I like you. You’re 20% bad guy.

How many of us live with victim mentality? 1 in 10? 3? 9 outta 10? I’d like to think numbers aren’t quite that high. Unfortunately, they are growing. As it becomes almost fashionable to be the one who got hurt, more and more of us are squirrelling into that hurt person frame, which is probably having a worse impact on the environment than your plastic Pepsi bottle. Because, unfortunately, how you view yourself impacts how you carry yourself in other interactions. And that impacts how other people carry themselves, and so on. It’s a bit of a spiral.

I got down this spiral the other day, thinking about the “so-and-so hurt me” frame of mind. Ex-lovers, former friends, bosses, snide coworkers, that mean little woman in front of you at the cash register. A crush. Your mom. It’s so convenient and so easily accessible to us, to design ourselves as the victim.

Why? Because we live in a binary storyline. In the simplified song of ourselves we tell, we’re either the good guy, aka the hero, or the antagonist. The evil overlord. Except, plot twist, we almost never end up being the latter in our own mind.

Fly free. Sometimes, that’s freedom from your own perspective.

I think your view of things would change drastically if to the “so-and-so hurt me/manipulated me/abused me” narrative, you added the rider “but I did the same to them”. While there are situations where someone is genuinely the victim, and someone the perpetrator, those aren’t as often as modern society might let you believe.

Roger Waters puts this divisive rhetoric very well in his This is Not a Drill show ~ Us good, them bad.

For many of us, in our own minds, it’s really that easy. Except reality’s a bit stubborn, and won’t recognize this divide. You get this sort of approach often with past relationships. You’ll meet people who start telling you how awful their ex was. How they manipulated them into bed, or into marriage, or into buying them a car, or whatever. And maybe they did. I can’t know for sure. But the majority of relationships are a two-end job.

I’m always apprehensive of people who are too quick to tell you how an ex fucked them over, or how a former friend was actually a psycho narcissist. Every narrative where the speaker comes out squeaky clean should invite closer inspection.

Why be wary of such people?

Well, for one thing, because they’re gonna do the same to you. I’ve seen that happen, as I’m sure you have. People who are too willing to pin all the blame on one party in a past relationship will do the same to you, if things between you sour. Not that you should care what they say, or think that much.

A bigger reason, I feel, to be careful with such people is that speech is quite telling. Them viewing themselves as a perpetual victim dictates how much effort they’re willing to put into the relationship with you. How willing they will be to discuss and solve problems as they arise. The answer is, not very. They’ve already created a narrative they like, by which they’re seldom (if ever) wrong. These won’t be good people to go forward with.

So be wary of them, but also be careful not to become them.

Why being a little bit of a bad guy is actually important

We all tell ourselves stories about how someone hurt us. Some might even be comforted by it, and it’s not hard to see why. But if you think victimhood’s comfortable, wait till you see what ownership can do.

First, it sets your past on a more likely plane. It’s highly unlikely you were always somehow wronged by others, while never being the wrong-doer. Recognizing yourself as the bad guy gives you a more realistic view of your life as it’s unfolding before you. And that’s important.

I was talking to a friend the other day about therapy, and growth in imbalanced relationships, and she said “yeah, but it’s not like I’m gonna change anything”.

It’s a telling statement of that kind of mentality, which I went on to tell her. If you view yourself as the wronged person, you give up the fight, in a way. You say okay, but so-and-so did the bad thing, they need to go to therapy, and do all the work, and fix it. In most cases, that’s too simplistic to be true. In many cases, it’s as much the wronged person’s past trauma, inner self-doubt, and fears that are permeating the abusive or uneven environment.

(I’m not saying it’s a victim’s fault. Not here, not ever. I think that sort of “who’s at fault” reasoning is generally too reductive, and harmful. Even the existence of this ellipses here is sign of that. We need to be able to discuss such things without it immediately seeming like pinning blame. It’s not “who’s at fault”, it’s “how do we stop this from happening again.”)

I don’t think it’s healthy to go on thinking you can’t change things. It’s a weak mentality that keeps you a weak, dissatisfied person, and life’s too short for that.

So maybe, in looking back on your past relationships (or even current ones), you start thinking okay, maybe I’m 20% the bad guy. 20% seems reasonable to me. Sometimes, it’s more. Sometimes, it’s an even split, and you’re more 40–50% the bad guy. You need to be aware of those moments, too.

When I think about past relationships, it’s an active effort not to fall into “so-and-so was a narcissistic psycho” thought. I see how others have hurt me. I acknowledge it. But I also see my own behaviors that allowed or encouraged that. I see the personal doubts and fears that led to poor decisions, without castigating myself. Because, how else am I gonna know to fix them?

Sometimes, you’re 80% the bad guy. Sometimes, rarely, even 100%. It sucks, but it’s also empowering. Once I know I was the bad guy, I have something to work on. I have someone who, in some future, might earn forgiveness. And I have an understanding of the evil and potential for evil in myself, and that’s very important. It’s all fun and games acknowledging yourself as a delicate, unique flower. But for real growth, it’s paramount to acknowledge the darkness, and the potential for terror. Me, I find there’s so much strength in knowing just what terrible things you’re capable of. It gives me an idea what to move away from, and watch over closely.

Sometimes, you’re 0% the bad guy.

Because that needs saying, too. Sometimes, evil is done to you through no fault of your own. Through no invitation, or act of encouragement or condoning. I think all of the above helps you define these moments. Knowing where I was at fault allows me to know when I really wasn’t. When bad things happened. Where I got hurt.

I don’t know how you navigate those situations, so here’s a quote I found the other day that spoke to me:

He’d known a lot of victims in his time, and he put them into three categories. First, there were the ones who pretended nothing had happened, or that whatever it was didn’t really matter. That was well over half of the people he talked to. Then there were the professionals, people who took their victimization as permission to act out any way they saw fit. That ate most of the rest. Maybe 5 percent, maybe less, were the ones who sucked it up, learned the lesson, and moved on.

“Leviathan Wakes”, James. S.A. Corey

I hope you have what it takes to learn and grow from (and in spite of) the darkness. I hope I do, too.

Thank you for reading! I’m fairly scatterbrained, and this was one of the many random subjects that pique my interest.

I recently put out my first book (the first in a fantasy trilogy), and am working on the next two. So there’s a chance I’ll be talking about that, sometimes.

So if you’re someone who enjoys that kinda writing, well, why not subscribe? It’s free. And I’m desperate. So there, honesty.

©All pictures in this post are my own.