Tara Brach

It's a never again.

So whether collective or individual, there's huge suffering from unprocessed victim consciousness.

And healing asks that we honestly and compassionately face the wounds that drive this identity.

So for the remainder or last part of this exploration together, we're going to look at the deeper processing of wounds that generate victim identity.

And I'd like to share two stories, different expressions of how that victim identity takes form.

In the first, one woman I worked with, her mother was an alcoholic, so she grew up with an alcoholic mother and a kind of absent father.

As an adult, she was a single woman, and with her friends, with her colleagues, pretty continuously in a state of feeling disappointed and feeling judgmental of them.

At work, colleagues not doing their share.

With friends, this kind of hyper-vigilance and sensitivity to how much attention she was receiving from them.

And she had this basic sense that her needs didn't matter.

She wasn't special to anyone and that others were always letting her down.

She was always feeling

mistreated and hurt.

And of course the reaction she would get from many is, you're just too sensitive, which then again made her feel more hurt.

So this is one expression of victim identity and she could recognize it.

We worked together and she could recognize, yeah, that's what I go into.

They are doing things to me and it's not okay.

And so she could recognize that and she could realize that she had a should, you should be different, you should treat me differently.

But she wasn't able to do the nectar, which is remember that you're more, because that identity as a victim was so strong.

So we worked together with Rain, with Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture, to try to get to the roots of that sense.