Throughout life, troubles regularly overtake us, and often the situation repeats itself? It is likely that this is our unplayed negative scenario. A clinical psychologist talks about what it is and how to treat it.
Many of us from time to time get into unpleasant circumstances, again and again playing the same role. This behavioral pattern based on psychological trauma is called a negative scenario.
One of my clients came with a request – she has difficulties in communicating with relatives, for whom she does everything: feeds, waters, provides, but they do not obey, do not behave as she expects from them, do not want to live by her rules.
Another gentleman was divorcing his seventh wife. Seven times he explained to himself that the problems were in them, but suddenly discovered that the seventh lover at the end of the marriage became strikingly similar to the first, like everyone else before her. Since the women did not know each other, he suggested that some scenario was repeating in him and in his life.
The main sign of a victim is a sincere conviction of a person that he was unlucky in life.
In this context, the “victim” is a person who feels himself a hostage to the circumstances in which he is. For example, the same gentleman and client – they are both convinced that others are to blame for their problems (one has a wife, and the other has relatives).
You may be yelled at at work, but you have a loan and small children, and therefore you are silent and hold on to her with all your might. Or you live with a man who comes only at night, and you don’t like it, but you stay in such a relationship. In both cases, you are behaving like a victim. Behind this pattern of behavior is a psychological trauma and a script that you will constantly repeat if you do not work through the trauma.
KARPMAN’S TRIANGLE
There is an expression in English: “It takes two to tango.” It is the same with the “victim”: she always needs “company” in the form of an “aggressor” and a “rescuer”. These are the three familiar roles of the Karpman triangle. Everyone who is in it benefits from it.
Let’s analyze how it works using the example of Pushkin’s fairy tale “About the Fisherman and the Fish”, where an old man and an old woman lived. The triangle turns on when a goldfish appears. The old woman becomes the aggressor, sending her husband to the sea over and over again with a new demand and dragging the servants by the hair, the old man is a victim, and the fish is a rescuer.
In the triangle, the roles are reversed, and the victim always becomes the aggressor, like that old woman. When she got what she wished for, after a short time she again demanded what she lacked. Even after becoming a queen, she remains a victim and unconsciously leads the situation to collapse.
In transactional analysis, which has been popular for the last 50 years, it is generally accepted that any statement can be reduced to one of four formulas:
- I am good – you are bad;
- I’m bad – you’re good;
- I’m bad – you’re bad;
- I’m good – you’re good.
The victim always lives in a world where she is bad and there is someone good whom she envies, but never admits it.
With the help of internal intellectual tricks, she tries to enter into a model of behavior: I am good – you are bad. Either she is satisfied with the scheme that everyone is bad, but secretly hopes that she is at least a little better than the rest, at least because she suffers, and pain is worthy of praise and respect.
Her problem is that being bad is unbearably painful for her, and the victim enjoys triumph: she suffered innocently, so she is entitled to compensation. And if it is imperceptible (immeasurable), then the victim will build it in his head – this, as it were, assures her that she is better than others. For example, a person’s car has broken down, although it has been acting up before, he calls his friends, someone does not pick up the phone, someone is busy. And he begins to get angry, accuse his friends that they did not help him, that they left him in trouble, but he cannot admit that he is partly responsible for what happened.
There was a popular meme about how to break up with a girl: “It’s not about you, I just don’t deserve you.” This is an attempt to play the victim script. The man seems to be saying: “I’m leaving you, but in order to avoid a scandal, we will both be victims of insurmountable circumstances where nothing can be done.”
FEAR OF LOSE
The victim is unconsciously focused on failure, and it is usually difficult for her to allow herself to be wrong. Even if at work a person is a great scientist, in his own life he is never a researcher. In order to cure this in the course of psychotherapy, the client must be systematically placed in conditions where he tries many times what he does not succeed. In working with the therapist, he learns to draw useful conclusions from failure, instead of suffering from failure.
This is what any child does when learning to walk, because for this you need to try to take steps again and again. The truth is that unsuccessful attempts to walk become successful attempts to fall. And the ability to fall safely is more important than walking.
As soon as a person allows himself and learns to fall, when he stops devaluing the experience of falling, the scenario of the victim in his life will turn off.
About expert
Denis Makarovsky – psychotherapist and clinical psychologist, specializes in working with addictive behavior with the help of: EMDH, Ericksonian hypnosis and provocative psychotherapy. His .