What Causes Victim Mentality?

Odille Remmert
4 min readFeb 23, 2019

Victim mentality is, in fact, a perfectly natural and automatic human development. Understanding how and why it develops is the key to freeing yourself from it, permanently.

Image Credit: Canva.com

What is “Victim Mentality”?

Living life from a victim mentality means seeing yourself at the mercy of people, circumstances, and events outside of you. It’s living life from a helpless, disempowered standpoint, and counting on the actions of others to change the issues and challenges you are facing.

For some, living from a victim mentality is part of their constant experience; for others, the state of victim mentality may come and go — depending on their current circumstances or emotional state.

What Causes Victim Mentality?

As humans, we are preprogrammed for identifying as victims. In fact, it is more natural and automatic to develop victim mentality than it is to escape it.

1. Human babies are born completely helpless. As infants, everything that happens to us, comes from outside of us, and we are completely dependent on those around us, to provide us with what we need, and to protect us.

2. From birth, every experience is interpreted by the subconscious, given meaning, and that meaning stored for future reference. These…

--

--

Odille Remmert

Author of: "Change What Happened to You: How to Use Neuroscience to Get the Life You Want by Changing Your Negative Childhood Memories"