Saturday 1 May 2021

Post No. 1,844 - Internalised victim blaming

There is a fair bit of awareness of the problems of internalised  homophobia (see also here) / internalised  transphobia (see also here, here, and here) and internalised  racism  (see also here and here) / internalised white supremacism, and I recently posited - and found evidence of - internalised sexism

All of these - to simplify - boil down to "going along with it" to improve chances of survival or cope with the abuse, or wrongly accepting that the haters' hate has some validity.

I am now going to posit that there is a similar problem, shown partly by those with a wrong understanding of karma (as a starting point, if you accept karma comes from bad acts you MUST also accept karma also comes from good acts), suffering from toxic positivity, and some of the most simplistic, feeble and naïve inanities of the New Age movements: internalised victim blaming. 

People suffering this would see themselves as having to take responsibility for everything that happens in their life, in that they have to overcome it - their catch cry is the facile "if I control my reaction to it, "it" doesn't matter". 

Well, if the "it" concerned is something harmful (e.g., work burnout [now often seen as a workplace OHS issue], being on the receiving end of discrimination - especially systemic discrimination, being a survivor/victim of domestic violence, being a victim of crime, etc), "it" does matter. 

By all means, try to cope, but keep in mind that if coping is difficult, that is not your responsibility - the "blame" / fault / responsibility lies squarely with the person / system / event that is behind your reactions, not your reactions. 

Taking a more realistic view of responsibility will, in my opinion, likely aid in doing what healing you can, and will also ensure you do not stop others trying to fix the cause of the problem (e.g., by changing society's values to be inclusive and non-discriminatory, addressing poverty to fix probably one of the widest causes of crime, etc) and may even be able to be part of that yourself.

This topic has been addressed by others - most often, in what I have seen, in terms of victims of sexual assault (who also effectively undergo a second sexual assault from the legal system): see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

My opinion is that the problem is broader, and covers many other situations.