Required Reading: Mark “done” when finished
April is coming early this year.
We are going to spend the month of April doing a deep dive into relational ethics. My hand got sort of forced, so I am presenting you with an intro now.
Embedded in another subthread is an adapted article about what is called by Pia Mellody and Terry Real, ‘offending from the victim position’. This is a potent and destructive weapon in the arsenal, and one I strongly exhort all of us to lay down.
It, like most of the offerings I will present to you on the topic, come from family and couple research and application; they are still valid in the one on one dealings we have with each other here and with the community as a whole in this space.
Read for gain; really try to get past defense and minimization and try your best to locate yourself here.
It’s something we need to turn away from for the sake of healthy relationships.
Offending from the Victim Position
Pia Mellody, a groundbreaking author who writes about healing developmental and other forms of trauma has coined a term for this behavior. She calls it “offending from the victim position.”
Offending from the victim position occurs when we decide that our status as the offended party gives us the right to become offenders ourselves. Because we have been hurt, we feel we are justified in hurting back.
So we take our pain, turn it into a cloak of self-righteousness, wrap ourselves in it, and let loose with all the anger and rage inside us. We believe we have immunity because we have been betrayed, that betrayal gives us the right to strike back.
Three things drive betrayed partners [and community members-lace]into offending from the victim position. The first involves our shadow self, the part of us that can wholeheartedly engage in unhealthy behavior. The second involves our wounded self, the part of us that feels shamed. The third involves our dignity and what we most deeply fear.
For the shadow self, offending from the victim position is primarily about revenge. When we offend from the victim position, we are trying to inflict the same level of pain and damage on our [fellow walkers] that we feel has been inflicted on us. We want to see our [colleague] writhe in pain the same way we did. We want them to feel their heart break in two, just like ours did. We want them to experience the horror of betrayal, as we have. So our dark side demands an eye for an eye, and tries to create justice by taking revenge.
The terrible truth is that when we let our shadow self pilot the plane it inevitably creates more pain, damage, and destruction – not only for our partner [or community member] and our relationship, but for us. We often end up feeling shame about our harmful behaviors, and we find ourselves dealing with unforeseen consequences resulting from our revenge. At a bare minimum we create more hurt and mistrust in our relationship.
When we are hurting the way betrayed partners tend to hurt, it can feel like lashing out is the only option. And being told that our behaviors are hurting our [colleagues] and our relationship makes a lot of us want stare straight back and say, “Good, then it’s working!”
Unfortunately, when the shadow self is driving, it is always and inevitably steering us toward self-destruction. We are hurting ourselves when we offend from the victim position. We are robbing ourselves of our dignity, our true power, and our true voice.
Shame is one of the most intolerable emotions to feel. We hate to feel shame, and we will do almost anything to get away from it. One of the quickest ways out of shame is to shame someone else. We move out of feeling “one-down” by assuming a “one-up” position over others. (This is similar to what we see with schoolyard bullies, where all they really want is for others to feel as badly as they do, or preferably worse, about themselves and their lives.)
Shame is such a sneaky emotion. Because we do not want to feel it, it frequently goes unnoticed and remains out of our conscious awareness. Often, the way that we avoid shame and keep it in our unconscious is by engaging behaviors that elevate us to a one-up position.
For betrayed partners, offending from the victim position does this very effectively. For a few moments it moves us into the position of the shamer rather than the shamed, providing quick, albeit short-term and quite costly, relief.
I want to focus on what it is that we are really trying to accomplish when we take this one-up position in the relationship.
I strongly believe that we are trying to accomplish something good. Typically, underneath our unhealthy behaviors, our dignity is trying to speak, trying to reach for the light and get one of our most important relational needs met.
I believe that offending from the victim position is ultimately about our deep hunger for justice and a longing to have our heart’s hurt understood by the one who has hurt us in real or perceived ways. It is a desire to have the Other truly understand, at a profound and heartfelt level, the pain and hurt that you feel that their behaviors have caused. It is a desire to be understood, empathized with, comforted, and meaningfully apologized to, however that may look.
This hunger for justice is a good longing. We need to affirm our heart’s need and desire for understanding, empathy, gratitude, and amends. When we affirm this for ourselves, when we reach in and touch the tender place of longing inside us and let ourselves know about our true need, the desire for revenge moves aside.
Our shame also moves aside. We recognize that we have been going about things all wrong. We have settled for the cheap shot and the quick thrill of retribution instead of waiting on that which will really heal. We begin to realize that offending from the victim position simply rubs salt in our open wounds when what we really need is to gently and kindly hold our hurts close.
When we give up the right to “offend back” it changes things. It unhooks us from our cheating partner’s behaviors and gives us the freedom to think through and choose our response to situations, rather than just blindly reacting.