In a dangerous situation without hope of escape, a strategy for survival is to blame oneself. It’s not fair, but it does have a kind of logic behind it. If you’re in a situation in which you have no viable options for self-determination, the next best thing is to imagine control.
If a child, for example, is being abused by a parent, they have little recourse. Kids can’t just decide to move. They are stuck with their abuser and the abuse. The experience of powerlessnes can be nothing short of terrifying.
Instead, most kids will decide to blame themselves. Because, the logic goes, if it’s their fault, then they can conceivably make the abuse stop.
So they watch the abuser carefully and try to predict which behaviors on their part will avoid or initiate the abuse. And sometimes, the abuse doesn’t happen, so they try to figure out what they did to create that outcome.
In actuality, whether the abuse happens has little to nothing to do with them. Sometimes, the person doing the abusing just has a good day.
The child experiencing the abuse however, scrambles to figure out how they caused this outcome, only to find that doing the same things the following day doesn’t yield the same results.
And this pattern can continue well past childhood into adulthood. Rather than acknowledging the terror of powerlessness, it seems safer to continue to imagine having control over the behavior of others, even though it doesn’t work.
The way out of the cycle is to recognize that the abuse is in the past. You’ve already survived it. The terror that may still be held in the body, can be released by acknowledging it and softening one’s heart to the experience. Emotions come and go. They only persist when we avoid them.
If a person finds themselves in an abusive experience as an adult, acknowledging the powerlessness can help them get to safety. If someone is treating you badly, you need to understand that it’s not your fault and that you can not change the behavior of others.
The danger lies in continuing to assume control of others rather than recognizing a dangerous situation.