[Repost] On Becoming Addicted to Misery and The Quest for Psychological Safety
I remember hearing an old Jewish joke about the guy who won't stop complaining about how thirsty he is. "Oh I'm so thirstyyy..." So someone finally gets him some water, and everyone is relieved that his kvetching stops. Then a minute later, he starts moaning, "I was so thirsty...."
The slow descent into delusional pain is a remarkable thing to behold. Even more bizarre is when you realize that it is you who is causing the follow-up.
In 1989, after living in my truck for four months, getting certified in Illinois to teach, getting hired as a library substitute, and leasing a crummy studio apartment in a building smack up against the neighborhood crackhouse, I was mugged.
It was after a night of playing jazz. I left my horn in the truck and decided at 3:15 a.m. I needed some Shoney’s breakfast. As I strolled past the Granville Redline stop, I was hit in the back of the head with a board. Three young black men (teenagers, really) proceeded to kick and punch me, demanding my wallet. I made the mistake of trying to fight back but I was prostate, my punch held no power, and the result was an intensified round of kicks — to the ass, to the stomach, and to the face.
They ran off with fourteen bucks.
For weeks after I found myself telling the story. The people I told, for awhile, gave me the requisite sympathy and horrified reactions. Once the black eye I had received faded, though, the story elicited less and less response. It became that thing that happened to Don. I also found myself expanding the story. The teenagers became grown men. They had on gang affiliated clothing. They all three had boards and hit me with them instead of kicking me.
A closer friend than most pointed it out to me. “You’re exaggerating your mugging, dude. Why? I mean, you were mugged, right?”
I hadn’t even been aware of the increasing drama of the tale. It just sort of got grander in scale with repetition. I came to understand that I was hungry for that initial reaction — the sympathy, the center of conversation, the horror at my plight. I liked being seen as a survivor of crime.
“I’m being mugged” became “I was just mugged” which transformed into “I survived being mugged” to “Did I ever tell you about the time I was mugged?”
Of course, I’m Irish and born in the South, so colorful exaggeration just comes with the territory but this? This was something different. I was mitigating my trauma of being beaten in the street with the good feels and empowerment that came with being seen as both a victim and a survivor.
In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups.
Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, they were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in an easy task.
The results were surprising. Those who wrote the essays about things being unfair were 26% less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13% more entitled.
The researchers also found that members of the unfairness group were 11% more likely to express selfish attitudes.
I’ve written before about the lens we use to see the world and how that choice determines so much more in terms of our behavior and this is a perfect example. The more you focus on how unfair things are in your life, how victimized you have been, the more you see it all around you.
Case in point when Ciann Wilson, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, had her car broken into overnight her conclusion was not that of a particularly well-adjusted citizen. She immediately determined that it was broken into by police because she is BIPOC (which is shorthand for “victimized member of society”) and is a Defund the Police activist.
So accustomed to seeing herself as a victim and survivor, Wilson, without a shred of evidence of any kind, determines a random vehicle break-in to be in lockstep with her continued victimization.
Her lens is fixated on her own victim status and so anything that can fit the narrative does. This lens is empowering while at the same time debilitating. I’m convinced that Wilson genuinely believes that her car was broken into by police yet her conviction in the face of no evidence nor any rational reason for authorities to rifle through her stuff is no more compelling than any other random conspiracy theory. Her sincerity is no more the truth than the president’s conviction that mail-in ballots are fraud.
We’ve all read about the existence of confirmation bias, the strange phenomenon that posits we believe improbable things that fit what we want to believe so one can’t fault those so ingrained in the attention and power of their own victimhood narrative. We all know one of those people, the kind that prove the rule that misery loves company.
I am encouraged that actual victims of harm are receiving more attention and justice. I suppose if a side effect of that authentic reparation is that more and more faux victims come out to complain, gain attention, and become distractions from real harm, it is little more than having to put up with that miserable person seeking attention.
