In my experience, victims ask, “Why me?” Survivors ask, “What now?”
Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is no way to escape being hurt or oppressed by other people or circumstances. The only guarantee is that no matter how kind we are or how hard we work, we’re going to have pain. We’re going to be affected by environmental and genetic factors over which we have little or no control. But we each get to choose whether or not we stay a victim. We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we do get to choose how we respond to our experience.
Many of us stay in a prison of victimhood because, subconsciously, it feels safer. We ask “Why?” over and over, believing that if we could just figure out the reason, the pain would lessen. Why did I get cancer? Why did I lose my job? Why did my partner have an affair? We search for answers, for understanding, as if there’s a logical reason to explain why things happened the way they did. But when we ask why, we’re stuck searching for someone or something to blame—including ourselves.
Why did this happen to me?
Well, why not you?
Maybe I went to Auschwitz and survived so I could talk to you now, so I could live as an example of how to be a survivor instead of a victim. When I ask “What now?” instead of “Why me?” I stop focusing on why this bad thing happened—or is happening—and start paying attention to what I can do with my experience. I’m not looking for a savior or a scapegoat. Instead, I begin to look at choices and at possibilities.
My parents didn’t have a choice in how their lives ended. But I have many choices. I can feel guilty that I survived when so many millions, including my mother and father, perished. Or I can choose to live and work and heal in a way that releases the hold of the past. I can embrace my strength and freedom.
Victimhood is rigor mortis of the mind. It’s stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, and stuck on the losses and deficits: what I can’t do and what I don’t have.
This is the first tool for moving out of victimhood: approach whatever is happening with a gentle embrace. It doesn’t mean you have to like what’s happening. But when you stop fighting and resisting, you have more energy and imagination at the ready to figure out “What now?” To move forward instead of nowhere. To discover what you want and need in this moment, and where you want to go from here.
Every behavior satisfies a need. Many of us choose to stay victims because it gives us license to do zero on our own behalf. Freedom comes with a price. We’re called to be accountable for our own behavior—and to take responsibility even in situations we didn’t cause or choose.
Life is full of surprises.
A few weeks before Christmas, Emily—forty-five, mother of two, happily married for eleven years—sat down with her husband after the children had gone to bed. She was about to suggest they watch a movie when he looked at her and calmly said the words that would upend her life.
“I met someone,” he said. “We’re in love. I don’t think you and I should be married anymore.”
Emily was completely floored. She couldn’t see a way forward. And then the next surprise came. She had breast cancer; a large tumor that required immediate, aggressive chemotherapy. During the first weeks of treatment, she felt paralyzed. Her husband postponed discussion about the state of their marriage to see her through the months of chemo, but Emily was in a daze.
“I thought my whole life had come to an end,” she said. “I thought I was a dying woman.”
But when I spoke to her eight months after her diagnosis, she’d just had surgery and received more unexpected news: she’d achieved complete remission.
“The doctors never would have predicted it,” she said. “It’s really a miracle.”
Her cancer is gone. But so is her husband. After her chemo ended, he told her he’d made his decision. He’d rented an apartment. He wanted a divorce.
“I was so frightened to die,” Emily told me. “Now I have to learn to live.”
She’s consumed by worry for her children, by the hurt of betrayal, concerns over finances, and loneliness, so vast it’s like she’s fallen off the edge of a cliff.
“I’m still finding it so hard to say yes to my life,” she said.
The divorce has thrown her into her worst fear made real, a deep-seated terror of abandonment she’s harbored since she was four, when her mother became clinically depressed. Her dad turned silent about her mom’s illness, escaping into work, leaving Emily to make it on her own. When her mother later died by suicide, it confirmed the reality she knew yet sought to avoid: that the people you love disappear.
“I’ve always been in a relationship, since I was fifteen,” she said. “I never learned to be happy on my own, with myself, to love myself.” Her voice breaks when she says those words: love myself.
I often say that we need to give our children roots, and give them wings. We need to do the same for ourselves. The only one you have is you. You’re born alone. You die alone. So start by getting up in the morning and going to the mirror. Look yourself in the eye and say, “I love you.” Say, “I’m never going to leave you.” Hug yourself. Kiss yourself. Try it!
And then keep showing up for yourself all day, every day.
“But how do I deal with my husband?” Emily asked. “When we meet, he seems totally calm and relaxed. He’s happy with his decision. But all my emotions come out. I start crying. I can’t control myself when I see him.”
“You can if you want to,” I told her. “But you have to want to, and I can’t make you want to. I don’t have that power. You do. Make a decision. You may feel like screaming and crying. But don’t act on it unless it’s in your best interest.”
Sometimes it just takes one sentence to point the way out of victimhood: Is it good for me?
Is it good for me to sleep with a married man? Is it good for me to eat a piece of chocolate cake? Is it good for me to beat my cheating husband on the chest with my fist? Is it good for me to go dancing? To help a friend? Does it deplete me or empower me?
Another tool for moving out of victimhood is to learn to cope with loneliness. It’s what most of us fear more than anything else. But when you’re in love with yourself, alone doesn’t mean lonely.
“Loving yourself is good for your kids, too,” I told Emily. “When you show them that you’ll never lose you, you show them that they’re not losing you, either. That you’re here now. Then they can live their lives, rather than you worrying about them, and them worrying about you, and everybody worrying, worrying. To your children, and to yourself, you say, ‘I’m here. I’m showing up for you.’ You’ll give them—and yourself—what you never had: a healthy mother.”
When we start loving ourselves, we start patching up the holes in our hearts, the gaping places that feel like they’ll never be filled. And we start making discoveries. “Aha!” we learn to say. “I didn’t see it that way before.” I asked Emily what discoveries she’d made in the last eight months of turmoil. Her eyes brightened.
“I’ve discovered how many wonderful people I have around me—my family, friends, people I didn’t know before who became friends during my therapy. When the doctor told me I had cancer, I thought my life had come to an end. Now I’ve met so many people. I’ve learned I can fight, that I’m powerful. It took me forty-five years to learn that, but I’m lucky I know it now. My new life is already beginning.”
We can all find strength and freedom, even within terrible circumstances. Honey, you’re in charge, so take charge. Don’t be Cinderella, sitting in the kitchen waiting for a guy with a foot fetish. There are no princes or princesses. You have all the love and power you need within. So write down what you want to achieve, the kind of life you want to live, the kind of partner you want to have. When you go out, look like a million-dollar baby. Join a group of people dealing with similar struggles, where you can care for each other and commit yourselves to something bigger than yourselves. And then get curious. What’s next? How’s it going to turn out?
Our minds come up with all sorts of brilliant ways to protect us. Victimhood is a tempting shield because it suggests that if we make ourselves blameless, our grief will hurt less. As long as Emily identified as the victim, she could pass all the blame and responsibility for her well-being on to her ex-husband. Victimhood offers a false respite by deferring and delaying growth. The longer we stay there, the harder it is to leave.
“You’re not a victim,” I told Emily. “It’s not who you are—it’s what was done to you.”
We can be wounded and accountable. Responsible and innocent. We can give up the secondary gains of victimhood for the primary gains of growing and healing and moving on.
The whole reason to step out of victimhood is so we can step into the rest of our lives. Barbara was trying to navigate this pivot when she contacted me a year after her mother’s death. She looked young for sixty-four, her skin smooth, highlights in her long blond hair. But she seemed to hold a heavy burden in her chest, and her wide blue eyes were full of sorrow.
Barbara’s relationship with her mother had been complicated, and so her grief was also complicated. Demanding and controlling, her mother had sometimes explicitly reinforced Barbara’s victimhood, fixating on problems like bad grades and breakups, stoking Barbara’s belief that she was flawed and helpless and would never amount to much. In some ways, it was a relief to be free from her mother’s distorted and critical perspective. But she also felt restless and unsettled. A recent back injury had interrupted the job she loved at a local café, and she had trouble falling asleep at night, her mind churning with questions. Is my time almost up? What have I failed at? What have I done to be remembered? What is the outcome of my life?
“I feel sad and anxious and insecure,” she said. “I just can’t come to any peace.”
I often see this happen to middle-aged women who have lost their mothers. The unfinished emotional business of the relationship lives on—and death makes it feel impossible that there will ever be closure.
“Have you released your mom from the past?” I asked.
Barbara shook her head. Her eyes filled with tears.
Tears are good. They mean we’ve been pierced by an important emotional truth. If I ask a question that prompts a patient to cry, it’s like striking gold. We’ve hit on something essential. Yet the moment of release is as vulnerable as it is profound. I leaned in, all present, no rush.
Barbara wiped her face and took a long, shaky breath. “I want to ask you about something,” she said. “A memory from childhood I keep replaying nonstop in my mind.”
I asked her to close her eyes while she described the incident, to tell it in present tense, as though it were happening now.
“I’m three,” she began. “We’re all in the kitchen. My dad’s at the breakfast table. My mom is standing over me and my older brother. She’s angry. She lines us up side by side and says, ‘Who do you like best, me or your father?’ My dad is watching it happen, and he starts to cry. He says, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do that to the kids.’ I want to say that I love my dad best; I want to go over and sit in his lap and hug him. But I can’t do that. I can’t say that I love him or I’ll make my mom mad. I’ll get in trouble. So I say I like my mom the best. And now…” Her voice cracked, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Now I wish I could take it back.”
“You were a good survivor,” I told her. “A smart cookie. You did what you had to do to survive.”
“Then why does it hurt so much?” she said. “Why can’t I just let it go?”
“Because that little girl doesn’t know she’s safe now. Take me to her there in the kitchen,” I said. “Tell me what you see.”
She described the window facing the backyard, the yellow flowers on the handles of the cabinet doors, how her eyes were exactly the height of the oven dials.
“Talk to that little girl. How is she feeling now?”
“I love my dad. But I can’t say it.”
“You’re powerless.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks to her chin. She wiped at them, then cradled her face in her hands.
“You were a child then,” I said. “You’re an adult now. Go to that precious, one-of-a-kind little girl. Be her mother now. Take her hand and tell her, ‘I’m going to take you out of here.’ ”
Barbara’s eyes were still closed. She swayed side to side.
“Hold her hand,” I continued. “Walk her to the door, down the front steps, out to the sidewalk. Walk her up the block. Turn the corner. Tell the little girl, ‘You’re not stuck there anymore.’ ”
The prison of victimhood often gets established in childhood, and even when we’re adults, it can keep us feeling as powerless as we did when we were young. We can release ourselves from victimhood by helping that inner child feel safe, and by letting her experience the world with an adult’s autonomy.
I guided Barbara to keep holding the hand of the wounded little girl. To take her for a walk. Show her the flowers in the park. Spoil her and love her right up. Give her an ice cream cone or a soft teddy bear to squeeze—whatever she wanted most to feel safe. “And then take her down to the beach,” I said. “Show her how to kick the sand. Tell her, ‘I’m here and we’re going to be angry.’ Kick the sand with her. Yell and shout. Then take her home. Not back to the kitchen, but where you live now. The place where you’ll always show up to take care of her.”
Barbara’s eyes were still closed, her mouth and cheeks more relaxed. But a furrow of tension still gathered between her eyes.
“That little girl was stuck in the kitchen, and she needed you to get her out,” I said. “You rescued her.”
She nodded slowly, but the tension didn’t leave her face.
Her work in the kitchen wasn’t done. There were others to rescue.
“Your mother needs you, too,” I said. “She’s still standing in that kitchen. Open the door for her. Tell her it’s time for both of you to be free.”
Barbara imagined going to her father first, to the breakfast table where he still sat in silence, his cheeks wet with tears. She kissed him on the forehead and spoke the love she’d had to hide as a child. Then she went to her mother. She put a hand on her shoulder, looked into her troubled eyes, and nodded toward the open door, the patch of green lawn visible from where they stood. When Barbara opened her eyes, something in her face and shoulders appeared to relax.
“Thank you,” she said.
Releasing ourselves from victimhood also means releasing others from the roles we’ve assigned them.
I had a chance to use this tool myself a few months ago, when I was on a speaking tour in Europe and invited my daughter Audrey to go with me. When she’d been in middle school and high school, training as a Junior Olympic swimmer, getting up at five in the morning for practice, her hair green from the constant exposure to chlorine, her father had usually been the one to accompany her to swim meets all over Texas and the Southwest. This was how Béla and I had managed the demands of our careers and three children—we’d acted as partners, splitting responsibilities. But that meant we each missed out on things. Traveling with Audrey now couldn’t replace the time we’d lost when she was younger. But it seemed like a welcome way to honor our relationship. Besides, this time I was the one who needed a chaperone!
We went to the Netherlands, and then on to Switzerland, where we sank our teeth into napoleon pastries as rich and sweet as the ones my father used to sneak home for me at night when he’d been out playing billiards. I’d been back to Europe numerous times since the war, but it was incredibly healing for me to be there, so close to my childhood and my trauma, with my magnificent daughter, to share silence and conversation, to hear her plans for launching a second career as a grief and leadership coach. One night, after I gave a speech to a roomful of global executives at a business school in Lausanne, someone surprised me by asking, “What’s it like, traveling with Audrey?”
I searched for the words to adequately convey how special this time was to me. I mentioned that middle children often get short shrift in families, and that Audrey had been raised largely by her older sister, Marianne, while I was running their little brother, John, all over El Paso—and even as far as Baltimore—in search of therapies for some undiagnosed developmental delays of great concern. John went on to graduate from the University of Texas as one of the top ten students in his class, and is now a respected civic leader and advocate for people with disabilities. I’m forever grateful he was able to receive interventions and vital support. But I’ve always felt guilty for the ways John’s unique needs occupied my attention and interrupted Audrey’s childhood, for the six-year age gap between Marianne and Audrey, for the burden my own trauma put on my children. Saying this impromptu, in public, was cathartic for me. It felt good to recognize it, to apologize.
But at the airport the next morning, Audrey confronted me.
“Mom,” she said, “we have to change the story of who I am. I don’t see myself as a victim. I need you to stop seeing me that way.”
My chest tightened with discomfort, with the rush to defend myself. I thought I’d been portraying her as a survivor, not a victim. But she was absolutely right. In trying to discharge my own guilt, I’d cast her in the role of the neglected child. I’d put us all in roles: I was the victimizer, Audrey the victim, and Marianne the rescuer. (Or, in another version of the same story, I cast John as the victim, myself as the rescuer, and Béla, whom I was so angry with in those years, as the victimizer.) The role of victim is often passed back and forth in relationships and families. But there can’t be a victim without a victimizer. When we stay a victim, or put someone else in that role, we reinforce and perpetuate the harm. In focusing on what Audrey hadn’t had growing up, I was undermining her survivor strength—her capacity to see any experience as an opportunity for growth. And I was trapping myself in a prison of guilt.
The first time I saw the power of the perspective shift from victim to survivor in action was as a clinical intern at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center, in the mid-1970s. One day I was assigned two new patients, both Vietnam veterans, both paraplegics with injuries of the lower spinal cord, both unlikely to walk again. They had the same diagnosis, the same prognosis. The first spent hours curled up in the fetal position on his bed, full of rage, cursing God and country. The other preferred to be out of bed, sitting up in his wheelchair. “I’m seeing everything differently now,” he told me. “My children came to visit me yesterday, and now that I’m in this wheelchair, I’m so much closer to their eyes.” He wasn’t happy to be disabled, to have compromised sexual function, to wonder if he’d ever be able to run a race with his daughter or dance at his son’s wedding. But he could see that his injury had afforded him a new perspective. And he could choose to see his injury as limiting and incapacitating—or as a new source of growth.
More than forty years later, in the spring of 2018, I saw my daughter Marianne make a similar choice. While traveling in Italy with her husband, Rob, she tripped on a set of stone steps and fell on her head, suffering a traumatic brain injury. For two weeks, we didn’t know if she would survive. Or, if she survived, who she would be. Would she be able to speak? Would she remember her children, her three beautiful grandsons, Rob, her siblings, me? Throughout those insufferable days when her life hung in the balance, I reached again and again to touch the bracelet Béla gave me when she was born, a thick braid made from three kinds of gold. When we’d fled Czechoslovakia in 1949, I smuggled it out in Marianne’s diaper. I’ve worn it every day since, a talisman of the life and love that emerge even from destruction and death, a reminder that there’s such a thing as survival against the odds.
For me, there is no more difficult feeling than fear mixed with powerlessness. I was gutted by Marianne’s suffering, terrified that we’d lose her—and there was nothing concrete to do about it, to heal her, to prevent the worst from happening. The fear would rise, and I’d say her Hungarian nickname, “Marchuka, Marchuka,” the syllables a kind of prayer. I realized it’s what I’d done in Auschwitz when I danced for Josef Mengele. Gone inward. Created a sanctuary inside myself, a place to keep my spirit safe within the turmoil of threat and uncertainty.
Miraculously, Marianne survived. She doesn’t remember the first weeks after the fall. Perhaps she went inward, too. Somehow—through excellent medical care, the constant support and presence of her husband and family, her own inner resources—she was able, bit by bit, to regain physical and cognitive function, to remember her children’s names. At first, it was difficult for her to swallow, and her sense of taste was distorted. I cooked for her nonstop, determined to try all of the foods she used to love. One day she asked me to make trepanka, a potato dish served with sauerkraut and brinza, a Czech farmer’s cheese. It was the food I most craved when I was pregnant with her! When I watched her try a first bite and smile, I felt deep in my bones that she was going to be okay.
In just a year and a half, she’s made a stunning recovery and is living and working as she did before the injury, with strength, brilliance, creativity, and passion.
Though many aspects of her recovery are out of her control, not easily explained, a matter of sheer luck, she’s also made choices that I know have helped her heal. When you’re in a vulnerable position, with limited energy, it is especially crucial to choose how to spend your time. Marianne has chosen to think like a survivor, focusing on what she needs to do to keep improving, listening to her body to know when it’s time to rest, and feeling and expressing gratitude for her health and all the people who are supporting her recovery. When she wakes up in the morning, she asks herself, “What am I going to do today? When will I do my therapy exercises? What projects do I want to work on? What do I need to do to take care of myself?”
Attitude isn’t everything. We can’t erase hardships or make ourselves well with our outlook alone. But how we spend our time and mental energy does affect our health. If we resist and rail against what we’re experiencing, we take away from our growth and healing. Instead, we can acknowledge the awful thing that is happening and find the best way to live with it.
This is especially true when we come up against setbacks or complications in our healing process. Brain injuries generally mean that patients are not as good at many of the things they used to do with ease or skill. Marianne is still working hard to reestablish all the neural networks that were damaged by the fall. She tires easily with too much standing or walking, and struggles with language retrieval. Except for the initial weeks of recovery, her memories are intact, but sometimes she can’t find the words for things—the name of a country she’s visited or a vegetable she wants to buy at the farmers market. She’s had to learn new methods for doing what she used to do effortlessly. When she prepares for a speech, she can’t just write down three points and trust her brain to remember the connections and fill in the gaps, as she did before her injury. Now she has to write down the entire speech—every word, every transition.
But interestingly, there are other things she does with more flexibility and innovation. She’s always been an accomplished home chef, and once had a cooking column in a San Diego newspaper. After her fall, she has had to reteach herself how to cook. In the process, she has begun inventing new recipes and going about old processes in a new way. She and Rob live in Manhattan now, but they spend as much of the summer as they can in La Jolla, where I live. This past summer she wanted to make me a cold cherry soup she’d prepared once for a dinner party in New York. She bought a bunch of sour cherries and reread two old Hungarian cookbooks, only to abandon the cookbooks and go about it her own way—preparing the soup cold instead of heating it and then cooling it down, adding three different kinds of fruit. Without the constant adaptations she’s had to make since the injury, she probably would have made the soup the same way she had before. Instead, she embraced the practice of reinvention her injury has required and let it guide her to something new. And it was delicious!
I can see in her eyes sometimes how tiring and frustrating it is to work so hard to do things she once took for granted. But she’s also attuned to the possibilities.
“It’s funny,” she told me, “but I feel like I’m intellectually alive in a different way.” Her face lit up the way it had as a child when she’d learned to read. “To tell you the truth, it’s kind of fun and thrilling.”
This isn’t an uncommon experience for people who’ve survived similar injuries. Marianne’s neurologist told her a number of his patients, never skilled artists, suddenly found after a major brain injury that they could draw or paint—and do it remarkably well. Something about the broken and reconfigured neural pathways allows many survivors to find they’re in possession of gifts they never had or knew about before.
What a beautiful reminder that the things that interrupt our lives, that stop us in our tracks, can also be catalysts for the emerging self, tools that show us a new way to be, that endow us with new vision.
This is why I say that in every crisis there is a transition. Awful things happen, and they hurt like hell. And these devastating experiences are also opportunities to regroup and decide what we want for our lives. When we choose to respond to what’s happened by moving forward and discovering our freedom to, we release ourselves from the prison of victimhood.