Fake-It-Until-You-Make-It vs. Victim-Thinking

What is Victim-Thinking. My quick answer is: toxic! Victim-Thinking is what we can easily fall into, when we suffer from something like self-harm. We tell ourselves, that it is not our fault. Tell ourselves, that we need to love ourselves, and take care of ourselves. And it is so easy to become lethargic. To blame everything on our self-harm. Because when everything has it’s reason in a disorder that we have no control over, we cannot be held responsible for anything. Which is basic determinism. But if we cannot be held responsible we can get rid of our entire judical system.

But we do have control over what we think about ourselves and I say considering ourselves a self-harm-victim is not healthy. Because that allows us to give up the fight. But don’t we all want to live in peace? And why should we not stop fighting, if it allows us to be at peace? Giving up may seem like we are achiving peace. But we really aren’t. Because giving in to our pain, will not release us in the long run, but hurt us even more.

So, if we are not victims, then what are we? That is up to everyone of us. We have a variety of attributes, that make us who we are. And self-harm is not one of them. We can choose one or a few of those attributes and decide that we shall be known for those. This can be anything, your hobby, to the way you talk to other, to the attitude you have towards your daily life. Focus on those. Picture the person you want to be and become that person. Actively. Choose to be that person. Rather than “just the person, who is always sad and hurts herself”.

 

The other extreme you can easily fall into is Fake-It-Until-You-Make-It. It is not less dangerous then victim-thinking. And in my eyes it is just as immature. The difference between just faking something and what I described in the last paragraph is, that one is taking an attribute, that naturally is ours and enhancing it. Making that one better, which results in us being a better person. Say we would like to be more positive (I choose that as an example, because I think it is so important). Being more positive can be achieved by appreciating the things around us. But there are two ways we can do that:

1. Seeing a random thing and deciding to like it.
2. Being on the lookout for things that we like.

The first is faking it. Because weare forcing yourself to like something, while we might actually even hate it. This works for a little. And sometimes faking it can jump-start us to get to appreciate new things, that we think we might like. Studying for example. Getting started is hard. But if we are studying what we love at some point it will become easy. In those situations faking can be okay. But only for a little while. If we fake for longer, we destroy us, because we are working against our will.The second is exactly what we want to do: we are not inventing an entirely new us, but we find something that we like about ourselves and enhance it. So afterwards we have more reason to love ourselves and are actually better, than before.