From Victim To Empowered
Or how to have a hand in shaping your own life, and how we can shape the future of our planet
It amazes me how many people float through their lives, experiencing “life” as something that happens to them. Life becomes an endless series of random events to which they react. Events are either immediate and personal, or more distant not as personal. Feelings are usually relegated to two kinds: good feelings, and bad feelings.
Experienced this way, life seems pretty two dimensional and the person seems to be essentially sleep-walking through a life in which they have no sense of agency. They are as much victims of circumstances, fate, others’ ill will or beneficence as they are to natural disasters. They will usually follow what they think is expected of them, often dictated by the culture or society they’re in, or what they expect of themselves. When things sometimes don’t work out, they blame others, or “bad luck,” or the “little black cloud” that just seems to follow them around.
Socrates was right when he famously made the statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
I work in therapy with a client, Steve, whose presenting issue was that he “found himself” yelling at his kids, and although he could justify yelling because sometimes his kids were…
