Therapy and the "victim mentality"

In discussions with others about how one decides if one needs therapy, a remark I hear from time to time is that therapy is a "crutch," or that it promotes a "victim mentality." We sometimes hear critics in the media suggest that therapy promotes a "culture of victimization."

These comments are interesting to me, because I think of therapy as promoting the opposite. There is a saying often attributed to Freud (although he likely never said it) that mental health means the ability to love well and to work well. The implication is that mental health affords us the power and freedom to live our lives fully, without being encumbered by fear, anger, depression, and the like. I see therapy as a way of restoring that power and freedom to us when things go awry.

It is a commonplace of victimization — whether we are talking about war, rape, child abuse, or anything else — that victims are expected to take the blame for what their victimizers do to them. I suspect that some who decry therapy as promoting a "culture of victimization" are people who align themselves with victimizers — and who don't like to see victims empowering themselves and placing responsibility for their victimization back where it belongs.

Still, there can be a seductive danger in labeling oneself a "victim." For if victims are not responsible for what happens to them, then by taking on the label of "victim," one can avoid taking responsibility for one's own actions and one's own life generally. This, I think, is where people can unwittingly wander off course in trying to work through difficult or traumatic experiences, and where some therapists can hinder rather than help their clients.

While it is important not to blame ourselves for events we have no part in, if we don't take responsibility for the things in our lives we can control, such as our actions toward others, then paradoxically we can never feel truly powerful or free — we can never truly love well or work well. The reality is that, much as we might like to think otherwise, there is no neat, clean division between "victim" and "victimizer." We are all capable, given the right set of circumstances, of being both. Power, freedom, and responsibility all go hand in hand.

With this in mind, one idea to consider if you are thinking about therapy is whether you feel "stuck" in some area of your life — whether the efforts you are making under your own power to solve or work through a problem just aren't getting you anywhere. Therapy can be one way of moving out of that "stuck" place and back toward living your life as freely, powerfully, and responsibly as possible.