Hey, welcome to The Young Faithful Mama Blog. My name is Justice Rodriguez and I helping young mamas like you stop feeling unqualified, overwhelmed, and chaotic so you can start raising your babies with more peace and joy, by sharing some of my experiences and things that I learned through my journey so you can become a Young Faithful Mama too as you navigate through your life as a wife and mother.
This series is to dispel victim mentality, something that I dealt with for many years and keep me from living my life to its full potential, I want to give a disclaimer that this mentality is not something you can be diagnosed with and I will not be using any of these blogs as medical advice. if you have any questions about certain things that pertain to a mental illness I always encourage and advise you to speak with your doctor. this blog is just informational and me sharing my own experiences.
Face your trauma
Before you can learn ways to cope with your victim mentality, you need to dig deeper. Pinpointing the events that have caused you trauma is an excellent place to start so your new coping mechanism will be successful.
When you take the time to acknowledge that at some point you were a victim and make peace with it, I believe you will be about to move on with your life not as if the situation never happened but using it as fuel to keep moving in a better direction.
Forgiving yourself and the person or people that you feel are responsible for how your life has gone and the pain that you have been dragging for all this time is going to be so important because it goes against what God’s word tells us about forgiving others, in Matthew 6:15 it tells us “but if you do not forgive others their trespasses (a false step or sin ), neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. which means It’s time to stop holding on to what people have done and start letting go. we can learn how to pretend that we are okay but that unforgiveness with always have a grip on us stopping us from walking in true freedom.
Replace the lies with the truth
Have you ever caught yourself saying “I know I need to stop (unhealthy behavior) but you just don’t understand ( insert traumatic experience ) and I can’t (insert the lie you tell yourself)?
I know from experience that there were lies that I told myself that helped me stay in the constant cycle of blaming, feeling bad for myself and not facing the real problem but instead allowing my toxic behavior to become my identity.
Once I surrender my life to Jesus and started to study his character it become very clear that my ways of handling things that didn’t go my way or when it was time to admit my fault there was something off about it. I couldn’t find anywhere in the bible that told me blaming, shaming, and manipulating were right. instead, I saw that we are to put off our old ways and put on a “ new man “, I learned that I should love my neighbor as myself and that my fits of rage were part of the 17 works of the flesh, and that I wasn’t exhibiting most of the fruit of the spirit.
Taking responsibility
Another big thing that you will need before we dive into better ways to cope is understanding for you to have a healthy abundant life you need to stop participating in the behaviors.
If you like me You might be thinking, how do I take responsibility for being molested, raped, abandoned, or manipulated?
Im not telling you to take responsibility for the event that probably changed your world, I suggest that you take responsibility for the events after. how did you handle being mistreated? did you decide that you would raise above it and not let that be your whole story or did you let it consume you? did you start using it as an excuse for why you acted poorly?
The best thing that I learned while learning how to take responsibility is learning what I was in control of and what was out of my control.
For example :
- I can’t control how someone chooses to treat me but I can control how I respond to triggering situations.
- I can’t control if I will get bad news but I can control my response when negative things happen to me
When you are faced with things that are out of your control I want you to understand that it’s okay and normal to not be able to do everything it’s very freeing knowing that I don’t have to have everything all together all the time. no, I didn’t come to this understanding all at once but after many failed attempts of trying to be everywhere, do everything, and then when I couldn’t measure put the blame game started and I remember how it became everyone else fault that I took on everything.
I found out that when you’re in a mindset of being a victim you are putting yourself back in the moment you lost your control but now the enemy is using your mind against you to make you think you are stuck when you are free.
You are free to say no, you are free to change your mind, you are free to walk away, and you are free to say I messed up and I don’t want to keep doing this how I have been.
4 Better Coping Skills
Instead of the toxic or negative behavior, you have been doing like maybe drinking your pain away, smoking, or doing drugs to numb yourself or to distract yourself from your reality. maybe you picking fights, consistently looking for the next hot gossip or endlessly scrolling through social media to escape what you have going on, let’s try these :
- Renew Your Mind
Start reading your bible, listening to podcasts, and journaling your thoughts. relearn better ways to deal with your feelings or hard situations.
- Talk About It
Find someone you can trust and that is wise in the Lord to talk about some of your problems with, let them pray for you and with you as you are going through this process.
- Practice Memorizing God’s Word
Psalm 1:2 talks about meditating on God’s word night and day. Having some battle scriptures memorized when you are faced with hard moments or feel like going back to your old ways will help you turn away from the victim mentality. The most important part is not just memorizing but also applying the Word to your life.
- Praying and Fasting
Making prayer and fasting a part of your life is going to make a real difference in this mindset because you will cast all your cares on the one who is in control of it all and having periods of fasting will help teach you discipline and tame your flesh to know who is in control.
I pray that this has encouraged you and that you found some valuable resources in this blog. If you are looking for more support I want to invite you to my private support group on Facebook, linked in the social media icons below.
The Young Faithful Mama 