Episode 62 - The Psychology of a Victim
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2019
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We can experience powerful feelings of empathy for those who are victims of trauma in all its heartbreaking dimensions. It is difficult even to consider a shadow side to this already dark aspect of human experience. Nevertheless, it is important also to consider the difference between lived experiences of victimization and meaning-making narratives that not only can become calcified, but self-reinforcing. If entrenched, narratives of victimization can become part of one’s identity and suppress life energy. Lisa, Deb and Joseph differentiate the emotions involved in suffering, mourning and acceptance from more reified states of powerlessness. They describe how the presence of a wisely witnessing other can help with healing, empowerment, and finding the path ahead to a more liberated sense of self.
Dream
I am being held in a prison against my will and I am sharing a cell with a male colleague from work. The cell is very cold and silent. The whole place feels very sterile. When I look out of the window, I realize we are imprisoned on the moon. My male colleague is talking to me with an intensity in his expression. He is demanding a lot of my attention and he says he wants me and needs me and that he has been having dreams about me- but I am trying to focus on getting out of the cell. Hesays it’s too late, and we are going to be executed in the most cosmic way- by being ejected into a black hole together.
References
Eye Movement Desensitization Movement (EMDR)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:03.0 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.0 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 0:22.0 | I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngie and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod. |
| 0:31.0 | We're going to talk today about being a victim and this is something that is very important to a therapeutic process because many people seek therapy because they have been victimized in some way, |
| 0:47.9 | whether it's abuse in childhood or a trauma of some kind and of course the goal of therapy is to help someone reclaim |
| 0:57.3 | a sense of empowerment and move away from the status of victim, but how do we do that and what are the potential pitfalls? |
| 1:08.9 | And also, what are the different ways that we can understand being a victim even from an archetypal perspective? |
| 1:16.6 | So we're going to walk around that today and see what we come up with. |
| 1:20.7 | So the first thing that just rises up in me immediately is the tension in the |
| 1:27.6 | culture where we're so afraid of not blaming the victim. We're so afraid that we might be blaming the victim. |
| 1:34.1 | Excuse me, yes. We're so afraid that we might blame the victim that we don't even feel |
| 1:39.0 | like we can explore the role of the victim in what's happened to them in terms of psychology or in terms of the process of even preventing it from happening in the future. |
| 1:51.0 | Yeah, yeah. And that is, that's a great place to start, I think, because I think that framing it that way, |
| 1:57.4 | if we want to turn toward the event and ask what part the victim, you know, where was the victim in it, for example. |
| 2:05.2 | It immediately constellates this, oh my God, you know, you're blaming the victim. |
| 2:10.4 | I can feel that in myself and of course that's a kind of either or it's a false |
| 2:15.5 | dichotomy in a way and one of the things about a depth psychological approach is it |
| 2:20.6 | allows us to sort of peel back layer upon layer and it just generates a |
| 2:26.1 | picture that's more complex so it isn't an either or. I agree completely that while we all have real empathy for people who have been victimized |
... |
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