I’m a little addicted to people who have overcome hardships. The resiliency of the human spirit is like drug to me, but the helpful kind of drug that always sets my head straight when I have jumped on to the victim corner of the Drama Triangle (see previous post).
As much as we aim to stay off the drama triangle, we are still human and it’s going to be natural to want to help others even when they don’t want to help themselves (rescuer), blame others for our circumstances when we feel like we “deserve” better than what we’re being served by the universe (victim), or want to cast aspersions towards individuals whose actions don’t support our personal agenda (persecutor).
There is a fine line between idolizing people who have rebounded from extensive hardships, sometimes unthinkable tragedy, and engaging in comparative suffering, where we downplay our own struggles because we see another person who “has it worse.” For me the balance comes in acknowledging my feelings when I want to be a victim for a little while and then putting my situation in perspective by thinking about others who have it worse. I give myself permission to feel wronged or unlucky for a brief period of time but then look to the inspiration of those who have overcome unimaginable odds to pull myself out of the funk and off the victim corner.
When I was struggling with my fertility journey (link to previous post), I felt like I had made all of the right choices to set myself up for being able to successfully create a family. Sure I was on the older side as far as fertility is concerned, but in my mind I had great genes with incredible health and longevity on both sides of my family, and I took care of my body with decent nutrition and regular exercise. I quickly learned that egg biology doesn’t care about your organic diet and CrossFit addiction, nor does it care that your HDL’s are over 100 and that your grandparents all lived well into their 90’s. My husband and I both got a little bitter at the beginning of our fertility journey as we witnessed examples of people easily getting pregnant who were not only less physically healthy than us, but who even smoked or did drugs and even had criminal records. How does it support the persistence of the human species to allow these “lesser” individuals to procreate but deny those of us who are clearly more prepared to support a new child the ability to conceive? Yeah, we got real judgey during this time period, and we were definitely camping out on the victim corner of the Drama Triangle (“why not us???”) We finally realized that kind of thinking was not going to help our situation and that the fact of the matter was there is no “fairness” in who gets pregnant and who doesn’t. We needed to accept that it just doesn’t work that way and stop comparing ourselves to others. We needed to just focus on what we could control and how we could build our family with the options available to us. In the end we made some pretty difficult decisions to set ourselves up for success and had to open our minds to options that we never would have previously considered . Once we pivoted to those options we were assured that the choices we made would set us up for at least a 70% chance of having a child.
But after we had controlled every variable in our power and had still “failed” to get pregnant, I jumped onto the victim corner of the triangle again. Looking back now, that’s what I needed at the moment. I just wanted to feel bad for myself. I wanted to feel like something else or somebody else was responsible for me not achieving my goals, that it wasn’t my fault, that I was being treated unfairly by the universe. At the same time I was persecuting (in my mind) all the people that seemed to be able to get pregnant so easily and that didn’t have to go through all of the struggles that I was going through. I resented the fact that men can have babies well into their 70’s whereas women have to basically cut their lives down into thirds and procreate when they’re still in their 20’s if they want to be successful. I had made choices in my earlier years to travel the world, to have a career, to move around and live in different states, to seek out adventures and live life on my terms. I didn’t regret any of those choices, but I felt like I was getting punished for choosing them.
With in vitro fertilization, the final step of a long process that includes the woman giving herself injections of multiple drugs over several months and spending 2-4 days a week getting blood draws and ultrasounds and potentially other invasive procedures including surgeries to address any physical issues that could preclude a successful pregnancy, is the transfer of a healthy embryo into the uterus. It takes so much time, effort (and money) to even get to this stage; it’s not uncommon for it to take years, and even then not every patient gets even one embryo. If the embryo successfully implants, the patient is pregnant. We were originally told that our chance of successful pregnancy was 70%, and we had even taken additional (expensive) steps to ensure our embryos had the best chance of implanting. So when our first embryo transfer failed to implant and the pregnancy test came back negative, we were completely unprepared to deal with the result. I can remember every detail of that day the call came in and in the week of hell that followed. I went into a dark depression phase, followed by a hell of a lot of anger, which is when I planted myself firmly in the victim corner. I screamed and swore at the universe, then burst into tears asking “why me?” and “what did I do to deserve this?”
This is a classic victim mentality. When we are on the victim corner we ask the question, “why is this happening TO ME?” Whatever is happening is not personal, but it feels that way at the time. To leave the victim corner we need to drop the end of that sentence and simply ask, “Why is this happening?”
For my example in experiencing the first embryo loss I recall very clearly when my mindset shift occurred. I had just returned from the fertility clinic where, to add insult to injury, they had asked me to come in and take a second pregnancy test just to confirm that I was indeed not pregnant. This seemed cruel to me. We all knew the transfer had failed and this was some administrative BS they had to box-check. I felt further victimized by this event–I was pissed that I was being “forced” to relive the negative pregnancy test experience and there was no part of me that wanted to be hopeful that a miracle would ensue and that they would find a mistake in the original test. I knew better and even if that chance were real, my victim corner was full of quicksand and I was in way too deep to see any possibility of hope. I had chosen to be stuck. I am not even sure how I got to the clinic and back that day as I was in a catatonic-like daze unable to control my stutter-cry-breathing even for a second. I had zombie-walked from my car into the clinic, down the hall, and finally plopped into the phlebotomy chair to have my blood drawn again. I couldn’t keep my body still as the nurse stuck the needle in my vein, the grief-hiccups pulsing through me wave after wave. The next thing I knew I was sitting in my car, parked in my driveway, staring out at the woods behind my house. The tears were still flowing when suddenly I just said out loud, “What am I supposed to learn from this?”
It was not a complete jump off of the drama triangle, but it was this sort of un-blindfolding. Another thing about being in the victim corner is that your vision is altered so that we only see negativity, impossibility and arrows coming at us from every direction. We are blind to the view beyond our corner, unless we make the effort to crane our necks and see what is outside the triangle. I had made a small but important shift from feeling as though things were happening TO me to getting curious about what was I supposed to be learning from this experience.
I do believe we are meant to learn something from every experience that happens to us, including the really, really awful stuff. Now, I don’t know how some people deal with that really, really awful stuff. I have people in my circle who have had unimaginable things happen to their kids, for example. That kind of stuff definitely doesn’t seem fair, and if anybody was going to be a victim, as far as I’m concerned these people had every right to firmly establish an entire compound on the victim corner and be angry and the world forever. Yet so many of these people have taken their experiences and turned them into lessons for themselves and wisdom they can share with others who are also suffering. I’m not sure how they do it, but somehow they are able to get out of bed every day and move forward even while living with grief and loss that still haunts them. If they can figure out a way to find a lesson in the circumstances they have been given, surely we all can.
The timeline for everyone in shifting from victim to learner will be different. I’m a big proponent of giving yourself the time, space and grace to feel what you need to feel, including feeling like a victim. It also helps to find people who will not try to pull you off the triangle too quickly, but who will validate that, yes, what you’re experiencing sucks and is unfair and you don’t deserve this awful outcome. Friends who will “sit in the suck” with you are invaluable in these situations; toxic positivity will only push you on to the persecutor corner of the triangle and then you’ll just bounce back and forth between victim and persecutor like a pinball.
Take the time you need to be sad, pissed, resentful, jealous, question your faith, question science, question anything that you previously believed in that now appears to have let you down. But let this all flow through you in a way that gets slowly diluted over time. Don’t keep a death-grip on the feelings, acknowledge their temporary purpose and then ask the non-personal questions: “Why is this happening?” “What am I supposed to learn from this?” “How can I use this experience to help others who are going through something similar?”
That last one is next-level resiliency. These are the people I referenced above–my idols, the people I keep in my heart and mind to guide my compass away from the victim corner and remind me that I can set my course to a place that keeps me moving forward, no matter what happens. I am eternally grateful for these individuals, these everyday heroes, who show up to make a difference in our lives even when their own lives have been riddled with loss that the rest of us can’t even fathom. Yes, we can and should still grieve the losses of our own journey and we can do this while also looking up to models of resiliency that show us the way out of the victim corner and into empowered living.