How not to become a victim of a person who always has everything bad

It is especially difficult to resist when a loved one complains and suffers. From a whining colleague, you can go to the next office or home – but how and where will you leave your husband, who was “unfairly fired” six months ago?

Circumstances are always to blame for such people: the intrigues of colleagues, envious neighbors, greedy parents, unhappy love, harmful bosses, the ruble exchange rate and a mediocre government. That is, everything but themselves.

“You feel good: you have a caring husband, obedient children. And my husband is a drunkard, and my son is an idiot, ”a friend complains every time. You do not even have time to remind her that she married the first handsome man of the faculty, to whom everyone predicted a comfortable future, as she brings down on you a new portion of her hopeless present.

You no longer want to share your own successes at work with her and talk about your husband’s next gift – why upset a person. Instead, you eagerly look for solutions to her problems, but to all suggestions she invariably answers: “I already tried this”, “It won’t work”, “It’s easy for you to say …”

If you are eager to fight to save – at the cost of your own time and effort – an unfortunate girlfriend or an alcoholic husband who is less fortunate than you, you have fallen into the network of a professional victim.

Such cases perfectly illustrate the patterns of behavior within the framework of the so-called Karpman Triangle. We all tend to occupy one of three main roles: predator, victim and rescuer. Society, bosses, life become predators. The victim usually manipulates through guilt and shame. How can you enjoy life when someone else is suffering? What’s left to do? Save!

The danger of the triangle is that often the “actors” change roles. The rescuer becomes the victim, the victim becomes the predator, and the predator becomes the victim. After another role reversal, feelings of shame and guilt cover all participants with renewed vigor. And getting out of the game becomes even more difficult.

Exit the “triangle”

“The first thing a “rescuer” needs to do is admit that you are embroiled in someone else’s game, explains family therapist Maria Dyachkova. “And that these relationships are painful and dependent. It is easy to confuse addiction with intimacy, because the line between them is fragile. The desire for intimacy is an absolutely normal need for each of us. It is important for us to have a reliable relationship with a person with whom we can share, whom we want to trust. At the same time, in a healthy relationship, each side has its own desires and goals that require sufficient freedom to realize them.

In a dependent relationship, the line between partners is blurred, it becomes more and more difficult to realize one’s desires. Partners do not risk doing anything for themselves, for fear of hurting the other or provoking his departure. The fear of losing a partner or friend often makes us turn a blind eye to his actions, endure resentment, shame and humiliation. At the same time, we simply do not have the strength to change this format of relations.

“Stop yourself whenever you seek to atone for feelings of guilt and shame,” advises Maria Dyachkova. Ask yourself questions: why am I doing this? What do I get in such communication? Maybe a sense of need and importance? But isn’t it too expensive? The difference between guilt and responsibility for what happens in life is huge.

To be guilty means to realize oneself as a source of troubles and sufferings of another. To be responsible is to be aware of oneself as a source of influence on the current picture, including one’s own suffering, but excluding the partner’s reaction. No one can be responsible for another person (unless it is your minor child), nor can you be inside his body and experience his experience.