Tara Brach

It's hard to trust that.

And in a daily way we can sense that we're kind of expecting to be taken advantage of at any moment.

Other signs of kind of more pervasive victim identity is this tendency to be hypervigilant, really oversensitive, scanning for signs of disrespect and rejection.

strong emotional reactivity to disappointment, to criticism, to conflict.

So there's quickly turning others into an enemy.

You are hurting me.

You know, repeated stories of being mistreated.

Okay, so the signs mistrust, hyper-vigilance.

There also can be a rigidity.

clinging to one's expectations of how things should be, one's interpretations, it's kind of that black-white thinking, and also habitual ways of doing things, not so flexible or responsive to circumstance.

And there's a story of a man driving from work after yet another tough day at the office, and everything's gone wrong.

And his wife calls him on the cell, and she's all distraught.

And she's saying she heard on the radio that someone was driving the wrong way on the beltway.

And he says, heck, Emma, he replies, you know, there's hundreds of them doing that.

Okay, so I've been focusing on individual victim consciousness.

Just as wounds in our personal history give rise to victim consciousness, wounds in the collective arise when there's power asymmetry and that's allowed violence and oppression against certain groups, political groups, religious, ethnic, gender.

That's the grounds of collective victim consciousness.

And again, that victim consciousness is a natural reaction of the survival brain.

It's adaptive.

It heightens vigilance to threat and violations.