A Cycle of Victim Blaming

When someone hurts me, something I often hear is “Your expectations were too high.” I think this is bullshit.

How are you going to turn the blame around on me? That is not how it works here. But far too often we victim blame to take the guilt away from ourseleves. We tell people they are too sensitive if they feel hurt, they’re overreacting, they need to calm down.

Maybe we shouldn’t calm down? Maybe hiding our emotions in order to appease the one who hurt us is just continuing the pain.

This mindset teaches us that our emotions are not valid. The way we are feeling is an overexaggeration. And maybe sometimes it is. But I think the majority of the time, these phrases are just used by the one who harmed you in order to validate their actions.

Validation is a really interesting concept. We feel a need for others to resonate with how we are feeling, or something we did, or some personality trait of ours, in order to feel complete in a sense. It’s almost as if we need external validation to grant us permission to feel a certain type of way.

But the truth is, we do not need permission to feel our emotions. We do not need permission to feel upset and hurt. No matter how many times we are told that our emotions are wrong, it doesn’t matter. The fact that we are feeling them means they aren’t.

Of course, it is not healthy to hold onto negative emotions for too long. But, if we repress them every single time they come up, then we never deal with them. They get pushed further and further down for years. At some point we are going to have to address this pain.

Our pain manifests itself into insecurities and projections onto others. By not letting ourselves feel the pain, we end up making others feel it instead. This a dangerous cycle. And this time, we are on the otherside of the problem. We have been told that our feelings aren’t valid, so why would those same feelings be valid in another person? We repeat the process.

This needs to stop. We need to stop hurting one another. We need to feel what we feel and be okay with it. We can no longer be ignorant to what our bodies are telling us.