Tara Brach

It helps anticipate danger and mobilize protection.

So we need it.

And when victim consciousness hardens, when it overtakes a group's full identity, then they lose access to their resourcefulness and spirit.

So one sign of it, when victim consciousness takes over, is powerlessness and apathy.

You can see this in really long-lived authoritarian states where there's just no way to resist the power.

I was talking to a friend in Mexico, lives in an area where families have been under the domination of cartels for generations, really brutal.

And he was describing how to survive.

These folks have just cut off from their feelings and reactivities and it's kind of an apathy that's there.

That's one response in collective victim identity.

Another

is bad othering, dehumanizing the enemy, the oppressor, having moral certainty, I'm right, you're wrong, and then it expresses as aggression.

So when not processed, the wounds turn into chronic anger, hatred, mistrust, and the need and drive to regain power to prevent further vulnerability.

So in this state, the victimized group, desperate not to feel powerless and endangered and humiliated again, may begin inflicting on others the very pain they once suffered.

So through aggression, through domination, dehumanization, cycles of revenge, getting back, they unconsciously become the perpetrator.

This happens, we see it around the world.

The inner identity is as victim and there is this righteousness that creates a kind of moral dissociation, a numbing of empathy that allows the now perpetrator to be completely cut off from the pain of those being harmed.

You can also see this phenomenon in individuals who have power yet are still identified with an inner victim.

They have unhealed humiliation and express this by seeking retribution against enemies.

That's the inner victim expressing.

It's a way to push away shame and secure themselves.