The quickest way to suck the life force out of your body is to be a victim.

Every one of us has played the role of victim in our life; we just didn't recognize it as a role. It was as real as real could get, or so we made it seem. We have all been awarded an Oscar for our victim performance.

I must admit that it's an easy role to play and it gets more comfortable each time we play it. It becomes our one person show where we become one with the character we are acting out.

The downside is that we become trapped in character and cannot separate reality from fantasy. We live out our lifespan in costume and often wonder how life has passed us by.

It's time to hop off the bus.

The key to finding your stop only takes a shift in focus from "happened" to "happening."

If your focus is on what happened, you will always be a victim and suffer all the attendant pain that goes along with those circumstances. When you begin to notice that what happened isn't happening now, you have opened a window to a victimless future.

There is such a cultural bias to keep what happened alive. "We must never forget" seems to be the global mantra. Believe me, if you have severely suffered, you'll never forget it as long as you have the capacity to remember. But to purposely prop up those memories as though they are happening now is the feeding ground for victimhood.

Justification is joined at the hip with being a victim. We justify our helpless feelings rather than explore and metabolize them. We keep our victim feelings alive by telling our story to anyone who will listen. The minute we tell it the second time it becomes drama and begins to take on a life of its own, and it begins to own us.

Here's the choice we all get to make: Do you want to be the liver of your life, or your life's story?

One keeps you tethered to the past; the other is your transfer to the future.

Here's a factual metaphor that works for me: Life took an unexpected turn and I fell out of the car that kept on going.

I'm not denying it happened or claiming it wasn't painful. "Why did this happen to me?" is a very natural question to ask. The more you ask it, the deeper you sink into helplessness.

The quicker we pivot off of that question and ask, "What am I going to do now?" the sooner we extricate ourselves from the muck and mire of victimhood.  By doing so, we shift our focus from the past to what's happening now. Because the reality is you can only affect what will happen in the future by focusing on what's right in front of you now.

The lesson every victim needs to learn is this: It's impossible to get to your future by going backwards.

When you drop the weight of victimhood, life not only gets lighter, it gets brighter. The journey to your future begins when you shift from "happened" to "happening."

 

All the best,

John