The Exhaustion of Victimhood, The Awakening of True Power

In 2016, when our current president was elected, it was viscerally felt in the collective how deeply so many of us are relentlessly focused on who and what outside of us is to blame for the pain that we experience.

In 2020, in the height of the global Coronavirus pandemic, that energy is even more palpable and obvious.

And if things don’t shift and we as a species don’t get hip to this pattern and learn to transform it, who knows? In 2025, when the flesh-eating mist seeps up from the fracking fissures in Northern Canada and spreads across the globe, causing humanity to retreat into subterranean caves to survive, the energy of victimhood will be so intense that anyone occupying it will literally not be able to function, and will be forced to face the traumatized child in their heart with authentic embrace, without blaming anyone or anything outside of themselves, including themselves. 

When will humanity get the message, that blaming what is outside of your control to avoid facing pain that you have never been in control of— which is entirely justified, based on your current level of perception— only serves to exhaust you, disempower you, and keep you ensnared with the very things that you hate to see in this world, ensuring that they will arise again in some other form until you get the message? Have you noticed this pattern yet? Have you seen this shitty chapter of your life’s movie over, and over, and over again, like the DVD of your life has a scratch in it and can’t move on?

When are enough of us going to stand up and say, “I want to watch a different movie?” 

When are enough of us going to admit “I don’t actually know if anything or anyone is to blame for the horrific pain I feel right now, so I’m just gonna feel this pain and love myself through it, asking for help and support from others in this sacred journey from victimhood to inner freedom?”

When are we going to realize that everyone who has ever hurt us, anyone who has ever even said so much as an unkind word to us, is showing us how deeply that they have been victimized in the past, and thus is deserving of nothing but the utmost compassion, even if we are not the ones who have the capacity to give it to them right now? 

When are we going to see that all war, all conflict, all atrocity, all terrorism, all inhumanity, all pandemic, are a manifestation of unprocessed grief, immaturely spewed upon innocent beings who then take on that unprocessed grief and become the next generation’s war criminals?

I have no idea. It’ll happen when it’s supposed to. But you have a say, right now in this moment. Your choices, your attitude, how you choose to view your reality, and the actions you take to remind yourself of what you wish to see, can make a real difference, since all journeys are profoundly interconnected in ways we cannot even imagine. A single moment of authentic embrace of the pain you experience is a gift more sacred than all of the monasteries, churches, temples, and mosques in the world. Just a drop of compassion for the characters, situations, and circumstances that showed you how deeply you are capable of feeling pain is more liberating than ten thousand years of retaliation, revenge, and fighting “the enemy that did this to me.” And no matter how victimized you have been, there is a power within you that is more powerful than every weapon of destruction on this planet.

None of what I am saying is meant to suggest that if you are finding yourself in a state of disempowerment or victimhood right now that you are incorrect for being in that space. Perhaps one of the cruelest things you can say to someone in such a state is “stop being a victim.” That’s like saying “stop being on fire” to someone whose face is being burned off. If your face, the masks you used to hide behind, are being burned off by the fires of victimized consciousness, may these words be buckets of water, pounds of healing ointment, and a full-time staff of compassionate healthcare professionals to nurture the innocence within you.

These words are not meant to talk you out of victimhood, because if they were, that would indicate that I was not intimately aware of how painful it is to be trapped in such a state. The feeling of being a victim is a hellish, demonic level of pain, and it’s disingenuous and heartless to tell victimized people that they shouldn’t be that way. 

I can only speak and bring life to the energy of empowerment because I have survived the horrors of victimhood. Anyone who tells you to stop being a victim has not yet survived and embraced their own inner victim. They are afraid of your experience because it shows them something that they haven’t faced within themselves.

No matter where you are on the journey from exhaustion to vitality, from victimhood to True Power, you are loved, you are supported, and you are embraced. There will always be space for your truth, and until my last dying breath I will hold that space for you.