Quotes & Sayings About Self Victimization

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry - between, say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off. — Wendell Berry

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. — Christopher Lasch

What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work. — Camille Paglia

I stayed in therapy long enough to know that nothing that happened to me was my fault. I didn't do anything to invite it or deserve it. But that just makes it worse. Maybe I don't blame myself for what happened, but when they tell you that something was completely and utterly random, they're also telling you something else. That nothing you do matters. It doesn't matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway. Evil's resourceful that way ... They tell you it was random to make you feel blameless. But all I hear them telling me is that I have no control, and if I have no control, then I'm powerless. I would have preferred being blamed. — Katja Millay

In a relationship where awareness is expanding, both people evolve together. Instead of projecting, they view the other person as a mirror of themselves. This is the basis of a spiritual relationship, where you can unfold your true self and relate from that level, see the other person as a soul equal to you, base your happiness on being real, not on illusions and expectations, use intimacy to evolve and grow, get past victimization by taking responsibility for your half of the relationship, ask what you can give before demanding what you can get. — Deepak Chopra

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate. — Shelby Steele

Regardless of how often the appetite for entertainment violence becomes addictive, increased exposure does risk further desensitizing viewers. And the element of pleasure that they derive may lead them to regard violence as a more acceptable way of dealing with problems, and victimization as more tolerable so long as it befalls others, not themselves. — Sissela Bok

People who talk a lot about their victimization make me uncomfortable. It's as if they use their suffering as weapons or badges of some kind. — Joy Kogawa

Some victims do need to "blame" themselves and take responsibility. — Bryant McGill

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse. — Judith Lewis Herman

We live in a society of victimization, where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves. — Marilyn Manson

The denunciation and smearing of truly gifted people like Rodriguez - people the Chicano community should be proud of - by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Chicano Studies is, alas, an everyday spectacle. (Did anyone in the Chicano Studies community even take note when Dana Gioia, who is one of the best poets of his generation and happens to be half Mexican American, was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002? No, because he made it on his merits and not by being a victimization hustler.) — Bruce Bawer

We are born winners, but we are hypnotized by the society to succumb to mediocrity and moulded into self-victimization. It is for each one of us to regain our self-geniusness. — Vishwas Chavan

I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption. — Walter Kirn

Certainly we struggle as victims of other people's unkindness. We have been sinned against. But we cannot excuse our sinful responses to others on the grounds of their mistreatment of us. We are responsible for what we do. We are both strugglers and sinners, victims and agents, people who hurt and people who harm. — Larry Crabb

It would be a mind-boggling endeavor to try to identify each individual who claims to have been a survivor of victimization during this period of 24 years. — Jose Ramos-Horta

No enlightened person would deny its premise, but as an ongoing program it is monotonous, limited, locked in a perception of victimization. — Robert Brustein

The story of how shit got in our meat is the story of one of the central characteristics of carnism, and of other violent ideologies: the system depends on a constituency of indirect victims, inadvertent victims who not only suffer the consequences of the system, but who also help that system by unwittingly participating in their own victimization. The system creates such victims by appearing to be something it is not, so that we feel safe when we are at risk and free when we have been coerced. The story of how shit got in our meat is the story of the human casualties of carnism. — Melanie Joy

On an unconscious level, the demonization of sexuality usually implies the demonization of males and the victimization of females. — Warren Farrell

Remember also that the great complaint carnival is not a celebration; it's a bandwagon of misery. Our complaints trivialize our experience - both at work and in our personal lives. When we complain, we disconnect. When we complain, we hold whatever or whoever we're complaining about as a shield between us. We perpetuate an old community of victimization and helplessness. But when we take the time to communicate about our fears and insecurities - our real lives - we connect on a deeper, authentic level. When we connect through this deeper humanness, we create a new community of support and possibility — Alex Pattakos

Codependence means we are depending on something outside of ourselves to provide our sense of wellbeing and are not being true to ourselves and our own feelings. As long as we keep believing that we can make someone else happy or that someone else has the power to make us happy, we are setting ourselves up for frustration, failure, and possibly victimization. — Roz Van Meter

I have truly moved beyond my victimization. I do not think of myself as a victim. I don't think of myself as a survivor. I think of myself as someone who through forgiveness has healed her soul and body and moved on to help other people. — Stephanie Davis

In a series of three studies, the offenders who claimed they were abused as a child were 67 percent, 65 percent, and 61 percent without the threat of a polygraph. With polygraph (and conditional immunity), the offenders who claimed they were abused as children were 29 percent, 32 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The polygraph groups reported approximately half the amount of victimization as children as the nonpolygraph groups did.
Nonetheless, the notion that most offenders were victims has spread throughout the field of sexual abuse and is strangely comforting for most professionals. — Anna C. Salter

Remember that we become what we believe that we should be, so resentment may stop us from realizing it. Resentment and victimization affect your vibration and lead you to attract challenges related to more situations that make you feel like a victim and resentful. — Daniel Marques

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttock, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals. — William F. Buckley Jr.

There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth; that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again. — Steve Maraboli

Unfortunately, victimization convinces men and women who should be looking for a Savior to search for a scapegoat. After all, if I am not to blame for what I do, the Cross is much ado about nothing. How hopelessly out of date the old spiritual sounds to us. "Not my mother or my father, but it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Victims do not need God, just a sympathetic therapist or a good lawyer.41 — D. A. Carson

I suppose in antique Marxist terms we are lavishly paid because we are perfect tools for the class even higher up, those who own the ballpark. You can occasionally have some sympathy for those frequently unhappy souls with big inheritances from birth. This was fate in which the sense of victimization is always possible. But my own class is undeserving of a mote, a mite, a filament, an iota of sympathy. We are self-made barkers, toy dogs, prime weenies. — Jim Harrison

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor. — Bret Easton Ellis

Having low self-esteem and a shield of lard are not guarantees of safety. Having a warrior spirit, high self worth (most people are assaulted by someone they know, so if you think you're only worthy of hanging out with controlling low-life's, that's who you'll attract into your circle) and the ability to run, hit, kick and holler loudly are far more effective weapons against victimization. — Jane Olson

I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Three aspects of the self betrayer's conduct always go together: accusing others, excusing oneself, and displaying oneself as a victim. — C. Terry Warner

Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defence. It is the victim who is responsible. This was Hitler's constant and deeply paradoxical claim. As Jeffrey Herf points out, he and his propagandists had to maintain two completely contradictory ideas: 'one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim'.23 In general, as Vamik Volkan notes, dualists tend to combine 'paradoxical feelings of omnipotence and victimization'.24 On the one hand we are masters of the universe; on the other we are the devil's slaves. — Jonathan Sacks

With men, we blame the victim. We blame men because we have camouflaged men's victimization by teaching men to also be the victimizer. Men's victimizer status camouflages men's victim status. — Warren Farrell

Many of you remember The Scarlet Letter, the novel that wardrobed its protagonist in a stigma or sign of reproach. But "A" is not the only letter a person can feel she is wearing. Some of us have looked like we spilled alphabet soup on our sweaters. Beloved, if you are wearing any kind of reproach from your past - especially if victimization has placed a letter there that never belonged on you - may God remind you of the cross of Christ and memorialize the victory it brought you. Let Him cut that old piece of fabric from your life, roll it in the blood of Jesus, and cast it away forever. — Beth Moore

Victimization is about powerlessness, and justice is about amplifying the voices of those who have been silenced. Healing — Shane Claiborne

For blacks in our society, victimization may be a true issue. But it isn't a true issue for women. Neither men nor women are victimized. The true issue, that I try to point out, is that both sexes suffer restricted roles. — Warren Farrell

But when General Ziaul Haq introduced the strict blasphemy - 295 A, B, C - of Pakistan's penal code, then from 1986 to today there are hundreds cases that are registered under the protection of blasphemy law. And until today, no case against any minorities, and especially Christians, is proved in the higher court. The lower court would order punishment but the higher court would always acquit people. So it proves that this law is being used as a tool of victimization against minorities and innocent people of Pakistan. — Shahbaz Bhatti

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil. — Jonathan Haidt

Our victimization in a way, can turn us into bullies because, the other person isn't doing something that we want and we get hurt. That way we get to bully that person and tell them basically you're a bad person for hurting me but, if you're burned all over and I give you a gentle hug and I dont know it, I'm not hurting you so to speak. It's the burns that are hurting you. — Stefan Molyneux

I think the media projected the case of Asia Bibi in a right way. They have given the importance of this case and especially how the blasphemy law is being misused for the victimization [of religious minorities]. — Shahbaz Bhatti

Victimization is often a dynamic. In many cases the victim is also a participant in their own victimization. — Bryant McGill

Victimization has its privileges, and I want some. — Mason Cooley

Multiculturalism is a campaign to lower America's moral status by defining the American experience is terms of myriad repressionsand their victims. By rewriting history, and by using name calling ("Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!") to inhibit debate, multiculturalists cultivate grievances, self pity and claims to entitlements arising from victimization. — George Will

I don't want any injustice brought against the bullies. Bullies just don't know any better. Anyone who is crying about police brutality or victimization as an adult needs to stop it and realize the privileges we have in this country. — Ariel Pink

Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization. The negative energy generated by that focus, combined with neglect in areas they could do something about, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink. — Stephen R. Covey

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews? — Iain Pears

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat. — James Ellroy

There are very serious forms of, and reactions to, sibling victimization. — David Finkelhor

Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another. — Anna Kavan

The dream doesn't lie in victimization or blame; it lies in hard work, determination and a good education. — Alphonso Jackson

It may be hard to hear, but victim thinking is actually self-centered. If you're stuck in a victim mindset, you feel one down, helpless, and at the mercy of others. From this place you perceive yourself as the target of unfortunate events and other people. You may interpret random events as being about your exceptionally bad luck or as a sign that other people are out to get you. You become "terminally unique" in your outlook and you may even become paranoid. When you take on the role of victim as an identity or a badge of honor, you are actively participating in your victimization and disowning your authentic personal power. "You are only a victim for a nanosecond." - Pia Mellody — Vicki Tidwell Palmer

The FBI continues to work with tribes through the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 to help tribal governments better address the unique public safety challenges and disproportionately high rates of violence and victimization in many tribal communities. — James Comey

A person will complain about his problems, unwilling to receive solutions, while demanding attention trough a victimization, reflecting lack of responsibility. — Mark Brightlife

But, in fact, the self-help movement still divides, roughly, into two camps. There is Empowerment - broadly speaking, the idea that you are fully responsible for all you do, good and bad. And, in contrast, there is Victimization, which sells the idea that you are not responsible for what you do (at least not the bad things). Victimization and Empowerment represent the yin and the yang of the self-help movement. — Steve Salerno

Most men and women born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationships from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way ... Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization. — Bell Hooks

when a victim tells her story and people respond with You-should-have-this or You-should-never-have-that, they are often adding to the victimization. — Gavin De Becker

I believe that all people allow the act of victimization to take lead in their lives without realizing or trying to stop it. You hear of another person's problems, automatically feel the need to salve their pain, so you make it your own. After a while, it no longer matters if the problem was yours to begin with. You absorb their pain into your body, your blood stream, your soul. It becomes yours. — Leigh Hershkovich

Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life. — Shelby Steele

She says, "I'll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me."
Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us - just her supporting cast.
Mrs. Clark, leading us, she looks back and says, "He what?"
And from behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, "Me, too. He raped me first."
Saint Gut-Free says, "Well what the hell ... He poked me, too."
As if poor skinny Saint Gut-Free had enough ass left to poke.
And Mrs. Clark says, "This is not funny. Not in the least."
"Tough," the Matchmaker tells her. "It's wasn't funny, either, when you raped me."
Shaking his ponytail, the Duke of Vandals tells the Matchmaker, "You couldn't pay to get raped. — Chuck Palahniuk