Periodically we raise the specter here that there's little to be gained, in the long run, by overly identifying with the victim role -- and in hinting so, it never fails to offend someone. Well, it's been six months since the last time we mentioned it so it must be time to bring it up again. (You can tell it's not a main point if so much time has elapsed since the last time.)
And it's not at all to imply that all, or even most, or even a significant some of those who suffer do so because it's in their (often unconscious) best interests to do so. Yet we've all met -- and sometimes even been -- those who are seemingly unable to get well/happy/better, even when it would obviously be a better choice to do so.
So it's worth raising the question as to WHY we don't, and whether there is some pay-off in staying ill. (Even if you disagree with this point in general, consider the portion of it you do realize is within your control -- the temperature, as it were, you can raise or lower at will.)
Ironically, reading a book on creativity the other day by Steven Pressfield -- an author who's apparently also been a Marine -- this passage about the payoff from staying a victim popped out. His focus in the book is on the battle between creativity (good) and resistance (bad), and how the mind plays tricks on us, especially when we want to accomplish something great, to keep us in a rut. What Pressfield has to say about our ability to manufacture illness in service of "resistance" is blunt, and while most of it may not apply to PTSD, there's a great likelihood that some of it will.
Combat veterans most definitely don't give themselves PTSD...but PTSD can still be a very useful "mask" to wear or barrier to position between the self and others. Combat veterans themselves will tell you that. Here's Steven Pressfield on the dangers of victimhood. The material on passive-aggression seemed particularly relevant:
“Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren’t sick, they’re self-dramatizing…
The acquisition of a condition lends significance to one’s existence. An illness, a cross to bear…Some people go from condition to condition; they cure one, and another pops up to take its place. The condition becomes a work of art in itself, a shadow version of the real creative act the victim is avoiding by expending so much care cultivating his condition.
A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one’s experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.
Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. And if you’re doing it, stop." -- "The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles," by Steven Pressfield.
