Tara Brach

I mean, it can be small stuff but just getting tight.

I mean, I'll share with you just in these last few days just this kind of reflexive shrinking into victim self that can happen.

walking my dog, my puppy, I have a strained arm and she'd be tugging and in some way you shouldn't be tugging and I'm the victim or else I'm doing it wrong, I should be holding the leash differently.

And then going to the mailbox and seeing that I got something from Fairfax County saying, you're called in for jury duty.

Oof.

You know, later in the day, taking my dog to the vet and finding out she needed surgery for a torn ACL and that the charge was, you can imagine, it's a big price tag.

and then realizing I didn't have insurance because my other dogs haven't needed it.

And the list goes on, this kind of sense of unfair, the world is mistreating me.

I'm grateful I get to give these talks because it helps me deepen attention to patterns that can be really confining.

And I'd say for me, the probably most charged place of victim consciousness,

is in my way of identifying with vulnerable groups.

I'll be reading in the news about proposed Medicaid cuts for everyone in California.

or the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which is going to greatly reduce representation of people of color in Congress, and just feel the surging of victim consciousness in me.

The vulnerable are being disregarded, the system is rigged and cruel, you know, it shouldn't be like this.

And now quickly my heart contracts into this kind of powerless place that has an enemy out there.

Now for some, people like me with more privilege and less exposure to systemic violence, victim consciousness may arise around personal relationships or health or other circumstances or identifying with other vulnerable populations.

But for others it can be like really direct and charged and intense like Jarvis who I described in prison are for, you know, people of color everywhere, for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank or Jews facing anti-Semitism, for countless others who live with real oppression and threat it's so easy to sense how victim consciousness would take root.

And I want to pause here because many people wonder, well, if we stop identifying ourselves or as groups as victims, doesn't that somehow let perpetrators off the hook?

I mean, doesn't it weaken accountability?

And I want to be really clear that waking up from victim consciousness does not mean denying the reality of the suffering or turning away from injustice or accepting harmful conditions.