Victim or Villain: Two Sides of the Same Coin

How blame and shame are related, how to step outside of the stories you tell yourself

During my first year sober, a pivotal practice was taking radical accountability and dropping stories that centered myself as the victim. Writing an 80,000-word (unpublished) memoir was part of this process, helping me to find forgiveness, understand my part, and move on. In the telling of my life—in recounting what they did to me—I couldn’t escape that I was the common denominator.

As my radical accountability guide, I turned to the work of Debbie Ford, who encourages us to ask—whatever the circumstances: What’s my responsibility in this? How did my actions, inactions, reactions, thoughts, emotions, and patterns contribute to where I am now?¹

The point isn’t to absolve perpetrators or to blame the victims. Nor is it to say that bad things don’t happen for no reason at all. It’s to unravel an exceedingly common tendency among humans to cast ourselves as the victim without tending to the countless (often micro, cumulative) actions and inactions that we did to get here.

This isn’t to say we’re responsible for everything. The question “How am I responsible?” is merely a tool. By getting curious—by dropping our death-grip defensiveness, our insistence on being the Good Guy, our attachment to well-worn stories—we’re likely to notice something in our own patterns of thought and behaviour that we’d missed before. We’re likely to see where we have the capacity to do something different, call something (or someone) else in, and potentially change our lives for the better. We’re also likely to more fully and fairly understand our impact on others. It’s not about assuming all responsibility; it’s about regaining a sense of our agency.

A foundational part of my sobriety, this practice extends far beyond giving up alcohol. It has transformed my entire way of seeing and responding to the world and myself; the world responds to me differently as a result.

BUT. I sometimes have a tendency to take things too far. And, in taking things too far, it’s easy to end up back where we started.

Image of me by Brian Limoyo

Self-blame and self-as-victim are two sides of the same coin.

If you’ve been following my personal journey of late, you know that every carefully laid plan to move from Canada to Cambodia unraveled shortly before our scheduled departure. This sent us into a two-week flurry of figuring out all new travel and life plans.

In the end, it worked out! We’re settling into Thailand, where I lived previously. We’re taking wise steps, one after the next.

However, when all those plans started coming undone, I began a shockingly quick descent into self-blame. Circumstances were beyond my control; there was nothing I could’ve done to prevent them, and I responded as best I could—working with my partner to figure out where in the world we’d be moving and get all (new) details in order.

Didn’t matter. This self-blame—and contempt, really—had zero to do with facts on the ground. It also wasn’t anything new but, rather, traced back to childhood. You see, as a kid, my underlying feeling a whole lot of the time was: “I am responsible for everything that’s happening around me. I did something wrong to cause this. I did something wrong because I am wrong.”

Observing this in myself now, as an adult, I realized that self-blame can be the flip side of self-as-victim. I also realized that learning to default to self-as-victim early on in my life was a defense mechanism in response to the undercurrent of amorphous guilt and sense that I was the problem. You know how the most arrogant people are often the most insecure underneath? It’s kind of like that. 

Problem is, both sides of this coin assume we’re more special, important, and powerful than we actually are. Both sides negate the messy truth of our humanness. And the fact that we will fuck up. And we will have shitty things happen to us. And that we are the victim, but also the perpetrator. Not once in a while. Not on rare occasions. Every single day of this human existence.

Every single day, we take actions (which may or may not be conscious) that end up hurting people. Every single day, we are hurt by actions and circumstances beyond our control. While we can’t avoid this entirely, what we can do is commit to doing our best to: 1) not cause harm, 2) take accountability for our thoughts and actions, 3) make amends when needed, and 4) do all this in an effort to live more beautifully. 

But getting lost in the stories—whether those stories cast us as victim or villain—helps no one, changes nothing, and is an exercise in perpetuating more of the same.

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My addiction to control plays a role here.

Entangled in all of this, for me, is what I consider my deepest addiction: finding my footing by finding control. This manifests in numerous ways, but one of those ways is making meaning by spinning a story. When it comes to how I see myself, specifically, this story is black-and-white; it ends in a judgment.

I’m good. I’m bad. I’m innocent. I’m guilty. I’m this way, not that. 

Of course, that’s never the whole of it or the whole of us. By pretending it is—by flipping to one side of the victim-villain coin and casting ourselves as caricatured characters—we’re missing the more complex, more human picture.

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It comes down to energetics—and making it all about me.

Have no doubt—this pattern isn’t harmless. It has an energy to it, and that energy pulls inward.

I don’t mean pulling inward in the reflective, introspective sense. I mean inward in the sense that we pull everyone and everything back into us. We collapse the whole story and the whole of our humanness into our self-sucking vortex. Whether we’re attaching to a story of self-as-victim or self-as-perpetrator, the energy’s all about me.

Here’s another example to show what I mean. 

There’s someone close to me who has, at times, said and done things that were hurtful. This happens! It’s normal human behaviour! But when I’ve brought such things forward to this person, letting them know I was hurt as gently as possible, their default has been to make a big show of their guilt and how they’re a “bad person” (often without taking specific, clear steps to change their behaviour).

The result? I feel even worse and as though my job is now to take care of them and make them feel better. Whatever apology they might’ve offered no longer feels worth the additional suffering. All the energy is sucked into them. (Part of why I recognize this pattern is because I’ve been on the other side of the same equation: making a big deal about my own guilt and blame, compelling the person who was hurt to take care of me.)

Another place this shows up everywhere these days? Overly apologetic disclaimers. Sure, there’s a time and place to acknowledge our privilege. Problem is, the way it’s done (online, specifically) often carries the same “sucking-back-into-me” energy. Rather than actually righting injustice or doing much to help anyone, it comes off as covering one’s ass and (again) making it more about me.

Where to from here?

Look, pretending like I have the answer to this—pretending that I’m able to witness and write and practice away my difficult patterns—would just be more of the same. Here, let me solve myself. Here, let me make myself the poster child for a perfectly self-aware sober person and yogi and Buddhist.

But inside, I know that would be bullshit. I know that I’d tie this essay up in a bow, close down my laptop, and soon be back to the same fucking thing. Self-as-perpetrator. Self-as-victim. Flip a coin, and I’ll step into story.

You know what though? You know what has actually and dependably helped me to set down that coin more of the time? It’s so simple it hardly seems worthy to mention. But I swear, it really does work and goes something like this:

• In my nightly meditation, I take inventory of my day, my mind, my body, my spirit. During that meditation, I notice the stories…and I notice what’s going on beneath the stories. This is how I realized that I’d swung into self-as-perpetrator. This is also how I realized that that pattern and self-as-victim are both distortions with the same energetics.

• While it sounds too good to be true, even just noticing the pattern already changes it. I can’t tell you why this is, I just know it has never, ever played out any differently. I locate a truth, the truth of the truth softens, my perception of the world and way of being in the world changes. And the more times I bring awareness to something, the more things shift in helpful, life-changing ways.

• From there, space opens. In that space, I allow for my wholeness and humanness and the wholeness and humanness of others. I remember that, really, we’re in this together.

• And know what? When I have more breathing room, when I can spare all of us a little more grace, I’m able to practice non-harming towards self and others. I’m able to take accountability but drop the stories. I’m able to show up more beautifully.

How about you?

I’d love for you to share in the comments:

• Do you tend to blame others and see yourself as the hero or victim? Or is your default self-blame and shame?

• Has this shifted for you in sobriety?

• Has anything helped you let go of old patterns and stories?

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Thank you. I appreciate you. I love you.
Dana

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