Loy Young

1. Sabotage

There is a dark side to all of us. Victims are usually too afraid to confront a person directly about any problem. If you are waiting for words from the victim to know if everything is okay or not, you are in trouble. They pretend that everything is okay, as they are too afraid of saying ‘no’. Their way of saying ‘no’ is to withhold their emotional energy from whatever they dislike which sabotages the project or person every time.
2. The dishonest victim

Victims usually will talk behind a person’s back. Felice was one of those sweet women to your face but turned into a fury behind your back. Her partner, Herbert, saw her loving facade at expensive dinners, during trips around the world, and plenty of concerts. Felice portrayed herself as the victim, and Herb was this insensitive egomaniac. Behind Herbert’s back, Felice made sure everyone knew what a boring, unimaginative man he was whom she felt forced to put up with. All his faults, especially his sexual inadequacies, were exposed by Felice.

Did she want to have a better sex life with him? Heavens no, as long as he ejaculated prematurely it was over and done with quickly. Most victims I found did not care for sex, often justified with some illness that no one could argue with.

2. The irresponsible victim

We all go through a learning curves before we succeed at something new. I found, however, that chronic victims refuse to participate in the experience because they are too afraid of making a mistake and being rejected. I worked with two businessmen in Hawaii. Richard always wanted to play it safe, yet he stood in awe of his partner John who was a risk taker. Richard gladly let his associate make all the mistakes and then cried “foul play” when anything went wrong. Richard denied any responsibility for failure as he was just taking orders.

3. The compulsive victim
Gabriel came for counseling because his wife Cheryl was ready to leave him. The threat of being abandoned frightened him. At the beginning of the marriage, Cheryl let Gabriel make all the decisions and did everything he asked her to do, but as the years went by, she started to sabotage and be resistive. The highest solution of a victim is to leave, and Cheryl had gotten to that point. Gabriel knew it, so he reluctantly accompanied her to the therapy appointments.

As the sessions unfolded, it turned out that Gabriel was convinced that Cheryl was too dumb to make the right decisions, and indeed around him especially, she made one mistake after another. As I dug deeper for what would happen when Cheryl was allowed to make wrong decisions, Gabriel’s fear surfaced. Without everything being exactly in the right place, he felt he would go out of control. And that was a terrifying concept to him. So he compensated by being overly controlling while in reality he was a fearful victim. Being in control to the point of excess had been Gabriel’s solution all his life for handling his fears. The least thing out of place triggered a story in his subconscious where he had been in a hurricane in which his boat was destroyed and he had drowned.

That story was not an experience Gabriel had in this life, and of course he didn’t believe in past lives. It really doesn’t matter whether it was a past life, a dream, or something we saw in a movie that frightened us and we forgot it. What does matter though is that the emotional tale in our subconscious contains our fear. Our emotions always have a story woven around them. The feelings aren’t involved with the facts, only the emotions in the story. Often, without revealing the story, the sentiments don’t unravel. Gabriel in the end surrendered to the relief he felt, even though it didn’t fit his rational reasoning logic.