To ask what causes someone to have a victim mindset?

[deflection]

One of my relatives seems to always seek to be the victim. She constantly feels wronged by other people yet is not very nice herself. She has behaved dreadfully towards me in the past, I step back (who’s got the time for silly antics) and soon she is back, either feeling angry that I should take issue with substandard treatment or devastated and bereft and worried I don’t like her and she has no idea why. Often bounces between the two.

Try to sit down and talk and it becomes extremely reactive and she just repeats ‘I am not the problem, you are for cutting me out/not being there for me.’ I calmly explain, ‘Jane, let’s just move on. For future I don’t like it when you look me up and down/call me boring/insert anything else that she has done’. She denies it, says I am sensitive and looking for trouble/the worst in her and says she feels sorry for me because I’ll never get over the grudges I hold. If I repeat myself, she says I am gaslighting her and invalidating her feelings. If anything surely it’s the other way round.

Other people either; do not show up for her enough, do not respect her, do not put equal effort in, she believes she is giver while other people ‘take’. She is quite assertive and bold and reposts things on social media along the lines of, choose people who choose you, know your worth or there’s the door etc. It is as if she has a genuine deep seated belief that nobody else is good enough, and it’s conform to her standards or else. No flexibility of thinking at all

Why would someone always feel persecuted like this?

It’s not misused. This person hasn’t been through any trauma themselves and has actively said as much, saying they have had a blessed time of it and are fortunate and the luckiest. I know them very personally and would agree with them. That’s why it doesn’t fit with their behaviour here

Some spoilt people are like this- they’re used to having everything their own way so can’t cope when things differ.

Being a victim of something and having a victim mindset are two very different things indeed. I genuinely can’t be bothered to explain what should be obvious to anybody with even the most basic reading comprehension.

Thank you

Some people are better calibrated and more flexible of thought than others. If as you say she'll need to recognise her attitude in herself and work to change if she wants her own situation to improve.

But they can co-exist.

Might be my own bias, because like attracts like, but the majority of my peers with the same mindset had just as much reason, if not more so, to count themselves as having been victimised.

Regardless of how many “real victim” points you have or do not have when you catch Victim Identity, you are still going to repel people. You are still going to be stuck waiting for a rescue that will never come, until you rescue yourself.

My ex and their siblings had a victim mentality. All through the work of their mother who would never ever think they could possibly do anything wrong.

I think it often stems from having an insecure attachment style and then having formed destructive relationships in early adulthood.

However, I think it would be better to look inwards. Why haven't you stepped back and detached from this relative yourself? It's not healthy to give this much headspace or emotion to someone you find so difficult. I think this would be worth exploring.

Of course they can coexist, having a certain mindset can be the case regardless of the reality. The difference is that somebody who has been an actual victim of something has had harm inflicted upon them, where somebody who has a victim mindset is more than likely inflicting harm on others. The two things can coexist as you say, but the point where an adult starts projecting that harm, perceived or real, onto others, is the point where they become the perpetrator and other people have to protect themselves. Sometimes victims become perpetrators, and at that point if you’re on the other end of it you have to protect yourself regardless, because the damage done isn’t diminished by how sad or oppressed the perpetrator.

I'd have to walk away and leave her to it. Can't be bothered with all that

Many things can play into the victim mindset as PPs have mentioned. I do work in mental health and narcissists can show this kind of behaviour, but so can people who survived trauma.
Best not to try and be an armchair psychologist and just stay away from her if you don’t like how she behaves. You’re unlikely to be able to fix it or make it better.

I think it’s called external locus of control.

It’s a behaviour that leaves you lacking agency and trapped in various uncomfortable situations but is otherwise quite comfortable and convenient.

I have an internal locus of control. Anything in my life I don’t like, I can choose to make changes in the hope of remedying it. I can work at exempt, get an extra job, move if my neighbours are aresholes. It’s not easy to do those things, in fact it’s hard work and frequently frustrating, but I can try and find solutions.

People with external locus of control are at the mercy of whatever happens to them. If they have a crap job, it’s because the boss is bad/there are no jobs/the teacher picked on them at school so they failed their exams.

etc. It’s comfortable because you don’t have to do anything. Sometimes you can even make other people do it all for you.

My now DH’s EW is always the ‘victim’ - never takes any responsibility for her own actions or behaviour and everything she so always someone else’s fault. It’s so tiresome watching a grown adult act like a young child.

It’s a learned behaviour.

It often evolves as a defence mechanism to cope with adverse life events. People who constantly blame other people or situations for the events in their lives have a victim mentality.

Neuro Linguistic Programming is quite used on this.
it was years ago since I read up on it, but ideas like ‘the most flexible person has the advantage’, and ‘you know the map not the territory’, are quite useful for dealing with complex situations.

People who are in that mindset seem to perceive all control as being external to them (often because this has been their experience in life). Constantly being in survival / fight / flight mode means that people might be hyper vigilant to criticism or threat.

They don’t half make excuses then get attacky if you suggest they might try to perhaps take some control themselves though.

Maybe because they feel powerless and don’t enjoy being in that place and being told they could get out if they want to, implies that they’re somehow responsible for it.

I don’t disagree that people are in control of their mindset and can take more control but I recognise that this isn’t easy and can take years. I also can see that stepping into a place where you are recognising the control you have might make you feel worse initially.

I agree. I think also these people often have very low self esteem and poor self awareness - but that might not be obvious from the way they act. Narcissists for example have very low self esteem at their core, but a huge ego that tells them they are amazing and other people are the problem if they don't see it.

So if you have very poor self esteem then you cannot cope with ever being to blame or responsible for anything - basically it's survival. But you don't have the awareness to see that that is what is going on, you just see that you are the victim.

Also when you have low self esteem the changes you need to make to take control of your life can be completely overwhelming. You're just trying to hold it together today - planning something to come to fruition in a year or two is beyond your capabilities.

It all tends to come from childhood. People can think though that they had a good childhood - because it was their 'normal' - and not realise that it was actually emotionally abusive in some way and has in fact had a huge impact on their behaviour as adults. Where parents are very controlling or manipulative for example.

I agree with what @pickledandpuzzled wrote. I think it’s partly how some humans are wired and partly from their upbringing / conditioning. People with a victim mindset tend to be entirely unaware that they have this even though it controls their entire way of thinking. Once someone has self awareness it’s entirely possible to break free from victim mentality but as someone upthread wrote, some people are very comfortable believing that others are to blame for whatever’s wrong in their life and they will probably never change.

As other posters said I think it can often be that a person was, at one point, a victim and they never moved on. That became their identity. It’s fine when it’s centred around the time they are actually being victimised but that identity becomes core to their being, it can really erode who they are. A hard life can make a hard heart.

The person I know who is like that has no ability to take responsibility for their own behaviour, either because they're deliberately a gaslighting self-centred pain in the arse, or they genuinely are unable to function as a normal adult does and are stuck in petulant child mode.

I think it's a mix of the two.

I've never known someone have quite the endless run of issues with friends, partners, family, colleagues, managers etc

Narcissists, especially covert narcissists, often have a victim mentality. From what I have read, they are most likely formed as a result of a combination of being pre-disposed to narcissim (genetic?), and genuine trauma in childhood.

Certainly that's true for the people like this I know . Interestingly, both my mother and MIL display some traits, but minor. Both did have trauma as children- but not as much.

Neuro diversity? Being gaslight by those around them?