When I was five years old, my mother picked me up from kindergarten one day and took me to visit my grandmother. I was named after her, and I adored her. She was fragile and elegant and educated. I don’t remember her ever being well. My one enduring memory of her is seeing her sitting up in bed with her hair combed in a neat, soft pile on top of her head, her long, thin arms at her sides. She used to read to me by the hour from her wonderful and brilliantly illustrated storybooks. Her voice was clear and light, and I loved her funny-shaped hands, her sparkling green eyes. She had a sweet smile, and no matter when I popped into her room, she was happy to see me.
We lived next door to my grandparents, and I spent more time with her than I did at home. On the day when my mother picked me up from kindergarten, I ran into my grandmother’s bedroom while my mother prepared lunch. I was alone when I found her lying glassy-eyed, staring at the wall. Her breakfast dishes were on the floor, and there was cereal splattered on the wall. She was talking to me, her tongue thick and her voice so soft that I had to put my face next to hers to hear her. Her hands clutched mine, cold, thin, the life draining from them. When my mother found me, I was snuggled beside my grandma in the bed, thinking she was asleep. My mother had to coax me to stop combing her hair and singing to her. She was dead.
Years later, I understood the emotional impact my grandma’s death had on our family. My mother had insisted our families live in an apartment building next door to each other so she could nurse her mother back to health. She believed she could restore her to her former healthy and vibrant self. When my grandmother died, my mother was shattered. She was the oldest of seven children and had felt responsible. Her reaction to her mother’s death was a mixture of grief and guilt. She just couldn’t believe her mother had died. She told me years later how she believed she was a complete failure in caring for her mother because she couldn’t keep her alive. The first phase of grief, “I can’t believe it,” can take several months to go through, even longer. At this point in her life, my mother could see no escape from her pain. Feelings of loss and defeat immobilized her.
A lovely couple I once knew had an outwardly happy life until the husband’s father was killed in a freak airplane crash. This once-happy couple was suddenly thrown into a morass of confusion and sorrow. The father had been a major character in their marriage. Without him, depression and sadness permeated their lives. In time, this couple separated. Without the husband’s father’s powerful influence, their foundation crumbled.
Another couple are parents of an only child, a teenager, who has turned his back on church and his parents’ expectations of him. The parents see his behavior as mutiny. The wife tearfully told me, “I don’t understand why this is happening to us. We’re good people. Why couldn’t our son be a good person?” Their son is not a bad person. Creative, yes—bad, no. He’s trying out his wings, but moving in directions the parents don’t understand or approve of doesn’t make him a mutineer.
Victim misbeliefs include, “Things should always be the way I think they should be.” And that is always followed by, “When things don’t go as I think they should, it’s absolutely terrible, awful, bad, unthinkable, disastrous.” A victim way of thinking is, “I should be rewarded for my hard work and sacrifice,” and it’s this kind of thinking that erodes the heart’s pure love. When things don’t work out as hoped for, the victim [mis]believes, “I must accept misery and disappointment as a way of life.”
A Victim or a Survivor
Suffering can make either survivors or victims out of us. My mother, in time, I’m happy to say, became a survivor. She experienced the emotional numbness of losing her mother, plus the feelings of defeat and guilt. She grieved, but as time wore on, she realized her need to let go. She thought maybe she wasn’t a failure after all, and even if she was, did it disavow her value? Eventually, she chose to be a survivor, not a victim. She chose to find a better solution than self-denigration. All of this I learned much later when I was an adult as she shared the pain of her guilt and sorrow with me. I learned much from her powerful emotional achievement. She felt she had let down her mother, her family, and God too, but she rose to a higher level of love and grace when she stopped being a victim. Only then could she tap into the lasting gifts of happiness.
Do you know the difference between a victim and a survivor? The times you’re depressed and unhappy in your life may be due to victim consciousness, victim thinking, and victim behavior. Nobody has to stay a victim. We can be survivors. Here are some differences between the two.
| The Victim | The Survivor |
| Thinks because bad things have happened before, they will always happen. | Tells themselves that when bad things happen, it is not the end of the world. |
| Thinks, “Everything happens to me.” | Knows and experiences trouble and pain but doesn’t lose sight of blessings. |
| Sees no way out of problems. | In suffering and trial says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” |
| Expects loss and failure to happen to them. | Is at peace with loss and failure without blame, guilt, or shame. |
| Is dependent on others for their well-being. | Creates a life without the belief that others are responsible for their well-being. |
| Feels rejected and left out. | Examines feelings of rejection to see if they’re real, making positive and realistic changes to have and maintain rewarding and lasting relationships. |
| Takes no responsibility for their life. | Takes full responsibility for attitude, beliefs, feelings, and actions. This is true maturity. |
The couple who lost the husband’s father could not be called survivors. To this day, they believe the world is filled with evil and tragedy, and these beliefs are what shape the quality of their lives. Happiness eludes them because of their negative expectations of life. Victims feel the world is a dangerous place.
You can see why a victim is a person who lives in a constant state of fatigue or frustration. Life and relationships fail to produce rewards that the victim craves. A victim typically enters a relationship with another person hoping to fill a void in themselves. The object of affection can quickly become the center of their existence. Neurotic dependency is then followed by resentment for the very one the victim needs. Dependence becomes obsessional, and the results can be disastrous.
Dependent thinking is victim thinking, and when a person depends on someone else for their well-being, they can eventually despise that person.
Another form of victim behavior is the one most often mistaken for humility. The victim behaves humbly and is subservient and even selfless. But this is not self-denial. This is not humility. This is inordinately self-centered behavior. The victim is a self-indulgent person with numero uno always at the forefront. The victim with a mind-set based on “poor me” puts themselves down hoping for attention and a caring response.
This victim will bend over backwards to help some cause or person. One day when there is no payback or if they’re not recognized for their appearance of selflessness, they’ll lash out over how used and abused they are. When good deeds promote self-absorption, the good deeds turn sour.
Overcoming Victim Thinking
Is there a way out of victim thinking? Yes. If you recognize yourself in some of these victim descriptions, make note of them. Write them down to jar your awareness.
We can be deceived by our own emotions and ignorance. We tell ourselves our problems are due to others or the environment. We don’t believe we’re responsible for our own happiness. Our troubles are because others have used, abused, hurt, wounded, cheated, and stolen from us. You see, dear uncaring world, you’ve done this to me, and I have every right to be miserable!
But eventually we have to wake up. Though things may be unpleasant or downright bad, things are also good. Blessings do exist. You can’t be victimized twenty-four hours a day every day of your life without even one glimmer of relief and respite. Nobody is a victim all the time. You can be hurt by others, mistreated, cheated, betrayed, and downright abused, but if you look truthfully at yourself, you’ll see you’ve also been blessed. Many times in your life, you’ve been loved and admired and you’ve been pleased with yourself. See yourself in this light. It’s the seed and flower of lasting happiness.
A real hero of mine is psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who suffered horribly in a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War. He told a fellow suffering prisoner as they painfully dug trenches in the hard earth, “This is where you’ve got to find your happiness—right here in this trench, in this camp.” Dr. Frankl wrote later in Man’s Search for Meaning, “What is to give light must endure burning.” He went on, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”1
Happiness doesn’t just fall on us from the sky. We choose it. It takes courage to be happy.
I’ve counseled couples who needed each other to blame their unhappiness on. They ignored the Bible’s sweet advice, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32 NASB). They were not courageous lovers but blame-putting, fault-finding foes. It takes courage to be forgiving. Unforgiveness keeps us bound to our pain.
Below are some statements that signal whether your victim thinking is hurting you and will only get worse if left unchecked. See if you can identify with any of them. Put a check by those that apply. If the statement only partially applies, still put a check beside it.
If you checked four or more of the above statements, you’re not in a happy place. Your life may be a mix of anxiety and needless pain. It could be that you feel constantly threatened by some impending doom or that the thought of living tomorrow with the troubles of today is overwhelming. Read on, because there is help.
A victim is not necessarily a crazy person racked with fits and mental agony, but they certainly display some neurotic behavior. A victim doesn’t like the idea of change. A victim is likely to run away from challenges and deliberately appear weak to avoid unwanted responsibility. The weaker we are, the greater our dependency. The more dependent we are, the more self-absorbed we are. The dependent person is interested only in fulfilling themselves.
The Root of Unhappiness
Let’s get at the root of our unhappiness. Positive or negative responses to events in life are directly related to the meaning we give them. In effect, we create our own neuroses. You’re upset, say, because your husband just left the house without telling you where he was going. You feel angry and helpless. You want to go after him, pull his arm, and demand an explanation. “I can’t handle it when you don’t tell me where you’re going,” you despair.
Your despair is self-inflicted and has little to do with your husband’s behavior. Your words “I can’t handle it” more often than not mean “I won’t.” You’re saying, “I won’t do something positive and assertive to enrich this situation.” Is it that you relish being weak and helpless? “I can’t change anything for the better” really means I won’t, and you think you have the right to feel angry.
Helplessness is:
As we’ve seen, a victim feels dependent on other people and blames them for their problems and pain. A person can actually become so detached from themselves that they stop feeling they are the actual person living their life. This is schizoid alienation and a sign of our times. Uncertainty about life itself, and our very existence, is at the core of much unhappiness.
If we live as a victim, we are always in a state of longing. Never satisfied. We turn our frustrations and anger inward and suffer from insatiable and unidentified longings that nothing and nobody can fulfill. We mistake “need” for “cherish.” We desperately need another person. We have a tendency to regard loved ones as “commodities.” Relationships based on and dictated by personal need culminate only in what Erich Fromm described as “fusion without integrity.”2
The couple whose husband’s father died represents fusion without integrity. When the father died and was no longer there as their bulwark, it was as though they themselves ceased to exist.
When we experience inner emptiness, we try desperately to fill the emptiness, and we can act out a child’s sense of deprivation. The advertising industry incessantly feeds us promises of happiness that isn’t happiness. We buy into fantasy that doesn’t fulfill.
As part of my research for this book, I interviewed and observed people in many situations. One was what I called my Bus Project. I’d board local buses in various cities with my journal and write down everything I saw and heard. (Air travel is different because people tend to act differently on longer trips than on a local bus.) I wanted to know what made people happy, what they talked about, what they read, what they typically did as they sat in a place where they were neither here nor there between local destinations.
The people I observed on my many bus rides who appeared to be content were those who had a smile for a stranger, who gave up their seat for someone else, whose body language said they were alert and alive. The next time you’re on a bus or a train, notice these things. Use the opportunity to take a good look at yourself.
The absence of problems doesn’t make us happy. You don’t need a vacation from your busy daily life. What you need is time with God in the midst of your busy daily life.
Replace the Bad with the Good
A quantum mechanical principle, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, states that no two particles can occupy the same space at the same time. Let’s apply the principle to our lives. The book in your hand and your coffee cup, for instance, can’t occupy the same space. Your hat and your shoe can’t occupy the same space. The space will hold one thing or the other, but not both. You can place your hat on top of your shoe and the cup on top of the book, but neither one can occupy the exact same area of space at the same time. Occupying space is what separates matter from light. Matter takes up a volume of space, and no other matter particle can occupy it.
Look at yourself. The peace in you can’t occupy the same space as the anxiety in you. Happiness can’t share the same space with fear. Love can’t share the same space with bitterness. In order for love to operate fully within you, bitterness must step aside. In order for faith to manifest itself fully in you, doubt must fall away. Anxiety must move over for peace to reign in you. In the same way, if you hang on to negative emotions, they will muscle out the good ones.
If you’ve experienced painful events and gone through horribly hurtful situations, begin to use the methods I’m sharing in this book to push out the negative emotions. I’ve been there. I’ve clung to Joel 2:25 to help me see more clearly God’s purpose, and you can do the same: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust.” This is a promise we can stand on. God can restore to us what has been stolen from us and what has wounded us in our lives.
Here’s a short, two-point exercise for something that happened in the past:
That may have been difficult to do, and if you’re like me, you may have to come back to this exercise again. To be free deep inside, you must get rid of your victim mentality. Know that God is in the business of rebuilding, renewing, restoring, and blessing.
You can become so accustomed to a victim mentality that you think it’s the real you. It’s not the real you. Stop hauling it around with you! My mother had become dependent not on a person but on her heroic cause to make my grandmother well again. She had to come to grips with this loss and appraise herself as well as her loss. Years later, she would again be forced to face a trauma when my dad was killed in a train accident. She, as well as my brother, sister, and I, had to discover meaning through severe pain of loss. Our grief over his sudden death took over our lives. But my mother became a woman of deep faith and inner peace and a shining example to our entire family. I learned through observing her that peace is not the absence of suffering and loss. Peace is not the absence of strife or trials. Peace can be found in the worst suffering, cacophony, and hopeless situations. Peace can be found in the midst of pain and turmoil, and the discovery of this is the secret to not only a happier life but also a glorious life.
Take the opportunity to become the free person you were born to be. When you close yourself off from learning new happiness skills, you do so for two reasons: one, you inwardly believe your life will always be the way it is; and two, you believe life was meant to be unhappy and those of us who preach happiness are deluded. Both notions are untrue. They are misbeliefs.
Answer the following:
Then do the following and write your answers in your happiness journal:
Though we live in a victim-bound world, refuse to be a victim. Pray these words:
Father, in the name of Jesus, I give up my role as victim.
I will not be victimized.
I will overcome.
I will love.
I will face my inadequacies.
I will dare to be imperfect because you are perfect, and it’s your perfection I trust.
I will be grateful.
I will forgive.
I will choose to be happy, not tomorrow or next year but right now.
Bury these words deep into the depths of your soul: “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose!” (Rom. 8:28).
The Art of Quiet Prayer
Here’s your first five-minute Quiet Prayer. Quieting your mind, pulling yourself into the now of the moment, is a foreign concept to most of us. We simply don’t know how to still our minds. And ironically enough, it is the route to real happiness. I’m talking about the kind of happiness that comes from deep inside us, so deep, so pure, so vast that outside influences simply can’t twist, alter, or strangle it.
I began practicing Quiet Prayer with no idea what it meant. I was alone in my writing studio one evening praying when suddenly I heard a voice from deep inside me. I knew it was the Lord Jesus. The sound warmed me from head to toe. He said simply and quietly, “Won’t you come sit with Me awhile?”
Sit with Him awhile. God was asking me to sit with Him awhile? (Imagine answering, “Not now. I’m praying.”) He didn’t ask me to do something or go somewhere. He just wanted me to sit with Him for a while. I didn’t quite know how to do it, so I rolled out my exercise mat and I sat. He said sit, so I sat. I didn’t say anything or do anything. I just sat. I sat with Him awhile. And every day after that I sat with Him awhile on my mat. I get up in the morning and roll out my exercise mat and sit. I do what He said: I sit. I don’t talk. I just sit.
This was all new to me, let me tell you. In all my years of experience in Bible school, seminary, and teaching and studying the Word, I’d never had a class in simply sitting. Of the thousands of prayer meetings I’ve taken part in, I couldn’t name one in which nobody said anything.
I knew nothing about the practice of stillness in prayer or what the holy Christian saints and mystics practiced centuries ago in their cloistered cells and monasteries. I thought “meditation” was something people from Eastern religions did, not something evangelical Christians engaged in. I began to research the ancient Christian tradition of meditation and the desert mystics—St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, Julian of Norwich, and many others. With no experience, I took courses with contemporary leaders of Orthodox and Catholic centering prayer, and I studied the books of Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, John Maines, Cynthia Bourgeault, and others. I entered the oblate program of a Benedictine monastery. I went to contemplative prayer retreats, and I poured myself into the Scriptures. I read, I prayed, I entered—I sat with Him a very long while.
Based on the centering prayer of the ancients brought forth from their cloistered walls in the 1970s by Fr. Thomas Keating and the Trappist monks, Quiet Prayer, as I’m calling it, is like entering into the heart of God and taking a seat. You look at Him, and He looks at you. I like what St. Catherine of Genoa passionately exclaimed: “Jesus in your heart! In your mind! The will of God in all your actions! But above all, love, God’s entire love!”3 I like the word entire. It’s a beautiful word and exceptionally powerful when placed before the word love. God’s love is entire, perfect, whole, complete, full, total, all-inclusive, absolute. His love for us, and in us, is absolutely, totally perfect, fully and wholly entire, lacking nothing. His love is eternity in us. If we are to be free of the victim mentality, we must pull away from whatever keeps us occupied and focus on God alone.
For Quiet Prayer, we center on the reality of Psalm 91:1, which reads, “He [or she] who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” Quiet Prayer is a time to enter the secret place of the Most High and just sit with Him. It’s a place where there are no words but simply the experience of sitting still with God in His presence while saying nothing, asking nothing, and having no expectations or desires—except to sit with Him. We’re being with Him, and in being with Him, He transforms us.
It’s an amazing concept when you think about it because we’re so accustomed to talking! There is a place for intercession, praise, and worship, of course, but Quiet Prayer is different. Here you are sitting in stillness in God’s presence, and nothing else. It’s a time to concentrate on and absorb God’s presence. You can enter this intensely personal Quiet Prayer time before or after your regular time of prayer. You may want to read a verse of Scripture before your Quiet Prayer to help center you for stillness. I suggest you try just five minutes to begin with.
To start, seek out a quiet place with no distractions, including music. Sit in a comfortable, upright, alert position with your spine straight, shoulders back, head relaxed, and eyes lightly closed. Remain as still and comfortable in your body as possible. It might take a minute or two for you to still your mind and settle into yourself. Keep yourself alert. This is not a relaxation exercise. Your body is alert, not resting. Your spine is erect. If you are sitting in a chair, your legs are not crossed. Your feet are flat on the floor. If you are sitting on the floor with legs crossed, keep your knees lower than your waist. Your hands are at your sides or comfortably on your lap.
For this first Quiet Prayer, you’ll practice breathing and quieting your mind. Begin by taking some nice, deep breaths. Breathe deeply and slowly with smooth, even breaths. Listen to the sound of your breath as it travels in and out like waves of the ocean.
As thoughts, ideas, and images enter your mind, gently observe and let them go as you bring your focus back to your breath. You’re quieting your mind. You’re sitting alone with God. You are with Him, and He is with you.
When five minutes are up, gently open your eyes and make a note of the experience in your happiness journal. Don’t be too quick to rush away. Stay for a moment with your Lord, who loves you, and think about what you just experienced.