career life, our decisions to have children. It touches our identity, politics as well, this compulsion to fall into the role of victim, and the reason I want to talk about this is because, ultimately, it's a really disempowering state to be in.
To tie your identity to the role of victim, to brand yourself as a victim And create content that goes into a forever archive where you are acting out the role of victim. And the reason this is so disempowering, from my perspective, is because it keeps us stuck in a reality with limited possibility, and this is especially relevant to health And this isn't just about people who have a textbook victim complex or martyr complex.
This is building an awareness in ourselves about when we adopt the archetype of victim in our own lives and why we do that and the payoff we get from it, and how we can transcend beyond the validation we get from identifying as victim and ultimately disempowering ourselves, and how we can move to a frequency of empowerment.
So let's journey.
Natalie Grace:
So, before I get started into helping us all kind of think about and analyze how we adopt the victim role in our own lives, i want to make a bit of a clarification about genuine victim experience versus self victimization. That is not healthy.
So in life we can go through traumas, really deep and genuine suffering. We can experience accidents and terrible luck that causes harm to us. We can experience abuse. We can be on the receiving end of some really terrible treatment by other people
And we can genuinely sincerely fall victim to others wanting to take advantage of us, and this can happen in many ways. We can fall gravely ill. We can lose loved ones tragically. We can have criminal acts perpetrated against us.
Natalie Grace:
So there's so many paths to experience the archetype of victim and being a victim against a real perpetrator, the opposite pole. On that axis, this energy is real. This experience is real And at some point in life perhaps multiple points for some of us, perhaps for long stretches we can genuinely be going through real suffering and real pain and real trauma and real abuse and real difficulty that comes with being a victim. And in those times, like I said, we are genuine victims. This is real. It's a real journey
And the disempowerment we feel through being on that end of a perpetrator causing pain against us, however that might be delivered, and even if that's bad luck that causes us to be in an accident and there's no one really at fault there, the disempowerment is real. So we can truly feel disempowered and be in a state of disempowerment caused by others or it could be just unjust, unfair, unlucky life circumstances.
So I just want to be really clear that this is a true and authentic path that requires so much work to get through. It requires reckoning, it requires healing, it requires feeling. So often being a victim of something leads us to a deep, dark night of the soul. that's so difficult to get through, And that's such a real experience And I hold so much love and compassion and care and nurture for all those. Anyone who is experiencing that path right now or has in the past and can really understand what I'm saying right now because it feels real. They hold that memory of what that pain felt like. This conversation is not about that kind of victim experience or that kind of victim mentality.
That is something I hold deep reverence and respect for, that journey through being a victim, and if we cast our minds back to a time in our lives when we have been in that real victim role, the pain, the suffering, the turmoil that you experience on that journey is not something that you want to maintain usually and you wish with all your heart that you could feel more empowered, that you could feel more joy and love and strength and self-confidence and healing.
Speaker 1: What I do want to explore today is not that It's the victimhood that we choose for ourselves. That seems to be celebrated and encouraged by our current culture. This is, i guess I want to call it self-victimization, where we're adopting the victim identity because we get a payoff for it and we play out the victim archetype and we're consciously, or even often unconsciously, choosing to disempower ourselves, and because there's this social payoff at the moment, often through social media and also through kind of groups, when we identify in this disempowered way, say as our illness or as the victim of, say, the crime that's been committed against us, and we're in these communities of trauma bonding. I've seen this play out and it's really unfortunate and sad that that validation, that attention that you can get, can become quite addictive and people can become quite eager to adopt this role of victim and hold this victim identity, prolong this victim experience or even adopt it, without even truly being a victim of much at all. And I want to explore why the culture might be encouraging us to do this right now, because I think it's a really important question and it all hinges on the fact that so many people are on this path of aligning with their true, authentic selves, awakening, if you want to call it that, ascending, if you want to call it that remembering I prefer the word remembering remembering the true self, remembering the authenticity, remembering what your deepest desires are, remembering what you're here to do, what you're here to speak on, who you're here to heal, what you're here to teach, whatever your sacred path might be. And once you become aligned with this path, you become so empowered And this is such a huge threat to the status quo that doesn't want a majority of people on the planet experiencing soul growth and expansion, leaning into that 5D New Earth energy that we talked about on the last episode, that energy of love and living from the heart space and not being afraid anymore and not being bored and apathetic anymore, feeling passionate and feeling activated. That is threatening and it makes sense, doesn't it, that it would be better if we stayed in a state of disempowerment where we don't take responsibility for our life experience, for our current situation. So let's first explore victim energy or victim mentality. It's actually quite clearly defined from a psychological perspective And, while I don't always agree with psychological diagnoses, i think it's helpful to go through the three beliefs that identify someone with victim mentality, or this can also be known as victim complex.
Speaker 1: They might be slightly different from a pathological perspective, but for the purpose of us discussing it today, i think they're fairly interchangeable. So, according to psychology, those with a victim mentality hold three pretty specific beliefs. Firstly, that bad things have happened in the past and they'll continue to happen. That others are to blame for your misfortune and that there is no point in trying to make a change because it won't work. There's a real apathy and hopelessness there. Now this victim mentality can be something that's adopted or that, something that has stemmed and has a source of a deep trauma. So, as a genuine response to a traumatic event, this victim mentality can be a developed coping mechanism. So the victim mindset can be rooted in trauma, distress and pain most of the time. Actually, when they're looking at diagnosing this, i think When you experience a traumatic situation, typically at the hands of other people, you might learn that you are helpless because at that time there was nothing you could do to save yourself from that experience.
Speaker 1: And that gets imprinted in your being and you can be left feeling and thinking like nothing that you do in the future is going to make any difference to what you experienced or your ability to heal from what you experienced, because you can't unexperience what happened to you and this is completely reasonable. So the outlook that kind of develops as part of a victim mindset. Let's break that down and talk about that. There can be a belief that life just happens to you and that you have no responsibility at all for what happens in your life. It's completely out of your hands. There can be a consistent feeling that you have no control over situations yourself and also that people are out to get you Tendency to blame other people for events or situations in your life. You can also have a tendency to catastrophize and a tendency for continued self-sabotage. There can be a refusal to learn from past experience to create improvement in the current situation. There can be feelings of learned helplessness.
Speaker 1: People with a victim mindset often hold just a negative outlook and commonly will put themselves down a lot, so there's a real kind of negative self-talk there that's very limiting. There can be feelings as though you are entitled to sympathy from others. There can be feelings of being defensive, no matter what other people are saying or offering, and a tendency to not want to accept help, to refuse help and to lash out in anger when help is given or forced. Commonly also, people with victim mindsets will hang out with other people who also have the same kind of behaviors, which is often a lot of complaining and blaming of other people, and that doesn't sound very nice, right? There's so many emotions that are, if we want to put it on a scale, kind of a lower frequency or just don't feel very nice. There's resentment, blame, self-pity, avoidance, depression, isolation, loneliness. These are things that are commonly felt by people with a victim mindset. And so why would we choose to stay in that state? Because it really doesn't sound very nice And it's because there's some kind of emotional payoff. So there's benefits involved here.
Speaker 1: You might gain sympathy or attention for your distress from what happened to you And that might be soothing. That might help you feel noticed and seen and be perceived like an act of nurture, that expression of sympathy. You might feel a sense of relief that others are offering you help or, at the very least, a sense of validation. I think a lot of this comes down to feeling validated. There's also self-protection mechanisms happening here. It's easier not to take risks or accept help because you don't want to feel vulnerable, because being vulnerable can be very risky Bad things can happen. So it's a form of self-protection.
Speaker 1: There's also a self soothing that happens when you feel sorry for yourself. It can make you feel a bit better. So in thinking how challenging it is when times are tough, where you know you could change, transform your life if you took action, but especially when you're in a negative emotional state, it's so hard to will yourself to action and it's so much easier to just feel sorry for yourself And I don't say that in a judgmental way. Sometimes when we're not getting real empathy from others or real concern or nurture from others, it's a way we know to soothe ourselves and to make us feel loved and cared for. But it's still. Self pity is not a positive emotion, it's still quite a disempowered state to be in, even though it does make you feel better And all of these things validate you so you can feel a little bit better. So, having gone through all those aspects of the kind of more formal sort of definitions or explorations of victim mentality or victim mindset, it's very clear that this mentality promotes a state of disempowerment where we become completely resigned to our current lot in life and we lose inspiration or even belief that we can improve our lives, our situation, our emotional state, and it's so much easier to outsource responsibility for that change to the world and blame things outside of ourselves, because it's so hard to transition out of that state, especially if it's really genuine. But I think what's dangerous here is that society is rewarding us to disempower ourselves and to kind of take on these victim mentality behaviors without perhaps being truly genuinely victimized a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: There's so many trends on social media where people get caught up in enacting emotional states that aren't positive for views and they get rewarded and validated by the algorithm There's. You know I don't necessarily think all of this is negative or bad, but it is really interesting, like trend that and this happens in waves. These, these trends happen in waves. You know the videos of people crying and or expressing rage. When that's genuine, it's a really beautifully cleansing thing. However, when you start seeing everyone doing that in the same week, you start to wonder is this truly how you're feeling or is this in some way a level of performance? because there's this social reward or social validation for you leaning into this energy And often the stories are actually real. But perhaps the dropping into that negative emotional state might not have happened unless you were prompted by four other people sharing their story on the feed and that dropping you back into that state.
Speaker 1: So one of the first things that comes to mind with this because I have my own personal experience around identifying as a victim of my own health, with my own health journey This is a really big trend on the internet of people and it's hung around for a while of people actually branding themselves with their illness. So I think this is the biggest and most important example I want to share, especially because I'm going to be talking to so many interesting and cool people that work in the health space to help us better understand holistic health and wellness in the coming weeks and months. But I thought it was a really good opportunity, before those conversations happen, to dive into how we receive a diagnosis and then begin identifying as our illness and how society starts rewarding us for doing that. So I'll use my experience as an example.
Speaker 1: After probably three years of declining health to the point where I was completely at my breaking point absolute adrenal fatigue and burnout, complete dysregulation of my energetic bodies, of my emotions, of my mental health I was in a really bad state and physically zero energy, finding it really difficult to look after myself day to day, finding it hard to stay awake really concerning symptoms, and so when I received a diagnosis of autoimmune thyroid disease, i used that as a determining point in my life because I found it to be incredibly empowering that I was given a pathway to my own healing, And I count myself lucky that I wasn't in a poor enough situation health-wise to be put straight on the drugs, because the only option for healing was me, and I was sent straight to the naturopath to talk about my diet and explore any kind of vitamin and nutritional deficiencies, to create a plan for my health around natural methods of healing, because that was, according to the doctor, the only option for me. So I feel grateful for that. And I also had a doctor who was extremely positive and hopeful, rather than dismissive of my experience and my desperation to feel better. She could see that and hear that and sense that in me that I was willing to try anything because I at that point I'd reached my breaking point and I couldn't stand to live like that another day. Anything would be better than living like that. If I have to cut out everything I love to eat, that's easier than living another day in this state.
Speaker 1: So I see diagnosis as a really useful tool. I think it's one of the best things that Western allopathic medicine offers us that we can feel terrible and not understand why, and with the right variety of tests. I want to say that because I feel like a good doctor will look at your blood and they'll be doing other tests on you as well, instead of just taking kind of the easiest or most obvious path. They want to investigate what's happening to you. But assuming you've got that good doctor, diagnosis can be very helpful, but it can also be really disempowering with what I had. It wasn't death sentence or anything like that. So obviously I understand how lucky I was to not be very seriously ill. But I also was told pretty clearly if my health doesn't improve, i could end up really seriously ill. So the power was put back in my hands there about what I wanted to do to make the condition of my physical health better, but also my emotional health. I was so desperate to feel balanced and normal and to get out of a depressive state.
Speaker 1: So what's dangerous about the diagnosis is when there's not much hope given to you and that it's simply this is now what you have and what you are, and this is the only treatment that can help you. And it's not looking great. You're going to be on drugs the rest of your life or your prognosis is very bad. You're going to decline. We have to understand that diagnosis is an opinion. It can be an extremely well informed opinion by someone who's studied health for many, many years. So I don't want to criticise anyone dishing out like good diagnosis. But it's still just an opinion based on someone else's knowledge, and the entirety of your health goes beyond physical tests. It goes beyond anything that Western medicine can offer us. There's so much more to it on an energetic level and I've talked about this on other episodes, but that's why I think it's so dangerous that one person's opinion can shape your whole identity of your life going forward, and it's become so common how people are now re-centering their entire identity around their illness.
Speaker 1: It is also a really dangerous thing to proclaim to the universe that you are ill, that you are your illness. I haven't talked much about this on the podcast. I think it deserves a separate episode, but as far as I'm concerned, words are spells, and spells aren't necessarily negative or positive, they just are. So when you speak, you're proclaiming something to the universe, and when we speak that I don't ever say this, because I don't like casting this spell out to the universe. I don't like proclaiming that I am a victim of a thyroid disease, because I don't feel that way genuinely. I much prefer to talk about my health as a journey, that I don't like ever saying that I have an illness or that I'm sick. I much prefer, if I need to talk about this, to say that I manage a condition or state of health that I manage proactively and I'm on a healing journey. And in my own life I'm doing much more specific positive affirmations about my health.
Speaker 1: But you know, sometimes we do need to speak about the state of our health And if we do, if we have been given diagnosis of specifically like chronic illness, it's so easy to just brand ourselves as chronically ill And think about what that means. You are going to be ill forever. How limiting is that, how disempowering is that, because it kind of shuts off the potential, the timeline where you might still, on test results, have stuff that's wrong with you from that medical perspective, from that physical perspective, but you could feel so much better than you did when you first got diagnosed. But to proclaim to the university you're chronically ill, that you have chronic illness and doing it so frequently that it becomes part of your identity, and then you start getting those payoffs because you've fallen into that victim behavior And you start receiving that sympathy and you start receiving that validation and you start creating bonds with other people who are speaking the same way about themselves and their health and their lives, i just see this as an extremely disempowering state and quite dangerous for us on an individual level. So if you're proclaiming to the universe that you are a victim of your illness, that you are your illness, it's almost like you're cursing yourself with limitation. Life is going to start reaffirming to you that you, in fact, are sick. Oh yeah, you are that illness and limiting your opportunity for healing and improvement.
Speaker 1: And I want to be really clear here. I know what it's like to be in a really poor health state and all you want is someone to notice and understand how bad you're feeling. All you want is to feel cared for and to feel empathy from others and to feel supported and to feel heard. And it's such a hard road, especially when no one around you understands or doesn't really know how to offer that support, and it makes so much sense that you'll seek support from communities of people going through this as well. So I'm not criticizing that at all. I think that's a really healthy thing and it's really beautiful that you can find groups online That can offer support and empathy, because they totally get what you're going through, and there's also potential there for learning about new ways of managing your health state and trying out experimenting with different healing pathways that you might not be given through the Western system.
Speaker 1: But we have to be really careful about being on the end of projections of pity, as I talked about that. That's like a really low frequency kind of disempowering emotion. It's also when people pity us that can it's such a simplistic way to use the word curse, i wish there was a better way that I could describe it But it's really a projection of energy that kind of keeps you in this lower frequency state. So is that what we want to be eliciting from others? Genuine empathy and care? Absolutely. We all deserve that. But pity, no, i don't think that's what we actually need to help feel better, feel more love. And so I get that.
Speaker 1: I can speak from my experience about chronic illness, and it's quite easy because I'm not going through a terminal illness, i'm not being given a diagnosis that says my health is going to deteriorate rapidly and much further. I feel very lucky and privileged that I'm in a position where I can manage my own healing in that way and that I don't feel really intense fear or uncertainty about what my state of health is going to be like in a year or two years or five years, whatever that might be. So it's a completely different experience. If that is your diagnosis and I'm really truly I'm not trying to cast any judgment there And that's when there is a path of genuine victim experience. But it's always a challenge as well, like, how do we manage our own mindset? Like, even if our health can't be helped, our physical level, and that every test that anyone's given us is looking pretty grim, it comes down to the emotional and the mental state. At that point, how do we empower ourselves on those levels, despite what's happening to us physically? How do we make the most of every moment we have left, and we should be thinking that way whether we're healthy or sick.
Speaker 1: So another thing that I want to talk about or touch on to do with chronic illness. I've talked about it resigning us to never having a state of chronic health. It's like this long-term branding of our health state which I really don't like, and I just feel so bad that the health system has done this to so many people and branded so many people, especially young people, as chronically ill, and that there's like a culture starting to build around chronic illness and a normalization of chronic illness. So instead of providing people language that's much more empowering to talk about their state of health and the pathways to improve their health. They're given such a limiting title to their experience. So the reason I am kind of distrusting of this movement of normalizing chronic illness is because we got a hint of it during the health crisis we just traversed through, which I will not name because I get warnings on the app players. But it seems like it's going to become more and more common that people are going to be falling or diagnosed as chronically ill after the event we just went through, if they fell ill with that particular illness. And we're already seeing the media normalize longer term chronic health impacts for people who did catch the bug. So that was something that was spoken about by health professionals and the experts very early in the piece that there would be long term impacts of this bug, even though you can hear from it fairly quickly that there could be long term chronic health impacts. So we're going to see more and more and more people become chronically ill at a much younger age And we're already seeing online the concept of spoonie culture.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with that, i don't know who started it, but I think it kind of became prominent discourse on tumblr back in the day. What would that be like 10 or 15 years ago even Where younger people who were chronically ill or having trouble like understanding how to explain how they were feeling And someone came up with the analogy of having spoons, and there would be like five spoons, and so people with optimum health who aren't chronically ill have five spoons of basically life force energy that carry them through the day, and it's like the normal person baseline of energy and life force and vitality, whereas if you're a spoonie, you have less spoons as your baseline And so you don't have access to the same level of life force energy, and so getting through the day is much harder for someone with less spoons. And so this is a pretty useful analogy for people to understand what it is like to be chronically ill and to perhaps develop more empathy for people who can't take on full time work because their energy won't allow it. I don't really have a problem with the analogy, but what came of this analogy was a whole spoonie identity culture where people would brand themselves as spoonies and wear spoons and sometimes even like tattoo spoons on themselves, like a literal graphic branding of the fact that they are chronically ill, and so I feel like it's a dangerous like energetic dichotomy that we're playing in, where we are getting like community. We're building community around our illness, but it's not necessarily empowering all of the time, and if more and more people are going to be diagnosed as chronically ill, there's going to be more and more people who are identifying with the limited possibility of not being able to be chronically healthy. I wish we could call it something else, because it's not like. I don't believe in that state. I've lived it, but I'm very suspicious of why it's called this and the spell work that takes place when there's so many terms that we could use to describe a depletion of life force.
Speaker 1: Energy manifests in many different ways, many different physical dysfunctions, and so not all the groups, but there's many groups, especially on social media, that become kind of like online pity parties. So I really want to encourage anyone who suffers from this themselves and you are actually a victim of a poor state of health to think about the ways that they might get a payoff from identifying with their illness and whether it is really is empowering or whether it's actually disempowering and limiting to the possibility of their healing. And I really do encourage you to find support groups, no matter what is going on with you from a physical health perspective or mental health or emotional health, that when you're seeking that support online, you are consciously seeking out groups who are genuine in their care and have genuine empathy instead of sympathy, and are all about healing and empowerment or just living as optimally as you can despite what's going on with you, rather than just being a constant feed back loop of identifying as the illness. Before I move on to relationships, this is kind of related, but there's a special brand of this kind of self victimization, which is the parent that builds their identity around their child's illness or health condition. This has become so popular in recent years and I find this a really difficult energy because I can understand where a parent is coming from in trying to normalize the state of health of their child so that their child can feel better living with a particular condition. But it's the same kind of energy for me where, if you are getting something socially out of identifying with your child's illness and it becomes your identity, who are you if your child heals? It's a really important, serious question. What do you lose if your child heals? And it the same goes for if you are really into identifying as your illness. Who are you if you heal and do you want to heal? Is that important for you? I don't feel like these two things align. So, again, it's super, super important to find support in your community and to be supportive yourself to those in your life your loved ones, your children, your friends who might be victim to genuine victim to poor health. And we have to really be aware of how we speak about that state of health and how we like, how that impacts our own identity, especially if you're a parent, because ultimately, i'm sure we don't want to be limiting the healing journey of our children and we want to expand as many opportunities as possible for the child to improve their state of health and hopefully potentially even heal and move beyond their diagnosis And to have other things in their life that they identify, as it could be their creativity, it could be their amazing knowledge, it could be how amazing they are at playing chess. There's so many other ways to identify that could be much more empowering. And I say that with love because I don't want to suggest that we need to hide what's happening with our health and keep that private. I'm not suggesting that. I don't think that's necessary. It's all just about choosing the right words because they are proclamations.
Speaker 1: Alright, let's talk about relationships. So this is probably something that we're all familiar with. I don't necessarily think that everyone is taking on that full victim mindset in their relationship, although some people might do that If there's a pattern of unhealthy relationships power imbalance is that kind of thing. It's more around that. We all have the tendency to exhibit some of these behaviors in our relationship dynamics. So it's a really good practice or awareness to think about how we might be doing that in our own relationships, so say, with our partners.
Speaker 1: We could be a victim of our past dynamics. So this could be past relationships that we take, that, the victim role that we might have experienced in past relationship And there's like an echo of that that we take into future relationships. And it can also be identifying or self victimizing around past events or dynamics in that current relationship. It could be as simple as bringing up stuff that has happened in the past and almost like re victimizing yourself when you get the opportunity. This could be in arguments. This could be in self sabotaging the relationship, when things maybe they're not great but they're not awful And you start feeling those echoes of the past dynamics, the past wrongs, the past attacks, and you relive them, place yourself back in that past role of victim and then hold that energy in the present And I'm getting full disclosure. I was thinking about my own dynamics as I was writing this list. So I am not immune. I am human.
Speaker 1: We could be feeling trapped in a situation but not willing to make change. So that's that mentality of feeling like we have no control over our situation and that we are at the mercy of our partner's whims or the universe or our financial situation or whatever. It might be that we're actually genuinely identifying as feeling trapped but not seeking ways to free ourselves from that situation or willing to make that change. We can have a compulsion to always need to be right about things, so that would mean that we're in this victim mentality of feeling like someone's trying to wrong us all the time. So therefore we have a need to be right. There's another aspect of this that's super self victimizing.
Speaker 1: This might be triggering for some people listening because I know it's such a popular narrative in the spiritual bubble, but the twin flame narrative I most often see this as so disempowering. People can become extremely obsessed about this twin flame dynamic and finding their twin flame and being in relationship with their twin flame. It's often so dramatic and unrealistic and also inconsistent because I don't know. I've been a member of some chat groups for four or five or six years now and seeing people evolve through their relationships and they'll talk about the twin flame being there. Let's actually just discuss what the twin flame is.
Speaker 1: So basically, a twin flame is imagine your soul mirrored or split into two different people, and that just happens to be usually what's romanticized is. It just happens to always be the gender that you are attracted to. No one ever romanticizes or glamorizes or yearns for their twin flame, who might be their sister or their best friend, who's the same gender that they're not attracted to and don't want to be in this crazy, chaotic relationship with. So that's one part of that inconsistency. But then the other part is that you might see people having a relationship with their twin flame and it all blows up and it's all crazy and then they've found another twin flame. So they've got fragments of their soul, their split soul, all over the place. It just happens to keep finding them. I think it's like one of those spiritual gateways that can kind of hijack our path if we get too obsessed with it.
Speaker 1: The way I see twin flames is that it's totally possible and that it can be a really useful kind of analogy for soul bonded kind of relationships, those soul contracted, deep relationships that offer deep lessons and deep learning. It can be really passionate and really intense. But really I don't see, i don't take it literally that this person is you, your soul, manifested in your lover's body, necessarily. It's more that the part of you that needs to be challenged or needs to be healed as part of your own soul contract with yourself about what you're here to learn perhaps can be karmic is being mirrored to you in this other person. So don't necessarily, from my perspective, have to be a split soul. It doesn't have to be your soul. We're all mirroring each other. Every single person on this planet. We're all fragments of the same creator. So in that sense we are all mirroring each other. But I think we are contracted to come into contact with particular people in our lifespan that trigger some really intense healing, and that's not usually easy or pleasant.
Speaker 1: And so I can understand why people are drawn to the Twin Flame narrative, but I also feel like it can be very obsessive and addictive And that's very disempowering And it's kind of like a soulmate. People can make excuses for trapping themselves in a relationship that's unhealthy or harmful to them, because it's this utopian idea of who you're supposed to be with And that overrides the harm or disempowerment that you might be living through. So there's that aspect too. That Twin Flame narrative can be, i think, very self victimizing, because we're just a victim to the universe, matching ourselves with our other soul fragment and we have to go through all this pain and chaos and suffering. It's always a choice. Our lessons might be destined, but how we learn them is always our choice and our doing Okay. So there's some examples of how we might victimize ourselves in our relationships And it's just a nice reminder to be aware, have awareness of how we react, what our knee-jerk reactions are, what our behavioral patterns are and really think. Are we disempowering ourselves by behaving this way Or are we empowering ourselves to better ourselves and improve how we relate and become more, better partners to each other?
Speaker 1: Relationships have also got parents here, so they can be like a real matter complex. I think this is actually a complex that's related to the victim complex And so the matter complex describes people who actually desire the feeling of repeatedly being the victim. So they've actually gotten kind of addicted to that feeling and the payoff it gives them. People with a matter complex seek out and encourage their own victimization in order to either satisfy their psychological needs or as an excuse to avoid personal responsibility. And I think this is often linked to kind of narcissistic personality disorder, which is something I also have opinions about. People are obsessed with that. There's some self-victimization going on there too. I'm always very suspicious of people who make being a victim of a narcissistic parent or partner their profession. It is the same energy dynamic of self-victimization when you can have a choice to transcend and move beyond rather than keep yourself in this role of victim and this pattern of victim and perpetrator.
Speaker 1: People who are diagnosed with matter complex, it says, often knowingly place themselves in situations or relationships that most likely will cause suffering. So it's actually choosing the path that is going to disempower you, that is going to cause you to be able to talk about how much of a victim you are, that you place yourself in those positions so that you can get that payoff. Now that sounds pretty extreme when we're putting that in the context of a parent, but lots of parents and people who, even if we're talking about in relationships like I, don't have children, so I can't speak to this with authority from my own experience. But I know that in, say, relationship dynamics with others, there can be parent and child dynamics there and that it's quite easy to fall into wanting to marty yourself when you are playing some kind of parental role or you are going out of your way to provide care and nurture to someone and you don't feel like it's reciprocated, that you can start to fall into the victim hood of well with me, but I do all these things for you. Why can't I get this in return? It's super common, so you don't have to be diagnosed with master complex personality disorder or whatever it might be called.
Speaker 1: These are tendencies we can all drop into depending on our relationships and our situations. So, as a parent and there's particular batch flower essences, for instance, that work with this particular behavior in the compulsion to martyr oneself it can often be about having over concern for other people, for your children and their safety, and for going out of your way to do everything for them, and then it's very easy to feel like you're disrespected or that you're not loved or not loved enough or the way you want to be loved, because you've done all these things for your kids, or you've done all these things for your partner and they haven't reciprocated in the way that you wanted. I'll just note quickly that we also can develop self victimizing behaviors from experiences we have as children. So we can experience varying levels of trauma as children some really serious abuse on one side of the spectrum and then on the other just like more kind of general emotional neglect or and when I say that it might be like being ignored when we cry or something like that, or being told to get over it very simple, tiny little experiences that can add up to us feeling like we need to behave a certain way in order to get attention or to be soothed or to feel loved. So if we have an experience when we're kids where we feel like things might be unfair, we carry that into adulthood. We have a tendency not to be able to move past our childhood and our upbringing. We can become really self sabotaging and develop this need to be constantly rescued and just refusing to take responsibility for things as an adult and needing to be rescued and saved a lot. So that's something to be aware of as well. If we can cast our mind back, if there's any times that we fall into those behaviors, we can go back to our own childhood and see where that might stem from and why we might be defaulting to that kind of knee jerk reaction of not wanting to take responsibility or moving into a position of self sabotage.
Speaker 1: Okay, a couple more here. I've got life path here. I think I'll just touch on this quickly, because we can also really easily fall into the dynamic of victim when we're at work. I think it's really common for women to do this, especially where we can overwork, we can burn ourselves out, and it's to be noticed that we go above and beyond what we need to do in order to be recognized and rewarded And so often it's not required and that's why it's not recognized, and it can actually be a signal of desperation. It can be a signal of like not being able to carry out your job in the allocated hours. I know all jobs are different and sometimes jobs are really clear on, like demanding overtime and stuff, but I think in the corporate world especially, so many women do work more than they need to to receive some extra recognition or to feel like they're valued in the work that they do And they'll go out of their way to do this overwork and then feel bad when the recognition doesn't come. So that's an extremely self-sabotaging behavior. It's really unrealistic.
Speaker 1: It's that feeling entitled to a particular reaction from people. In that sense it's feeling entitled to praise. It's part of that matter kind of mentality as well Feeling entitled to praise and reward and recognition for the work that you do. That might not be required or that it's not important to other people. And so we really have to be reflecting on if we're falling into that and we feel bad and annoyed and resentful at the people at our work for not recognizing us and not appreciating our value. Is it their job to do that? first of all And second, are you falling into this kind of self-victimizing behavior because you're not actually valuing what you do at your job and you're not appreciating the work that you do because it's not actually what you want to do? So that's one example of how we might self-sabotage and victimize ourselves at work. There's other people in their jobs who might just not want to take any responsibility at all and constantly blaming others when things go wrong or when their work's not up to par. So that's another aspect of that victimizing behavior that we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: We can also be this way on our life path from a class perspective, so we can feel it like we're being born into a lower class, can be born into disempowerment And look realistically on one level, on a social and financial level. That can be true. But there's so many examples of people transcending the limitations of what society projects onto them based on their class. There's just endless examples of people who defy that projection and push themselves beyond those limits. And so if you're from that kind of upbringing and you don't have much more than that modeled to you, you can really feel like your opportunities in life are limited because you haven't been modeled anything different. And that's real. I'm not saying that's not real. It does make it really harder to transcend beyond that current limitation of class. But class is also an intellectual concept. It's a way to explain what's happening in our lives And it's like a diagnosis. It's one person's or it's one opinion, it's one way to explain, but it's not the only way to explain your situation.
Speaker 1: So from a victim kind of perspective, if we're talking about class, it can be very self defeating Sometimes. Acceptance of that reality can be freeing for some people. Once they go through that acceptance, they no longer feel bad about themselves and not being born into money or not getting an education or whatever it might be that other people would be feeling like limits them And they actually can move beyond any kind of like victim energy because they have self acceptance, they've developed self acceptance. Some people just are born with self acceptance and that's what's modeled to them, no matter how much money they have or are born into. But most people aspire to have more than what they have right now or what they're born with.
Speaker 1: And If you are entirely convinced that it's not available to you or that that opportunity is not open to you, there is an aspect of self that's confining and imprisoning yourself and victimizing yourself, because there are pathways out of that and you can be ignoring the opportunities that are available. That might take some work from you, and so at some point you need to ask yourself is it society that's limiting you, or is your beliefs about society limiting you limiting you? And how can you empower yourself to actually improve your situation, whether that's financial or otherwise, moving to a place that is safe or whatever it might be, and envisioning and aligning with what that better life looks like and finding others who can model that to you, if that's what's missing. So it's really about just acknowledging that these dynamics exist, and now we're getting into the ones that society project out onto us. They're more of the outer world rather than the inner world, and when I say inner, i'm talking about, like, personal relationships, whether that's with partner, family, work. Okay, the last one that I want to talk about is identity politics. So I could go really deep into all the workshed and forced outrage that comes with this self-victimization in identity politics, but I think you're all, if you're listening to this, probably beyond that kind of discourse, because that itself is very polarizing.
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about something closer to home as the example of identity politics, and this is actually the world of conspiracy theories. So so much of conspiracy theory is around slave narratives and being the victim of something, of invisible puppeteers, of elites, of Illuminati, of whatever you want to call them, controllers of a particular family or CEO of a tech company. whoever it is you want to blame. There's always someone to blame in these theories. It could be, it could be the CIA. There's so many, and I love conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: This is another gateway into spirituality. In the Initiates chat and some other chats I'm a part of, we've talked about this, where conspiracy is a gateway drug of spirituality, as I like to call it. Perhaps it's one of those ones that can split people. Either way, they can get into thinking more deeply about reality and their own life's meaning And what's the point of all of this, after they start watching evidence of them being lied to by the controllers of society, by the media, lots of places, by the government, and they can either become really politicized or they can start feeling more deeply and become more spiritual. Sometimes both of those things happen, but I don't think for long. I think you either choose the side of politics or you choose the side of spirituality.
Speaker 1: There is such a victim mindset in these conspiracy theories and not the theories themselves, because the theory is just a theory. Like we said before, it's like a diagnosis, it's just an opinion about something, a theory about something. But the way we attach our emotions, the way they're presented on the internet, is designed to trigger us emotionally and to make us go straight to that victim mentality That we are the victims of these faceless perpetrators, that we are the victims of the matrix, that we are slaves to the system, that we constantly complain about the power structure oppressing us, and it's a power structure that we can't even pinpoint because we understand it through all these hidden esoteric symbols. I have very strong opinions about that whole thing being an opp as well, and I'm definitely going to go into that in detail in a future episode. But it's such a distraction And this is the other thing that victim mentality does It just creates this huge cloud of distraction where we don't have to actually take action on stuff.
Speaker 1: We don't have to take responsibility from our own reality. We get to blame our things, influences, leaders outside of ourselves for our own personal experience. And it can become really obsessive as well just like that Twin Flame narrative I talked about earlier that people can become really obsessed with these conspiracy narratives where they can start developing some really crazy cognitive dissonance because they must be the victim at all times, even when presented with evidence that this one time, what they might be sharing is complete and utter nonsense. No, i'm not willing to accept that, because I am the victim of this. You cannot tell me I'm not the victim of these people.
Speaker 1: So there's a really big outsourcing of all, responsibility for our own betterment, whether that's personal or collective, which I think is so disempowering. If each of us took responsibility for bettering our own lives, that will impact us and everyone around us directly. But then also on that personal level, but also in the collective sphere. It was like how I talked about in the intro, that a community, a population, a society of empowered, activated souls is threatening because the change, the transformation that can take place. Think of how beautiful the world could become We wouldn't be so focused on all of this oppression narrative.
Speaker 1: And what's really dangerous about this and self-victimizing is that if we subscribe to that, there's no point, there's nothing we can do to get the upper hand against these controllers, these oppressive controllers. We have to wait until the corrupt system exposes the crooked controllers, which we know, if you use your logical mind, is never going to happen because it's all the same people in the same system. And so we're waiting for them who we do not trust, who we know lies to us, to free us. We can't be free until they decide we're free. It's just silly, it is self-victimizing.
Speaker 1: The Q narrative is a great example of this. People who seem to desperately, desperately want change. They want the world to be better for their kids, but they get caught up in this, this like cryptic puzzle. That's quite silly. That is telling them to wait until the corrupt systems who they all regard are full of pedos to out themselves and make everything better, like how obvious is that that they're taking people who, if they didn't get caught up with this narrative, could potentially be going out there and creating incredible change, because that's what happened. When people are so passionate about making a world better for their kids, they're confusing them and distracting them with these silly puzzles that don't lead anywhere and encouraging them to outsource their responsibility for making the world better.
Speaker 1: And the reason I say it so obviously in op is because that is 100% disempowering. This is a narrative that promotes disempowerment rather than empowerment. Nothing can happen until Q reports that it is happening, and, just from my perspective when it comes to conspiracy theories, any disempowering narrative to me is just an op, and it's really freeing to see pretty much everything as an op, because you no longer need to pick which ones are ops and which ones aren't. You can just live your life knowing that everything that happens in society, every website we go to, whatever it might be, is watched by someone or observed by someone, and even if it's just our guides up in the other realms to learn something. Everything that happens here informs someone about how things work And they can use that information to inform something else in the future that they create. You can see that is disempowering, or you can see that as neutral, or you could even see that as empowering. I found that view to be very empowering.
Speaker 1: Rather than victimizing myself, rather than disempowering myself, outsourcing my responsibility, i am calling bullshit on all of that and compelling you all to think about that. If you do consume a lot of this kind of alternative media, conspiracy media, whether it's on social or alternative or mainstream news, works, whatever it is. They're all just theories. I'm asking you to think about that. What payoff do you get and how much are you outsourcing your responsibility to these corrupt systems you don't even believe in in fixing things so that you can finally be happy and feel free? What if you could feel free right now? What would it take for you to feel free right now and can you lean into that energy? And I think that goes for all of it.
Speaker 1: Like, if we look at that axis between victim, the ultimate victim and the deepest perpetrator. What sits in the middle? It's that zero point, that center of just being free of either of those things and being able to at the same time, see both of those energies what they are. What's interesting about that axis is no one ever wants to identify as perpetrator. But if we are constantly in this self-victimized energy, we are on that end of that axis opposing the perpetrator And, as we know from like the universal laws, they are one and the same. So if you are stuck in this energy of being the victim all the time, you are actually perpetrating victimhood on yourself and potentially others as well. But thinking about the way, being aware of the way that we can place ourselves into the role of victim, can be really helpful in keeping that neutral awareness where we can actually observe ourselves and our reactions and our behaviors and really consciously choose to learn from that and improve ourselves, improve our responses, our reactions, and become better people who are acting more on love and out of joy and out of care for others. Okay, that was a big one. Thank you for journeying with me today.
Speaker 1: I am so excited to share some really cool interviews with you as we move into the end of May and June, there's going to be a bit of a health focus, which I'm actually really excited about because I feel like it's been a really big journey for many of us over the past couple of years, moving out of that big health event and needing to reset ourselves around how we view health, how we view the health system, how we view our own physical health, and then expanding our knowledge and understanding of health to also involve other layers of our being, like our mental spheres, like our emotional energy bodies, our spirits, our auras, our electromagnetic field. Looking at health in a much more holistic way, perhaps a more aquarium age way. And that's really one of my goals here is to be introducing new ways of thinking about health and introducing perhaps new technologies that can help us with that, but even old technologies, like some that I work with, like flower remedies that cultures have been using for who knows how long, the most simplest forms of energy medicine, even, you know, shamanic methods, just working with breath, for instance There's so much to explore. So, and this is all going to be an exploration from a spiritual lens and wanting to dive deep into what it is to be truly healthy and truly optimal I want to say, living our most optimal lives on all levels. How can we get to that point? Because that's the, that's realizing the new earth, that's realizing that fifth dimensional state, and if you want to hear more about that, go check out my previous episodes about grinding into the 3D. That's a whole other journey.
Speaker 1: If you would like to chat about this episode, come join us in the Initiates Telegram chat group. You can find the link to our Telegram chat in the show notes. We would love to see you there. And if you enjoyed this episode, why don't you leave me a rating or even a review? if your app allows it, you can subscribe to this podcast on YouTube. That would be cool as well, and you can leave comments there really easily. Or you can even share this episode with a friend, or send me a comment or a message on Instagram And I'll be happy to chat. I would love to hear your thoughts. Have a beautiful week, my friends and I will speak to you again soon. Peace.
