Taking Personal Responsibility Frees & Empowers Us

How to go from a victim to victor

Originally published on WrongSpeak.net on 7/11/22.

The United States is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave and I look around me and see most are slaves, and they’re not brave. Bravery is defined as having the mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty. When the going gets tough, too often we blame someone else and give up. Too many of us shift responsibility for our physical, emotional, and mental well-being from ourselves onto someone else. Why is that?

Many people have decided that it’s someone else’s responsibility to care for them. They seem to fear taking that responsibility upon themselves. My goal is to help people see that giving away that responsibility to someone else is willful slavery. To become free, we must take back that responsibility.

Stephen B. Karpman proposed a social model of human interaction called the Karpan Drama Triangle. It’s also referred to as the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT). It consists of a “victim,” “rescuer,” and “persecutor.” These are not stable roles where people only pick one to play. It’s a very fluid conversational game. Someone may identify as a “victim” in one way but a “rescuer” in another only a few minutes later.

The roles in the drama triangle are co-dependent. They need each other. You can’t rescue someone unless they’re being victimized by some persecutor. In 2020 plenty of people felt victimized by the COVID-19 virus and they waited for rescue from it. The pharmaceutical industry is seen as the rescuer in a lot of ways today. It’s a good example to show the difference between someone stuck in the drama triangle and outside of it.

If you were afraid of getting sick, you could sit around waiting for your rescuer to “save” you. Or you could take personal responsibility for your health and figure out ways to mitigate the risk. Personally, I started taking more Vitamin D and Zinc in 2020 because hospitalized COVID patients were often lacking in those. I exercised because obesity was a co-morbidity with COVID. I also meditated because stress can actually lower your immune system’s ability to fight off infections. Meditation helps to let go of that stress. I never got sick regardless of never wearing a mask or getting vaccinated. But, better yet, I was never afraid of getting sick in the first place. When you take personal responsibility for yourself, then you feel powerful and in control of your life. You are your own master.

If you feel like you need someone else to rescue you from some situation, like people felt they needed a vaccine to be able to live their lives normally again, you feel powerless because you are at the mercy of that “rescuer.” You become a slave to whether that “rescuer” comes in to save the day or not. You also tend to live life in almost constant fear of the “persecutor” which is an unhealthy way of living. Some people viewed masks as their rescuers and non-mask wearers as “persecutors.” They placed the responsibility for their health onto other people and felt let down when someone else didn’t wear a mask. If they were taking personal responsibility for their health, someone else not wearing a mask wouldn’t have phased them.

There are myriad things people fear that would fit this “persecutor” role. Racism, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, COVID-19, government overreach, and climate change are a few examples. Depending on your political affiliation, the president can be looked at as a “rescuer” or “persecutor.” To anyone taking personal responsibility for their lives, however, the president is simply a president. If you don’t like how the actions of the president affect you, then you take personal responsibility to figure out a way to mitigate your risks. You innovate. If he zigs, you zag. You are more creative than you realize. However, we often have limiting beliefs saying that we don’t have any other options. But there is always another option to make things better for ourselves.

When you get stuck in a victim mentality, there’s a near-constant fear of the “persecutor” and that terror blinds us from seeing all of the possibilities that exist. In the fight-or-flight response, our minds get locked into a very narrow focus. When you relax, which meditation can help you to do, your mind opens up to a broader range where more ideas can come to you. We have a large portion of people who are stuck in the fight-or-flight response and who never take time to truly relax. They often turn on the news after a stressful day of work and the news is focused intently on more “victims” and “persecutors.”

On the Joe Rogan Podcast, Dr. Robert Malone suggested that we are living through a mass formation psychosis. He mentioned that many people have free-floating anxiety. Many people have this constant fear, but they never take the time to let go of that fear. They never take the time to face their fears and come up with solutions on their own. Because they personally don’t have a solution, they are open to hearing one, and then the media tells people what or who the “rescuer” will be and everyone jumps on board with it regardless of any logical fallacies. The reason that logic can’t penetrate someone who is that terrified is that they are terrified and that fear locks their minds into a narrow focus.

You may not be able to help people understand this. Yes, you can help people without turning into a “rescuer.” The difference between someone who sees themselves as a “rescuer” and someone who simply wants to help others, is that a helper only helps people who truly want assistance. A “rescuer” takes it upon themselves to try to “save” people who may just want to be left alone.

There are many people who have a victim mentality and want to stay that way because they get pleasure out of hating their perceived “persecutors” and they get social points for playing “victim.” You can’t help someone who doesn’t actually want help. If you tried to tell someone with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), that Trump didn’t actually do some of the things that people think he did, they don’t want to hear it, because they like hating him.

But those people are also slaves to Trump. They could be having a wonderful day and hear a news story about Trump, get triggered, and go on an angry tirade. By hating him so much, they place their mental well-being into his hands and become a willful slave to him and what he does or does not do. If they took personal responsibility for their lives and mental well-being instead of giving him that responsibility, then they could be free from being influenced by his actions.

Taking personal responsibility is the way out of the Dreaded Drama Triangle dynamics. If someone is playing roles in the drama triangle, it means they’ve given up some of their own responsibility and placed that responsibility (or blame) onto others. That is willful slavery because the roles are co-dependent. A “victim” will have to wait around in constant fear waiting around for the “rescuer” who may or may not come to “save” them. That breeds a feeling of powerlessness. But it’s not because the power was taken away from them, it’s because they willfully gave that power away.

At any time someone who feels like a “victim” can take back that responsibility for their lives and well-being. Every single person in your life is fallible. They may not always be there for you. Placing your fate in someone else’s hands is disempowering. Placing your fate in your own hands is truly empowering. A former “victim” can truly feel like a “victor” the moment they take back that responsibility for their lives and well-being.