Blame Is a Drug

Why victimhood feels amazing and ruins your life

I once had a colleague on a Senator’s staff with whom I shared a daily ritual.

Almost every afternoon, one of us would appear in the other’s doorway with the same expression that addicts probably recognize in each other instantly: you wanna go?

And off we’d march, through the marble hallways or circling the Capitol grounds, coffee in his hand, Diet Coke in mine, to enjoy what can only be described as an emotional cigarette break.

We complained.

About do-nothing staffers. Cowardly senators. Misguided activist groups. Reporters too lazy to figure out facts. Agency bureaucrats subverting oversight. Consultants whose messaging lost elections, and Congressional leadership whose corruption made good faith negotiations impossible.

We were very smart, you see. Everyone else was the problem.

At the time, I didn’t recognize these walks for what they were. I thought we were “processing.” I thought we were blowing off steam. But really, we were getting high.

Blame feels fantastic. Especially combined with genuine human connection - blaming loves company.

Politics runs on this fuel.

In Washington, one of my favorite exercises during policy debates was a game I called “demagogue it.” We would sit around asking: how will the other side distort this policy? How will they twist our motives? What’s the most emotionally devastating version of this argument?

And whenever I wanted to kill a bill, I would take a provision from it and imagine the absolutely most extreme and craven use of that authority and write a talking point accusing the bill author of having only that intention all along.

This works to win arguments and elections because the human brain is built for victim stories.

We instinctively organize the world into heroes, villains, and innocents. The problem is that once you start seeing yourself primarily as the innocent victim in the story of your life, you’ve already surrendered your ability to be the hero.

At some point, I realized something disturbing about those afternoon complaint walks.

The stories my colleague and I told each other were changing me.

People would frustrate me during the day, and then during our walk I’d construct a whole psychological profile for them. They weren’t just misguided; they were corrupt. They weren’t just difficult; they were malicious. They weren’t just limited; they were fundamentally defective people standing in the way of progress, success, justice, truth, or whatever noble thing I imagined myself pursuing at the moment.

This “othering” made it harder to collaborate, to connect, to feed the higher part of my soul or the other’s soul. Which robbed me of the kind of happiness that outlasts the victories or defeats of a given moment.

Every explanation for why my life or work was difficult rested on someone else’s failures.

If only they weren’t incompetent.
If only they weren’t corrupt.
If only they listened to me.
If only they changed.

I was assigning myself too much power and too little power at the same time. Too much power because I assumed I possessed the wisdom to fix everything - if only everyone listened. But far more important - this mindset gave me too little power because I was outsourcing my own effectiveness, peace, and happiness to the vagaries of other people that I couldn’t control.

This all sounds very silly and petty in the context of politics, where it’s obvious that I wasn’t actually a victim of anybody or anything. The more serious question is what to do with actual victimization.

Because real evil exists. Real injustice exists. People genuinely betray, abuse, neglect, exploit, humiliate, and wound each other, intentionally and unintentionally.

Think about children, for example, who suffer traumatic abuse and are removed from their homes. Then they might spend years suffering further inside systems supposedly designed to protect them. By the time the time they enter actual safety at some point, they could have a thousand legitimate reasons to rage at the world.

And some of that rage is necessary.

One of the cruelest effects of childhood trauma is that children often assume everything was their fault. To heal, they have to learn the truth - they were the victims, not the instigators. But there is a danger waiting on the other side of that awakening.

Once someone puts on the victim identity, it can be very difficult to take off. It becomes a convenient explanation for everything: why trust is risky, why discipline is cruel, why relationships fail, why self-control is unrealistic, or why self-destruction is inevitable. Why selfishness is your right, and sacrifice is for suckers.

Victimhood moves from being not just about what we experienced, but rather, who we are - the organizing principle of our entire identity.

And once that happens, every challenge we face gets re-framed as persecution. Obstacles are personal affronts rather than problems to solve. Failure is someone else’s fault.

This is one of the reasons I think our culture is becoming psychologically fragile in ways that no amount of material abundance can fix. We are teaching people to interpret suffering almost exclusively through the lens of blame. Social media is largely fueled by this mentality - take a gander at your favorite feed - you’ll notice that most of what’s viral is victim mindset:

Who caused this?
Who’s responsible?
Who should pay?

Now, those questions matter sometimes, of course; civilization requires accountability and justice. But there is another question that, in terms of our own individual story, matters so much more:

What now?

The secret to all power, all happiness, purpose and achievement is in the question: now that these things have happened, what do I do next?

There’s a concept in The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - a deceptively simple, but radical book - that I found particularly powerful. The authors distinguish between those who view life as happening “to me” and those who trust that life is happening “for me.”

At first glance, that sounds absurdly simplistic. Offensive, even.

Was abuse “for” someone?
Was betrayal “for” someone?
Was death “for” someone?

No. Not in the simplistic Hallmark-card sense that people sometimes mean when they say “everything happens for a reason.”

It’s obviously a theological matter, but we Catholics do not hold that God delights in suffering, that tragedy is inherently good or that death is always a gift.

But I do know that I know that I know this to be true: once something has happened, the only thing that makes any difference at all is what you do next.

That’s the difference between continuing in defeat and helplessness or becoming great. Nobody who wallows in the past, ruminates on the wrongs of others, or the devastating circumstances of the present has a future that is strong, bold, brave, heroic.

Don’t you want to be the one who overcame instead of the one who was ruined? The only person who can make that choice for you is you. Because nobody dictates what you do next, regardless of any circumstance, except you.

That’s true even in the darkest prisons, where control over others is the rule.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing about the Soviet gulags, and Viktor Frankl, writing after Auschwitz, arrived at the same subversive conclusion: there is a dimension of human freedom no regime can fully extinguish. Frankl called it “the last of the human freedoms” - the ability to choose your own attitude in any given set of circumstances. Solzhenitsyn observed that, even in prison, where every external liberty had been stripped away, some men became spiritually smaller while others became larger.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest also imprisoned at Auschwitz, volunteered to die in place of another prisoner at the same camp. In a place engineered to reduce human beings to terrified animals, witnesses described him leading prayers and comforting other condemned prisoners as they starved to death together.

These men weren’t saintly, inspirational and heroic because they changed their circumstances. Their circumstances remained hellish. Their stories are still retold and inspiring today because they understood that, even when all powers and freedoms seem to be stripped, we still have one left: the meaning we make of our suffering. The name we have for ourselves - “victim,” “victor,” or anything in between - is entirely and profoundly up to us.

Most of us don’t have such a hard task in front of us - not even traumatized foster children or most other innocents you can imagine. Our task - and theirs - is usually much more mundane: to look at today - the day in front of us - and take 100 percent responsibility for what we do with it and how we respond to what comes of it. To recognize that everything about what this day means in the story of our life is 100 percent ours to determine. Even if we’re fired today. Even if someone hurts someone we love today. Even if we’re given a diagnosis today.

I used to objectify all the other drivers on the road as out to kill me, hinder me, wrong me, or otherwise try my patience. I looked at the cars as my enemies, obstacles to where I was trying to go. In other words, every time I got on the road, I was deep in victim mindset. If I was on a wide-open country road, with the windows down and the sun on my face, singing at the top of my lungs, I was happy and content. Anything that deviated from that utopia, I interpreted as a grievous injustice and infringement on my God-given dignity and I reveled in feeling offended.

After learning the “to-me” v. “for-me” framework, I decided to adopt the mindset that everyone on the road was there for me.

I started repeating a mantra: “everyone deserves acceptance.” Your mantra might be different - that was just the one that helped me. It changed my relationship with driving from one of frustration to one of embrace. If I was held up, I had more time for podcasts, audiobooks, prayer, or singing the Indigo Girls at the top of my lungs like I did in high school. I found that I started welcoming traffic or slower speed limits because I got more “me time” in this mindset. Traffic, delays, distance - they were no longer happening to me, they were happening for me.

My work building health plans for employers tests this “new Katy” every day: firing insurance carriers, PBMs, and quarterbacking a million vendors, daily fire-drills, vendor mishaps, client concerns, and a fifth of the economy trying to burn down my business model. A few years ago, I was operating on the sleep deprivation and low-grade fight-or-flight that the victim mindset bathes in. I told myself that this is why I was successful - the only way - I was the only consultant that cared this much and so that’s why clients should hire me.

When I intentionally renounced the victim mindset, I started recognizing that everyone was doing their best in an imperfect business. I recognized that the real value I delivered for my clients wasn’t perfection but rather, sophisticated problem-solving built on trust - a commitment that the problem can and will be solved, that solutions will appear. That the work our team performs is wrapped in love for our client’s workforce like we love our own family. And that I couldn’t control everything that happened to our clients, but by changing my own mindset, I could relax emotionally - knowing that whatever came at our team every day, we would face it with best-in-class commitment, collaboration, and service. Victory doesn’t always look like the bumper sticker I’d like it to be, but I see more and more of it every day.

One mindset creates anxiety and paralysis. The other creates agency and purpose. Which one feels like where you’d like to live?

That doesn’t mean the second mindset hurts less. In fact, it often hurts more initially, because it forces you to relinquish one of the ego’s favorite narcotics: righteous helplessness.

Victimhood is seductive because it relieves us of responsibility. If my failures are someone else’s fault, then I no longer have to confront my own fear, laziness, cowardice, bitterness, pride, impulsiveness, or lack of discipline.

I can remain exactly where I am forever and call it justice or fate.

But there is no real power there. There is only permanent dependence on the repentance, apology, punishment, or transformation of other people. And if your peace depends on that, you are handing other people the keys to your nervous system.

When bad stuff is happening, there’s no way out but through. Nothing will change what happened, whether just now or long ago. The only choice we have is what we do next. If we blame someone for why we can’t do this or that next, then the only result is that we’ve disempowered ourselves. There’s no winner there. You haven’t won the argument. You haven’t been vindicated. You haven’t gotten back at them. You’ve only hamstrung yourself. You’ve only let the people who hurt you yesterday continue to ruin your today and your tomorrow.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that the secret to life is largely a head game.

The victim mindset is low vibration (the same frequency as shame and fear) and I choose not to waste time there anymore - it doesn’t serve me or anyone else.

That’s why the victim mindset is so spiritually corrosive. There’s nothing remotely inspirational about it - especially to yourself. It’s a salve to the bruised ego, but at the price of actual change.

Even when your grievances are legitimate - especially when they are - building your identity around them guarantees that the people who harmed you continue their power over your life long after the original injury occurred.

Meanwhile, life is moving on.

Your children are growing closer or more distant.
Your marriage is either deepening or eroding.
Your gifts are being developed or buried.
Your body is aging.
Your time is running out.

People who choose radical agency, who focus only on their own responsibility and their own contribution in every situation, their own next step, no matter what came before, are fabulously dangerous and subversive.

Those who believe they can alchemize suffering into wisdom or purpose become invincible. Ungovernable. Mastered, yes, but only by themselves, to serve their own goals and highest ends.

Where are you falling into a victim mindset?

If I do my own inventory, it’s probably social media and body image. When you identify your traps, you’re already halfway there. Start naming the people and circumstances who are to blame for those areas of your life. Then, take a few long, deep breaths, close your eyes, and ask yourself:

“Recognizing who and what my ego wants to blame, nonetheless, what do I do next?”

Your highest self will whisper the answer.

Be brave!!