Loy Young

The Victim

No Edgar Wallace, no Agatha Christie and no John Grisham movie can do without a victim, the first star in Goodness Triumphs Over Evil.

Ironically, this is by far the preferred role of the emotions in a conflict, even though it is not a winning role in the Soul Game.  The victim is truly a beginner’s role, as the villain triumphs over the victim.  Only the hero wins in the end, saving the victim, and triumphing over evil, no matter how long it takes.

Still, for a beginning player in the Soul Game the victim role is important.  The victim can triumph in a watered down version of the storyline of Goodness Triumphs Over Evil  called Goodness Triumphs Over Adversity.

Adversity comes in all forms of pain, grief and suffering from life-threatening illnesses, accidents, beatings, torture, and thousands more of heart-wrenching and blood-dripping conflicts. Overcoming adversity leads a player to leave the victim role behind and eventually turn into its own heroine, a true winner in the Soul Game.

All of us have auditioned for the victim role more than once in our lives; and no wonder. Through the hurt and suffering that we endure, we tap into our seductive, tender sensuality that makes the agony worthwhile.

Usually people come to me after a major crisis leaves them devastated when they have been abandoned by their partner, or lost that ever so important job.  Hard-core victims wait until misfortune strikes so many times that even they cannot help noticing that something must be wrong.  Most of us need help with our feelings and our relationships, as we were not taught social skills right along with math or science. Dealing with feelings is a very complex subject that we are only now beginning to understand.

Fact or figment

In my years of counseling, I found regressing people to the stories in their subconscious to be an effective tool for changing behavior. Despite our scientific advancements and religious teachings, humanity has changed little since Cain and Abel as emotions have been ignored, suppressed, or misunderstood.  But feelings fuel all our actions and without them change is impossible.  It doesn’t make any difference if these tales are based on facts or just figments of fantasy. Involving our emotional self in a story allows us to touch into the breath-stopping pain to release the victim’s energy.

One young woman came to see me with her daughter who had a breathing problem for which no medical reason could be found.  Carolina was a fragile child who one day painted a picture that vaguely resembled a dog under a black cloud weeping from the sky.  When asked what the image reminded her of, she had one of her asthma attacks right in my office.  I took Carolina in my arms and ask her what she felt, and she said, “I feel like dying, I want to be with Skipper.” I asked her if that was Skipper in the picture, whereupon she started to sob uncontrollably.

She told me a story of her dog Skipper dying in her arms.  The pain and the anguish she went through was incredible as she relived the dog’s eyes rolling up toward her as he gasped for his last breath and then felt limp in her arms.  Carolina went limp in my arms and started gasping for her own breath again.  She then emerged as if out of a deep trance.  From that moment on, Carolina’s breathing started to get fuller and the color in her face turned from a gray to a vibrant live pink.

How could you refute an emotional story like that?  Although I found out later that that dramatic incident never happened as Skipper had been run over by a truck and was buried before the girl could ever set eyes on him, by expressing her feelings Carolina had become a healthy young woman.

Scenarios that start in childhood sometimes take years to complete.  As long as we are driven by negative energy, spending day and night in a crisis mode, waiting to be duped by someone, we eventually become an emotional basket case and are cut off from our feelings.  Liberating ourselves from the pain of our past sufferings is a heart-wrenching enterprise, but worth the effort. Working with a large number of victims, both chronic and temporary, I found many different impersonations of that role. 

But I detected one characteristic that was common to all - purity.