You already know we live in a society that re-victimizes the victim, right? A society that delegitimizes real victims of crime and loss, with widespread anti-victim generalizations and terminology?
I have previously written about eugenics, superiority, LEARNED HATE OF ALL TYPES. Click here for that piece and remember: important to both hate & helplessness, is that victims wouldn’t exist if not for the people who create them.
Defined in college text as “refusal or unwillingness to take on new tasks or challenges resulting from repeated failures or control by others,” learned helplessness can be applied to many scenarios…
The kid unwilling to try any musical instruments after failure at piano lessons and subsequent belittling. The woman whose husband finds his way in every time the authorities remove him. The parent with a negative “self-efficacy” causing him or her to respond differently and maybe give up parenting.
Learned helpless is the child that can’t stop their mother from being beaten, or the youth forced to heal her broken bones with no trip to the doctor.
It’s the overtired child whose parent tells doctors and teachers “he wouldn’t go to bed” instead of “we didn’t come home until 2 a.m.” Thus beginning the world of prescription drugs, to help make child calm or sleep. That child has already been indoctrinated to never dispute the parent, OR ELSE WAIT TIL WE GET HOME… helpless to speak the truth without consequences.
Children like this exist across America, with misdiagnosed ADHD due to the false-reporting of parents who use self-preservation bias in order to avoid admitting the truth of why the child isn’t getting sleep: partying, on the go lifestyle, fighting, or something else that keeps them awake.
You would think the dollars this country puts into child protection services would help our children feel comfortable to come forward, yet it is no wonder they don’t. They live with learned helplessness every single day, and then contribute to the same broken paradigm.
Society teaches that victims are WEAK. Victims are CRAZY. Use discretion in believing them because we all know people lie, they try to PLAY THE VICTIM!
If not teaching that victims are crazy, they support victimization with the dark reminders of what the world will think of you if a victim tells their heinous tale…
Helplessness is easy to indoctrinate into youth for the family with a closed off environment. In the past, horrible experiments were done on dogs by researchers Martin Seligman and Steven Maier and it was found that the more trauma (electric shocks) the caged dogs were subjected to with no way out, the quicker they learned there was no helping themselves and stopped trying.
The same results would show for children, if in fact ethics allowed this type of testing on children.
We can, however, tap into research that tells us parenting is the largest contributor to a child developing a normal and/or healthy LOCUS OF CONTROL–> the extent to which children feel they can control rewards and punishments in their own life.
When the psyche of a child is breached it leaves the victim with a trait that makes them a target in the future. They get labeled with society-pleasing terms like submissive, “high tolerance for negative behavior,” or just lumped in with all the girls that “only like bad boys.”
Society condones these learned helpless individuals, diagnoses them with “mental illness” and then they are revictimized in alarming numbers, falling into the role of what is called “lifetime revictimization.” Not only do they make perfect targets for an abuser; but the justice system, medical professionals, and even police officers are less likely to take their complaints seriously.
These people are part of a ‘big group’ that is finally being researched as POLYVICTIMS, and I would bet that in each case we would find instances of deeply instilled learned helplessness, the kind that impairs an individual with illogical thoughts and maladaptive behaviors, FOREVER.
Instead of ending with the learned helplessness discussed in the first part of this writing, I would like to go back to the VICTIMOLOGY part of this writing.
The trademark phrase is “playing the victim” and I would like someone to tell me, how EXACTLY does one decide who is and who is not a victim?
I did a little obsessing over numbers and came up with a list of people who are victims, whether of a crime or traumatizing circumstance…
Disasters and weather deaths, suicides, violent assaults, stillbirths, SIDS, murders, child maltreatment-founded, automobile deaths, veterans with PTSD, and rapes that have occurred in the FIVE YEARS, we get a total of 13,657,629.
More than 13 million people who very well may feel traumatized and/or like a victim, just within 5 years!
26 million in 10 years. 52 million in 20 years. That doesn’t even include the family members of accidental, cancer, and other unexpected deaths that leave a family feeling robbed.
Imagine how many victims are walking around, whether the trauma is perceived or real, feeling like a victim who, IF LISTENING TO WHAT CULTURE SAYS, needs to “just get over it.”
RIGHT?
