Without trying to sound like a stand up philosopher or wanting to state the obvious, life can be extremely challenging with hurdles that test our strengths on a regular basis.  I recently heard a wonderful proverb that says: "Life only throws at you what it thinks you can handle".  Some challenges are difficult but doable.  Life is hard going for a while but we tend to get back on our feet.  However, other ones can be traumatic and heartbreaking with detrimental and life altering results.  Think of a painful divorce, rape, the untimely death of a child, cancer, losing your job when you have mouths to feed or even having your home flattened by a missile because of your beliefs.  Life can be hard, yet some of us overcome such challenges and live to tell the tale.

What has always fascinated me is how some people overcome incredible difficulties, get themselves together and continue to move forward, while others suffer what to them seems like purgatory.  A state of stagnation within a bubble of pain as the clock of life ticks away.  Why is this?  What determines why some people get up after every fall, no matter how bad it seems to be, while others struggle longer to get up and in some cases never do?  What is the secret ingredient that helps people cope with the tragedies they have been dealt?  The answer is quite simple, it's attitude.  Quite specifically, it's victim attitude vs. survivor attitude.

Relationship experts Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks who are the founders of the Hendricks Institute (www.hendricks.com) have a remarkable model called "The Relationship Triangle".  Each corner of this triangle has a role that people have played at some point or another during their lives.  In the first corner: The Villain, in the second corner: The Victim and in the third: The Hero.  Every role is dependent on the other two.  None of them can exist without the others.  You can't have a victim without a villain to inflict the crime, you can't have a hero without a victim to be saved and you certainly can't have a villain without a victim to be victimised.  At some point or another we have all either consciously or unconsciously played one or all of these three roles.  Let's zoom in on the victim role for the sake of this article.

When bad things happen to us, we feel victimised.  My own personal experience of this being that I was mugged at knife point when I was 18.  I still carry the visible scar on my right cheekbone.  It made me feel angry, bitter, scared and frankly, traumatised.  I carried those feelings for months but eventually they diminished.  Most of the Clients I have closely worked with have also at one point or another suffered terribly and felt victimised for something they had gone through.  Feeling like a victim is understandable and there are times that we need to have our space and peace and quiet to re-compose ourselves and carry on with life.  Feeling victimised is a short to medium term phase we all go through and with the right attitude, love and support from people close to us and overall faith we can cope and move on.  However, for some, feeling victimised tends to spiral uncontrollably into an identity or role they undertake: the "victim".

What tends to happen is that they view the world as a horrible place of suffering.  People, society and the whole world end up feeling like villains who they perceive are out to get them.  They feel helpless, weak, paralyzed and incapable of coping with things that they had successfully managed before.  In addition, they start to dramatise how they feel, become overly demanding and exhaust everyone around them.  Bizarrely enough they end up also being emotional vampires i.e. the villain, who inflicts suffering on their loved ones.  They become hero radars who seek help and attention from people around them to save the day.  Moreover, they unconsciously seek villains to reiterate their role as victims.  In other words, if all is going well, they seek situations and people to get hurt and carry on in the vicious loop of despair to resonate their comfortable "victim" identity and role.

Months ago, I had a Client who had finally decided to come out of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship.  She walked out in the middle of the night and never looked back.  Naturally everyone around her were relieved and happy for her.  She came to see me because she wanted to create a fresh life for herself.  As we progressed with our sessions, she confessed that she was still attracted to "bad boys" who treat her appallingly.  This immediately pointed me in the Self Worth  direction, but it also made me question her role within relationships and whether she still felt like a victim.  We worked on this issue in depth, and she now sees herself as a strong person who can overcome the challenges that life throws at her.  In other words, her identity shifted from feeling like a victim to feeling like a survivor.  Though it seems simple, the changes in the way she lives her life are profound.

I've mentioned before that if you repeat a thought to yourself over and over again, it becomes a belief  and if you believe something for long enough, it becomes a conviction then eventually a behaviour.  Since beliefs are not 100% true, or else they'd be referred to as facts, they can be re-examined.  Bertrand Russell very wittily once said: "I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong".  The same principle is applicable here in the victim attitude.  People feel victimised because what has happened to them is an injustice of some kind.  Now if you mentally re-run and re-play what happened to you over and over again; in other words re-live the experience repeatedly, you'll feel the suffering again and again.  You then lose control of your own mind.  Remember that the only person who can control what you think is you.  If you don't like what you're visualising (mental pictures) and hearing (internal dialogue), you have the right and freedom to change it.

I mentioned early on in this article that it all boils down to attitude.  In order to de-victimise yourself from what happened to you, you need to change your own attitude by being honest with yourself and delete the victim program you have unconsciously installed from your mental computer.  There are numerous people all around who can inspire us and strengthen our spirits with their resilience, positivity and attitude to life. They are survivors, not victims because they chose to be.

Here are a few reminders:

• Lance Armstrong - Testicular Cancer
• Tina Turner - Battered by ex-husband
• Billy Connolly - Sexually abused as a child
• Nelson Mandela - Imprisoned for over 20 years
• Kelly McGillis - Raped
• Tom Cruise - Severely Dyslexic
• Stevie Wonder - Blindness
• Pamela Anderson - Hepatitis-C
• Stephen Fry - Manic Depression & Bi-Polar Disorder
• Viktor Frankl - Holocaust Survivor
• Paulo Coelho - Viciously Tortured my Brazilian secret police

There are many more celebrities and historical figures who have triumphed in the face of adversity but there are just too many to list here.  Ask yourself: What role do any, or all of the above examples play? Victim or survivor?  I think the answer is quite obvious.

So, how do survivors think?  Naturally, being human, they do suffer and grieve, but it doesn't last long. They move on, they get stronger and don't allow an unfortunate event from cursing their precious lives.  They fight and create a life of substance and meaning for themselves.  Most importantly, they believe in themselves and challenge the odds to come out winning.  Because your past does not equal your future and as Carl Jung once said: "I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become".

I once asked a Client of mine who had been abused and battered in the past how she coped and moved on.  Her reply was so simple, yet powerful that I still remember every word and the expression on her face.  She looked at me straight in the eye and said: "No one has the right to change my life but me".  Freedom to be and live however way we wish is a gift that we all have.  We owe it to ourselves to be who we truly are and never allow anyone to derail us off our chosen paths.  Ultimately, time does heal, and with the right attitude we have the strength and ability to turn our lives around.  Being a victim is a temporary phase that does pass, but being a survivor is an everlasting affirmation that we can overcome the hurdles of life time and time again.

Whether you have been wronged, abused and unjustly treated by others in the past, today offers you the chance to stop feeling victimised and start feeling like a survivor who's strength and self-belief only grows day by day.  Let me finish off with a wonderful quote by L. Wilde: "Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it".

Until Next Time, Live...­Don't Just Exist!