Episode 2 – Rejecting Victimhood

Episode Summary

Victimhood is a mindset which leaves people unhappy and with unsolved problems in their lives. This episode explores what it is and how you can eliminate it.

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Show Transcript

All right, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I’m your host, David Enevoldsen. And on emotional Embuffination, we train to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any conflict in life. And just as importantly, it’s about soaring to new levels of success and happiness and learning to optimize those, to make them as persistent as and as consistent as possible. We’re going to explore emotions, including a look into why we have them, how to use them. We’re going to look at principles of law of attraction, how those can make you feel better, and how to get what you want in life. And ultimately we’re going to be figuring out how to get emotionally strong enough to be the best version of ourselves and to live the most amazing lives possible. This podcast is just one of a bunch of resources I have. You can check out my website, which is embuffination.com e-m-b-u-f-f-i-n-a-t-i-o-n.com. All right, let’s jump in to today’s show, we are going to be talking about victimhood and why that’s such a problematic place to be and also why it’s such a normal place for people to drift into and how ultimately we really need to get rid of it, how it’s not a reliable place, how it kind of leaves you immersed in drama and how important it is for purposes of empowerment and happiness to get rid of victimhood. All right, first off, before we get anywhere, I think I need to create a definition of conflict.

Now, this is one that I’ve offered in my book, Emotional Embuffination. And it’s a little unusual. And I don’t think this is how most people think of the idea of conflict. So before anywhere and you’ll see why in a second why we need to address this when we’re talking about victimhood. Because I define conflict as a situation in which at least one person involved feels like he or she is a victim of something. I’m going to say that again because I feel like it’s really important. Conflict is a situation in which at least one person believes that he or she is a victim of someone or something. You’ve probably never heard it that way. And this is this is unique to me. The reason that I’ve structured it this way is that in my mind, the ideal state and a big part of the reason we have emotional embuffination or that I have emotional embuffination is we’re trying to find ways to optimize happiness, to resolve problems in our lives, to make these problems seem like not big deals. One of the analogies that I talk about a lot is this concept that emotions and your emotional strength in essence, is very much like physical strength. You work out a lot, you get stronger. Assuming you’re doing all the things right, you’re eating correctly and working out in the right ways, etc. But over time you should presuming all those, you’re going to get stronger and you’re going to be able to deal with things more easily.

And it sort of culminated in this phrase that we talk about in sort of pop culture, where we say where people will look at somebody who can’t do something that requires some level of strength and you’ll hear some beefy weightlifter say, “Bro, you even lift?” And in my mind, that’s sort of the model that we’re following on the emotional level. If somebody can’t handle something that from training you might easily be able to handle, you can look at them and think, and you want to do this in a condescending way, I just mean in a general sense, you can look at somebody who’s unable to deal with basic level emotional regulation and think, “Bruh, you even lift?” like you’re not even practicing this stuff. You’re not working on it. If you are working on it, then that same thing that that person would be struggling with is not going to be that big of a deal. Now, that place where most people drift into where they’re not working on their emotions, that is victimhood. The ideal state for Emotional Embuffination is to be in this place where you’re not in victimhood, where you’re not walking around totally dysregulated, where you feel like the world is caving in on you, like things are terrible. That situation is conflict. So this is all a function of mindset. This is me saying, “If things are bad, I want to not care because I’m so capable of resolving these problems, emotionally speaking, that it just becomes this little thing in my day that I’m solving and then moving on as opposed to this life ending catastrophe and oh my gosh, the sky is falling.”

So with that definition in mind, and keep keep in mind also that when we talk about this conflict situation, the perception of being a victim doesn’t have to be legitimate. And I have seen this many, many, many times where somebody doesn’t have any right to be complaining about the situation that’s going on or it’s something that’s self-inflicted or they’re creating a problem out of nothing. It doesn’t matter if that situation is legit or not. What we’re talking about is entirely perception. This is all just does this person feel like they’re a victim? So you can have somebody that is legitimately, morally or ethically a victim of someone or something. If somebody walks up and punches me in the face, I might legitimately be a victim of this person’s assault. Like they had no right to walk up and punch me, probably. And so I might be, from an ethical perspective, a victim. But what I choose to do from there and the mindset that I embrace determines whether or not I’ve embraced victimhood or whether I am shifting it around to something else. I’m looking at problem solving, I’m looking at action, that kind of thing.

So it doesn’t really matter if it’s a legit victim situation or not, although I would encourage you to always look at yourself and we’re going to get into this in a few minutes here, I would encourage you to always look at yourself as not being a victim because I think it incentivizes victimhood. But let’s kind of shift on here a little bit. Let’s talk about victimhood versus being a victim. I think that’s a good segway into that. Now, victimhood, like we said, is a mindset. And the problem there is that it creates disempowerment because in effect, what happens is people will say, “This situation happened. This sucks. It’s not fair. It’s so-and-so over there’s fault or this political figure’s fault or this societal construct’s fault or nature’s fault or God’s fault,” or whatever it is you want to point at. You say, “This is all the fault of that person over there.” And then you sit there and you dwell on it, you stew on it, you get upset about it, and nothing else happens. So victimhood is characterized by a few things. One is blame and another one is a lack of action. Those are intertwined because when you get stuck in blame, nothing positive happens. In fact, with blame, it actually gets a little bit worse. Now, some of this breaches into one of my absolute favorite of all time paradigms, which is the Drama Triangle. And I’m going to have a whole separate show on this because the Drama Triangle is a huge topic, I think people have a tendency to summarize it and really brief terms, and there’s a lot of ins and outs on it.

I could easily and have presentations where I’ve done I’ve spent an hour plus on this, so I want to touch on this separately, but I’m going to just briefly describe what the Drama Triangle is for for purposes of this show. So, the Drama Triangle is this model where we’re essentially analyzing how people deal with things that they’re unhappy about. So, I get upset at having woken up late this morning and now I’m late for my meeting at work and I can be upset about that. Now, the the Drama Triangle, of course, has three points because it’s a triangle, and each of the points on the triangle represents a different mindset that we embody if we’re caught up in this game, this Drama Triangle game. On the bottom, one of the points of the triangle is a victim. In the upper left, you have a persecutor. And in the upper right you have a rescuer. All of these roles are intertwined. The victim sort of starts off from this position of disempowerment. Basically, you just want to sit there and say, this is not my fault, this happened to me. It’s somebody else’s fault or someone some things fault. It’s not me. I can’t do anything. So, they’re coming from this place of powerlessness.

The persecutor role usually lashes out in anger. They’re typically want to resolve problems by way of yelling at them or bashing them, and they’re crushing them into submission so they will comply with the rules or do the right thing or anything like that. The rescuer wants to jump in and rescue the victim. They want to be the knight in shining armor. They want to save the day. They want to be the hero. In essence, the problem with the rescuer is that they will tend to come in and solve the problem for the victim, thereby perpetuating their victimhood. That is to say they’re not taking action. They’re not doing something to further their lives or solve their problems or anything like that. All right. Now, with all of that said, the victim in that orientation this Drama Triangle model is the same thing as what we’re talking about when we’re saying victimhood. Again, this is not the same thing as saying ethically you are a victim of a situation like if somebody gets punched or attacked or raped or anything like that, you become ethically a victim. Victimhood is in essence, what you are doing, the mindset that you’re embracing. And it’s a very specific kind of mindset in the situation or in any situation. And victimhood can arise when nothing is going wrong. I’ve seen people that just get upset over nothing. Everybody around them can be super happy and they can just be angry and walk around very curmudgeony and mad and you know, everything is everybody’s fault.

These two items that are most important here are action and blame. This is what everything is going to start hovering around. I want to give you an example of when I was really kind of getting into the swing of understanding this. It was right after I realized how often I was becoming a victim and by way of perception, it was embracing victimhood, and I was actually able to reject it. And I’m not saying I’m perfect all the time. There’s times where I drift out of this, but I’ve gotten much better over time. And I think the first part of this is just becoming aware of it, becoming aware of when you’re drifting into this mode. And so, a few years ago, I was driving my car and I was pulling into I was in kind of a townhouse complex at that point, was driving in. I was turning right into the turn in lane. There’s another lady that was pulling out at the same time as I was turning in at the same moment that I started to turn right into the driveway here, this guy in a truck flies across three lanes of traffic and slams into the back of my car really hard, just smashed the whole front or the whole back area of my car that propels me into this other lady who was about to turn out. I smashed into her car.

So now both the front and back of my car kind of totaled. And then this truck takes off before I really had a chance to even realize what the heck was going on. And he was gone. The lady didn’t even see him when and obviously it had happened because the back of my car was destroyed. Another guy even stopped and said, “Oh, I saw what happened.” The police showed up and in my head I just kept thinking, “All right, this is annoying, but just solve the problem.” And that’s kind of become my mantra for escaping victimhood is “Don’t get sucked into blame. Just solve the problem.” Because that’s remember, we’re talking action and blame. Those are the things we want to avoid when we’re getting into victimhood. So I kept thinking, “Just solve the problem.” So immediately after this whole incident, I went out and got the rental car, got the insurance stuff lined up. I did have some help with all that, but I was fixated on I’m not going to vent about it. I’m not going to complain about it. I’m just going to fix it. I’m going to talk as minimally as I need to just to solve the problem. But that’s it. And I did that and it really wasn’t that big a deal. In fact, I had a small part of the back of my car that was damaged that had been annoying me, that ended up getting repaired through this whole thing.

Minimal out-of-pocket costs because the insurance covered it. But at the end of the day, it was just solving the problem. Now, the other lady that a hit and I didn’t follow up with her after the scene, but when we were there, she could not wrap her head around how this person that slammed into me could just get away with this. She was very, very fixated on blame like her entire focal point, like all of her mental energy was going into how this guy could get away with this. This is kind of like the persecutor mode. If you go back to the Drama Triangle model, because she wanted to be angry at this person. She wanted to blame him. She wanted to make him suffer or punish or pay the consequences, something like that. But her focus was there. It was not on like, “How do I fix the problem?” And I don’t know what happened after this. I’m sure she figured out how to fix it at some point, but from a mindset perspective, she was not coming from, “Just solve the problem. Let the blame go.” She was coming from a perspective of, “I’m really upset that this guy did this and how can he get away with this? And I need to teach him a lesson and somebody needs to teach him a lesson. It’s not fair.” That is representative of victimhood, where something has happened you don’t like and you’re abrogating action on the front end and you are thinking about blame.

Now, this is going to raise the question of why do we even care about this? Who cares if we’re not taking action? Maybe somebody can can help you solve the problem. The core problem with victimhood, in my opinion, is that it creates inaction. It creates a stagnant situation where nothing is really changing. So, generally speaking, if you are feeling like a victim or if you are a victim legitimately, something isn’t right. There’s some situation that you don’t like what’s going on. Now the causal for that could be who knows what. It could be on you, it could be from somebody else. But there’s a situation you don’t like. So if you just sit there and in effect you are complaining about it, you’re saying, “I don’t like that this is happening, this is not fair.” You’re not taking any steps to actually alter the situation. That’s where the action comes in. The action is incredibly important because it creates momentum to something else. It’s creating momentum to a resolution, to changing the situation, to doing something about what’s going on so that you’re not continuing to have this problem facing you right there. The other part of this that’s problematic is blame. Now blame is, number one, it kind of takes your energy away from action. And so, if you’re not dumping all your energy into action, you’re way less likely to solve the problem. However, if instead you’re allocating all your energy into blame, then sometimes we think we feel better.

And I’m going to talk in other podcasts and I mentioned this in the book on Emotional Embuffination for various reasons. It actually doesn’t. It might. We might think it does, but that’s a short-lived feeling. And in fact, and there’s research on this, it frankly makes you feel a lot worse to kind of shift into this blame mode. But when we shift into blame, we also have a tendency to inflame the problem, because if we have somebody in front of us and that person is in any way intertwined with the problem that we’re facing or even if they’re not and we start shifting into blame, that person is very likely because this is human nature to get extremely defensive about what’s going on, even if they are to blame, even if they rightfully were in the wrong for whatever happened. That example I gave earlier, if somebody walks up and punches me and there was zero justification for that, if I turn around and start screaming at them and say, “What the heck, why would you punch me?” I’m inviting them, in essence, to get defensive and get angry back and explain to me why it was justified or explain to me how terrible a person I am and how I deserve to be punched or whatever it is. Me blaming inflames the situation. It makes it worse. And so, in effect, if I’m embracing victimhood, I’m not doing anything to solve my problem.

I am shifting the the external situation into a place where it can get worse and it’s really just going to snowball into a more problematic mode. So victimhood sucks. It’s not good. It doesn’t help the situation. One other kind of interesting note about this is that sometimes there’s no action that we can engage in, or at least no obvious action. And one of my favorite examples of this comes out of the book, Think and Grow Rich, which is one I’m really fond of. And in it, the author, Napoleon Hill, describes a situation where he was interviewing this guy who was about to be electrocuted, like hours away from electrocution. And I’m going to read you a quote out of this. And he says, “The condemned man was the calmest of some eight men who were in the death cell with him. His calmness prompted me to ask him how it felt to know that he was going to going into eternity in a short while with a smile of confidence on his face, he said, ‘It feels fine. Just think, brother, my troubles will soon be over. I’ve had nothing but trouble all my life. It has been a hardship to get food and clothing. Soon I will not need those things. I have felt fine ever since I learned for certain that I must die. I made up my mind then to accept my faith in good spirit.'” Now, this is interesting because in this situation, you’ve got a guy who’s in death row here, he’s sentenced to death.

There’s there’s a problem. He’s got he’s got a situation here. There is no action that he can take. There’s nothing he can do to make this problem go away. But what he’s done here is a function of mindset. He’s accepted what’s going on. And I’m by no means am I saying if things look bad, just give in and just throw in the towel and say nothing is going to happen. But there are some situations where it feels like you don’t have an obvious path of action. Or, you know, maybe you don’t know what it is yet. Or maybe you’re still trying to figure that part out. And the opening, the opportunity is coming, but it’s not there yet. You need to still be exploring that. But at the same time, when you get riled up, if you become super resistant to what’s going on and you don’t make decision about what’s going on, then you have this perception of loss of control. And control is really important. And this is another reason that action is so valuable is because this is another thing I talk about in the Emotional Embuffination book. There’s some research out there showing that when people have a perception of control, not even necessarily actual control, but just believe that they have more control over what’s going on, it dramatically alters how they feel about the situation.

And I’ve experienced this as an attorney many, many times where I just sit down and we say, okay, what’s going on? Let’s develop a plan and just not even taking action but by virtue of thinking about a plan that gives people the sense that they’re in control of what’s going on. And the second that happens, you can feel the energy lighten up. Like they feel better. Like I’ve had this myself. I’ve had times where something scary happens and I go, “Oh gosh, what am I going to do? This is the end of the world.” And then I think, “Think it through.” I kind of stop myself and I go, All right, what am I going to do with this situation? And then when I turn around and I, like, make a plan, the moment I do that, I start to feel better, you know, even if it seems kind of hopeless on the front end. This guy who was on death row, hours away from death, made a decision about what was going on. And that decision gave him this perception of control. That perception of control is really, really important. And that’s why victimhood is really a horrible place to be in. And this is why we need to reject victimhood, because it makes us spazzy. It doesn’t solve the problem it inflames the problem, and it’s just not the place to be. Empowerment comes through action. It gets things moving. It creates a sense of control.

It also increases the likelihood that you’re going to change the situation. An interesting note here is that it is indeed possible to solve problems from a victimhood state. That is to say that and this works and I think this is part of the reason that we drift into it. And it’s also easier. For example, I’ve seen in many occasions, especially in family court cases, where somebody runs into a problem and another family member or another friend, a new lover or something, somebody jumps in to try to save the day. They want to pay the attorney’s fees of this person or they want to come in and yell at the other party or they want to do something to solve the problem. Remember the rescuer and the Drama Triangle? This is usually that person. I want to come in and fix the problem for someone. The problem with that rescuer role. The problem with solving the problem for someone else is that they become entirely dependent on you. And from the victim’s perspective, from this person who’s essentially using this as a problem-solving mechanism, that is to say, I’m facing my problem and I’m waiting for someone else to come along and help me. The problem with that mindset is that it’s very disempowering in that it’s erratic. Like you never know when somebody is actually going to be there to help you or not. You may be stuck by yourself. You may not be able to get help from somebody else.

They might get frustrated with you, they might become unreliable. They might, and this is another common one within the Drama Triangle dynamic, a lot of times rescuers will come in and save the day. Like maybe help some abuse victim come out and move in with them. And then the abuse victim doesn’t go out and get the job, you know, after that. And they just sort of stay there and they’re milking it and milking it. And then meanwhile, this person who was a rescuer starts turning into a victim because they feel like, “What the heck? You’re consuming my resources. You’re leaving a mess in my house. You’re making my life miserable and you’re not taking any action, [remember action] to get yourself on your feet.” And so they start resenting it and then all of a sudden their help might get pulled out. And you’ve lost this this friend, you know, this person that might otherwise help you. So, the next time something is going down that this victim needs help with, the rescuer might not be there anymore. Solving problems as a victim from that victimhood mindset is incredibly reactive. It’s in essence, you’re at the whims of whatever around you happens, it becomes unreliable. And that’s why, even though it can theoretically be a valid problem-solving mechanism, it is not the right place to be from a default perspective. We don’t want to shift there. Now, this doesn’t mean you can never accept help.

This does not mean that you should never ask for help. It’s just that we want to cultivate a situation where we are always saying it doesn’t matter what’s going on. I’m going to find a way out. I’m going to find a way to solve this problem. And you’re not shifting into blame. You’re just finding a way out. You’re finding a way to solve the issue. Now, that may be from help. That may be that someone is coming along and saying, “I’m going to help you.” And you say, “Okay, thank you for your help. I’ll find a way to make this up to you,” or something like that. But you also want to make sure that that’s not the only mechanism you have out there. If no one is jumping to your rescue, you don’t want to just be stuck in an undesirable situation. Now, this can be really problematic sometimes if you think of situations where victimhood gets perpetuated. Like, for example, I see this a lot in domestic violence situations or situations where you have somebody that is just being torn down over sometimes years of time and their self esteem is shot and they just think nothing of themselves and they think that they’re just a piece of garbage and they have no real resources to kind of get away from this person. It can be really tough from that perspective to to be constantly thinking, “I am worthless, I suck, I have no way out of this.”

To kind of shift into a problem-solving mode, where you think, “I have the ability to solve this problem.” But very often nobody’s there, you know, especially in a lot of domestic violence situations where the abuser will go out of his or her way to cut off access to friends and family and make it such that you have no resources. And this is usually done under the auspices of, “Oh, I just want you to be at home and be doted on.” And but then it turns into like, oh, well, now you don’t have money and you don’t have resources to get out of here. And “I don’t think you should go out with your friends tonight. You should just hang out here with me because I want to pay attention to you.” And then all of a sudden you haven’t seen your friends in ten years and you haven’t seen your family in forever and everybody’s alienated and you’re just all alone. That can be really tough, but the mindset implications are the same if you are there. It’s important to get out in any way you can so that you can start building up your self-esteem again. But if nobody’s there to help you, you’ve got to find a way out. And if you don’t, you’re just going to be stuck there. You’re just in that situation in perpetuity. This is all mindset. This is all entirely a function of mindset. And because this is mindset, that’s why it becomes so important to not even embrace the idea that you could be a victim.

Because what very often happens with that is people will shift into an excuse. It’s incredibly tempting, and I’ve heard this many, many times, even after I sit there on a lecture or talk about victimhood or the Drama Triangle and will say like, here’s this victim role. Usually people want to say, “Well, but this is an actual victim. This is a legitimate victim.” And the second you give yourself that out, you’re going to shift into it because we have a really strong pull subconsciously to step into the victim role. It’s compelling. I mean, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to take action. You don’t have to do anything scary. You often get attention for it, or at least so we think it’s not necessarily the attention we want, but sometimes it is. If somebody throws in the crocodile tears and someone else is willing to jump in and say, “Oh my gosh, you poor thing, let me be your rescuer. I can’t believe how special you are by having been able to endure this stuff.” That’s a compelling proposition. I see this a lot in kids, too, if especially in situations where a parent becomes kind of helicopter-ish or over-overprotective, you’ll have a kid that’ll start playing up illnesses because they’re getting attention out of it and they’re getting things solved for them so they don’t have to do anything and they’re getting attention at the same time.

It’s really compelling. So we can easily shift into that if we start to make excuses or allowances for this idea of victimhood. “I’m not in victimhood because I’m actually a victim. Like this person is clearly to blame for what’s going on. And clearly I’m not. Therefore, this is different.” I would encourage you to eliminate that entirely, no matter what’s going on. Like this guy, from a from an empirical perspective, on an ethical level, it’s hard for me to say that this guy who slammed into the back of my car and took off after flying across three lanes, I have no idea what was going on with that guy or why he did it. It would be hard for me in that situation to say he was not at fault. But when I get sucked into that blame game, it’s really easy for me to just stop at, “Well, I was a victim. I was legitimately a victim. Therefore, I can sit here and complain about it.” If you have an out in any way, you’re going to find it subconsciously. And so because of that, I like to talk about absolute responsibility. This is one of the chapters in my book, Emotional Embuffination is entitled Absolute Responsibility. And the basic idea is that no matter what is going on in your life, no matter what the situation, no matter how obvious it may seem that someone else is at fault or multiple other people are at fault.

No matter how much it may seem that you are not at fault: Own it. Own your role in it, own that you may have contributed something to this situation. If you have somebody on the opposite side of the courtyard that shoots you in the leg with a sniper rifle, and you survive that, then, that seems really hard to say. “Well, I was at fault for that.” But if you come in with a perspective of the mindset is I own that no matter what happens, then that’s going to shift how you think into, “All right, how do I make sure that doesn’t happen again? What did I do there? How do I resolve this problem that I’m now facing?” That is so much more important. Because it’s easy to just throw your hands in the air and do nothing. And if I say, “Well, I got shot with the sniper rifle, how can I make sure that that doesn’t happen again?” I might start looking around. That’s a tough one. I’ll grant you that. But I might start looking around at situations that are going to prevent that problem in the future. If I just say, “Well, this was that guy and this was a crazy person and that’s the end of the story,” I’m not going to do anything to change my situation. I’m not going to become more cautious. I’m not going to like take safety measures to ensure things like that aren’t happening again.

When I got rear-ended by this guy that took off, one of the first things that I thought was, “Wow, I need a rear dashcam.” And I went out and got that because I had a front-facing dashcam, but it didn’t capture anything of that incident. I didn’t have a rear dashcam, which is what I needed. And I could have captured this guy and given it over to law enforcement and all this stuff. But I didn’t have that. And so one of the thoughts that I had was, “Well, if anything like this happens in the future, I need to make sure I’ve got a dashcam.” I also became much more cautious about looking around me and paying attention to what was going on when I was turning. I started creating much bigger space cushions around people. The mindset I was embracing, at least in that moment, and again, I’ve definitely had times in my life where I was not in this mode of thinking, but in that situation I was of the mindset of I’m not going to worry about blame, I’m not going to worry about the fact that this guy did something to me and got away with it. And that’s unfair. I said, “What can I do differently?” And when you start thinking in the action orientation, in the letting go of blame orientation, your focus becomes on something that’s going to make you better.

It’s going to do stuff in your life that’s going to move you towards preventing problems from arising in the future or minimizing problems if they do arise in the future. It is so empowering to take absolute responsibility for whatever the heck is going on. So with that, I would highly encourage you to reject victimhood. If something is going on that you don’t like, take action on it. Do something. It may be an issue that you are permitting something to happen. Maybe you don’t have effective boundaries up. If somebody else is inflicting a problem on you, find a way to stop that. Don’t shift into blame. Even if there’s another person involved. Maybe it’s like you just need to escape as cleanly as possible. Like in a domestic violence situation. Maybe you need to get out of there and just figure out how to get out. But don’t think about retaliation. Don’t think about, “Oh, I just need to make this person suffer.” Just find a way to safely get away from the situation. Don’t think about how much you need this person to pay. One of the mistakes I think that people get caught up in is they think that-and I think this is the reason we go into blame so often-is that they will start to think, “Okay, if I can find the root cause of the problem and get rid of that root cause of the problem, the problem goes away.” In practice, that’s not usually how it works though, because the thinking is all right, there’s this evil other person that is doing this stuff to me, and if I can find a way to make them suffer enough or teach them a lesson or make them realize that they can’t do this thing to me anymore, that’s going to solve the problem. I’m going to have, we’re going to have to talk on another show about kind of retaliation and some of the problems with that and how things like that inflame the situation. But nine times out of ten, you teaching them a lesson is not going to fix it. It’s going to make it worse because usually they’re going to respond harshly. There’s kind of two opposite extremes here. Either they didn’t really need the lesson in the first place because they were already willing to just buy into whatever you were saying or you are pushing them into throwing more violence and anger and frustration at you. Either way, you’re inflaming the problem. You’ve got to get away from blame. Blame is not helpful. Blame does not generally cause us to root out the problem. I have seen this so, so many times in family law cases when I was working on divorces and custody fights. Everybody wants to say it’s that other person’s fault. They’re alienating me, they’re causing the problems. And you get into these crazy fights. Everybody spends thousands and thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands, if not more than that on attorney’s fees.

They stress themselves out of their minds. All that stress gets dumped on their kids if they have kids. And at the end of the day, they go to a trial or a family court hearing and the judge says, “Eh, okay, I kind of you’re both being a little unreasonable or one of you is unreasonable and the other one’s not.” It kind of all washes out. It’s very rare that a judge says you are the evil party. And when they are, it’s so highly subjective that it’s a dice roll. You don’t know what the heck is going to happen in there. And really in trying to suss out this problem through blame, you have just made it ten times worse. Now you’re broke because you spent all your money on attorneys fees. You’re stressed out of your mind because you had just years of anxiety and depression and stress over this stupid court case. Your kids probably feel like garbage. You probably lost all your assets in the process of this or at least lost a significant portion of your assets. Nothing good comes of this. So let go of blame. Take action. Or if you can’t take action, make decisions about what you’re going to do and what you’re going to accept and just embrace absolute responsibility. Embrace the idea that everything that happens to you is on you. That is an empowering mindset. And if you can just embrace that, if there’s nothing else that you hear from Emotional Embuffination hear this message. To me, this is probably the single most valuable lesson I have ever learned in my life, because I started off very much on the victimhood end of the spectrum on this.

And my life was an absolute roller coaster. It was depressing, it was frustrating. I’d have a great day, and then the next day I wanted to kill myself. Take absolute responsibility. Seek empowerment, reject victimhood, and your life is going to be way better. I promise you. All right. That’s going to bring us to a wrap for today’s show. I hope that you found this useful. I genuinely hope that you can take something out of this and make your life better. Remember, in order to become more emotionally embuffed, you got to keep working on it. This is like working out. You don’t just go to the gym one time, do some reps, and then you’re done forever. Like you keep actively working on it. So please check out some of the other resources I’ve got. Again, check out embuffination.com. If you need help, reach out. We can, there’s contact information on that page. At the end of the day, we want you to be emotionally strong enough to go from saying, “The struggle is real,” to just being in a mindset where you say, ‘What struggle? I can handle all this stuff.” Thank you all for listening and I hope you have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.