The Unraveling of An Unacknowledged Shadow

I don’t think there’s a single person on this planet who hasn’t experienced trauma in some form. It’s unfortunate, but I’ve come to view trauma as an inevitable part of the human experience. Whatever happened to someone wasn’t anything they deserved, and the fact that trauma is inevitable doesn’t make it right. But it happens, and it will continue to happen.

When we enter this world, one of the things we eventually have to navigate is the complexity of experiencing trauma that we didn’t inflict upon ourselves. We will encounter things we didn’t ask for or deserve. Learning how to live with what happens to us is something we continuously navigate throughout our lives.

Trauma comes in different forms and different degrees. We call it “Big T” and “little t,” but I don’t think you can always measure trauma that way because it’s subjective. You can’t always look at what happened to someone and determine how deeply it affected them. What matters is that something happened, and now that person has to figure out how to live with what it left behind.

How does someone take the anger, hurt, trauma, knowing that they didn’t inflict it upon themselves, knowing that they didn’t deserve it, that it wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t okay, and somehow conceptualize it into something that allows them to move through life peacefully?

“Trauma goes crazy”

I have seen trauma completely take over people. I’ve seen it deteriorate people until their hearts could no longer bear witnessing their own deterioration, ultimately leading them to their death. I’ve seen it turn people into shells of themselves, empty and broken, with a deep hollowness in their eyes that looked like they had seen everything, but somehow carried nothing but emptiness inside. I have seen trauma turn people into monsters. “Hurt people hurt people.” It’s true, they do. I’ve seen trauma turn people into caricatures of themselves that they probably wouldn’t even recognize if they were in their right mind.

So what does someone usually do with something traumatic that happened? They transmute it into something manageable, malleable, useful, or they repress it—whatever they have to do to make it possible to continue functioning, and without allowing what happened to them to consume them completely. The ways people transmute trauma are not always beneficial to them. Sometimes what keeps a person going is adaptive, and other times, it’s maladaptive. Either way, it's serving a purpose by helping that person survive what they’re carrying. It keeps them moving, and it keeps them alive.

Learning how to live with trauma is not something someone figures out once and “moves on” from. It’s something they continuously navigate as they learn how to carry what happened to them. Depending on how that trauma is processed, or how it is made manageable and usable, that process can lead someone toward a life they can continue living healthily, or it can eventually contribute to their demise.

When we are trying to move forward from trauma, moving forward can involve some degree of repression—where we have to put things away just to keep going. At times, we cannot fully process what happened while we’re still trying to survive it—so emotions remain with us, like anger, bitterness, sadness, jealousy, resentment, and so on.

These emotions exist within a person who’s also trying to function in a world that doesn’t always make space for them. Depending on who they are, how they were raised, and what they have experienced, some emotions are made more palatable than others. We learn which feelings are safe for us to express and which ones are not.

And with that, some of those parts become part of the shadow. The emotions are still there, even when we’ve learned not to acknowledge them. I’m going to keep repeating this throughout this essay because I believe it’s important: whatever someone is hiding is not gone. It will eventually reveal itself in a form they may not recognize, whether consistently throughout their life or at some unexpected point.

Reasons People Reject Their Shadow

It’s Hard to Look at

The ability to look back at what happened, why it happened, what it did to someone, and how it may still be contributing to how they operate now is not an easy task. Depending on who they are and what they experienced, it can be incredibly difficult. So, one of the main reasons people never really go that deep is because it’s easier to leave it alone than to go back into it.

Socialization and the Need to Belong

We are social beings, and we want to belong; we want to be accepted and be surrounded by community. A mindset people unconsciously adopt is: If someone can’t navigate the complexities of their trauma around the people they’re surrounded by, then put it away. Nobody wants to see that; in actuality though, nobody knows how to receive that. A lot of people don’t have safe spaces where they can express these parts of themselves or bring them to the forefront. And because people prioritize socialization and community, that part of themselves gets pushed aside. Maintaining that balance within their relationships and community can become more important than confronting what’s happening inside them.

The Pseudo-Power of Victimhood

Some people get a sense of power from trauma— and I don’t mean the good kind. It’s a “pseudo-power,” for lack of a better term. The person doesn’t necessarily feel powerful in their everyday life, but within certain situations and complexities, especially when they feel victimized, the position can become a source of validation and leverage. Nobody else validates them in the way that the experience, and the way they have conceptualized it, validates them. So they hang onto it.

This is a stage where they’re operating heavily within their shadow while simultaneously rejecting it. It may not feel like they’re rejecting it because they’re actively expressing and identifying with the experience, but they’re rejecting the parts of themselves that would require them to confront, process, and integrate what they’re carrying.

They know what happened to them was real, but they haven’t figured out how to separate the experience from their identity. The story becomes a form of psychological footing. It gives them something to stand on, something that reaffirms how they understand themselves and justifies the way they operate. From that position, they can project onto other people, make excuses for their own behavior, or interpret situations through the lens of being the victim.

I don't necessarily think they feel powerful, but I do think the position is reaffirming. It tells them that their interpretation of themselves and the world is valid, and when that becomes their primary source of validation, stepping outside of it can feel threatening. Some people begin to attach their trauma to their identity markers so deeply that the distinction between “what happened to me” and “who I am” is difficult to differentiate.

Familiarity and Identity Disruption

Acknowledging the shadow requires people to reconsider things they have built their lives around, like their relationships, boundaries, behaviors, beliefs, and the way they understand themselves. That can disrupt their identity. If someone has spent years understanding themselves as one way, recognizing a part of themselves that contradicts that can create internal conflict. Something within us knows that acknowledgment can require change, and that alone is enough to keep us from looking introspectively. It’s not necessarily that we don’t know something is there; at times, on some level, we know. We just don’t want to deal with what knowing might require from us.

Lack of Psychological Language

There could be other times where someone simply doesn’t know, or they don’t have the words for what’s happening inside of them. It’s too complex and jumbled up; there’s no clear way to explain it. So instead of trying to untangle it, it becomes easier to put it in the back. Someone can feel something deeply without having the language to understand what they are feeling, where it came from, or what it means. If they can’t articulate what’s happening within them, it becomes much harder to acknowledge it as part of themselves.

Repression and Shame

On a societal and collective level, I believe we are riddled with repression and shame. Everything is cringe. Everything is embarrassing. Nobody wants to deconstruct why so much of human expression has become something we feel ashamed to show. People don’t want to be seen too deeply; they don't want to be heard too loudly. They don't feel comfortable being completely within themselves or outwardly expressing themselves. Shame operates in so many of the spaces we occupy, and it's reinforced through the standards and expectations that dictate how we are supposed to exist within them.

Collective Shame

There’s a lot of repression and shame happening on a collective level; that shame is often being perpetrated by people who already carry so much of it within themselves. You see this happen especially when someone begins to step outside of the version of themselves they’ve always presented. Or even when someone makes a mistake, acknowledges it, apologizes, changes, and moves differently, there can still be an ongoing need to shame them for what they’ve already confronted within themselves and addressed. There’s this need to hold people to the version of themselves they’ve already acknowledged and moved past.

I think, subconsciously, some of this comes from people being unable to conceptualize transformation because they themselves aren't allowing themselves to transform. They can't conceptualize someone acknowledging a shadow aspect of themselves, examining it honestly, and actually integrating it into their sense of self. So when someone does, it can be met with skepticism, shame, or the assumption that the change is inauthentic. Transformation is happening within select individuals, but I don't think that same transformation is happening within families, communities, or societies. On a collective level, the pattern remains repression and shame, and until that changes, we continue creating environments where people are punished for stepping outside of the identities they’ve begun to outgrow.

The Construction of the “Good Self”

The construction of the “good self” is deeply connected to morality—morality isn’t always something that's individually constructed or internally processed. It can be an exterior, a shared understanding of what the “good self” is supposed to look like depending on the society, community, family, workplace, or collective someone is operating within. It's the face we put out into the world and the version of ourselves we bring into certain spaces because we understand there's a particular way we're supposed to be. We know what's considered right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, and we begin to organize ourselves around those distinctions. The good self becomes a rigid way of looking at ourselves and other people, but it isn't necessarily a morality we've gone inward and examined for ourselves. It can simply be something in which we've learned to perform.

This is connected to the idea of surveillance. Even before technology, there was always some form of social surveillance because people have always been aware that they're being evaluated and perceived by other people. Now, that surveillance has taken on an entirely different form through the internet, social media, live streams, algorithms, and the constant visibility of our lives; There's a greater awareness of how we're being perceived and what the acceptable version of ourselves is supposed to look like. Nobody wants to be perceived in a way that steps outside the good self society has deemed acceptable, so people learn to exercise this shared morality without necessarily processing the emotions, beliefs, or experiences underneath it. They learn how to perform the good self, project it onto other people, and recognize when someone else is stepping outside of it.

Projection

People have an outer-spection without having much introspection. They can be highly aware of what other people are doing while never really examining themselves, holding other people to standards they've never actually applied to themselves. Someone can know what's right and what's wrong and use that knowledge to build an identity around being a good person without ever asking why they believe what they believe, where that morality came from, or whether they actually live by the standards they impose on others. That morality can have loopholes because it isn't built through genuine self examination; it's a shared perspective that's been internalized and then projected outward.

Maintaining the identity of being good can become more important than examining what the person actually does. Someone can condemn a behavior in another person while secretly struggling with the same impulses themselves; or they can become deeply triggered by something they haven't processed and turn that trigger into a moral judgment against someone else. The morality becomes externalized, giving them something to stand on without requiring them to look inward.

I believe this contributes to our inability to hold complexity in other people. We're losing the ability to understand that someone can be good and bad, loving and harmful, generous and selfish, capable of doing something wrong and still capable of transformation. We want people to remain within the categories we've assigned to them because those categories make the world easier to understand. When someone does something wrong, acknowledges it, and changes, there can still be a need to hold them to who they used to be. Or when someone steps outside of their norms or the norms expected of them. It becomes difficult to recognize the transformation because recognizing it requires us to understand that people aren't static.

Who gets to define goodness?

To examine their own morality requires people to go deeper than knowing what's considered right and wrong. They have to examine why they believe what they believe, what they've internalized, what they've rejected, and how their own unresolved material might influence the way they judge other people. That kind of introspection is difficult. It's much easier to look outward and decide who is good and who isn't.

When we become more committed to performing goodness than examining ourselves, we can construct a version of morality that looks healthy from the outside while remaining completely unexamined underneath. We become very good at identifying what's wrong with other people while remaining unwilling to confront what exists within ourselves. The result is a judgmental kind of morality that leaves very little room for contradiction, complexity, or transformation. We can become so attached to the good self that we forget that being human has never meant being only good.

The Unravelling

The parts that people hide aren't gone. The shadow can show up through comments, reactions, emotional responses, behaviors, relationships, and situations that activate something they never fully processed. Parenthood, intimacy, friendship, work, school, and positions of power are all environments where the shadow can surface, bringing people into contact with parts of themselves they thought they'd already moved past. How they respond to those moments becomes part of the “unraveling.”

Projection becomes important when the shadow starts seeping out because emotions that were once internalized begin becoming externalized. Jealousy, envy, bitterness, resentment, and anger don't necessarily remain feelings when they've been left unresolved. They can become behavior, shaping how someone treats another person, interprets a situation, responds to someone else's happiness, or reacts to something that makes them feel threatened. Its as though they become the emotion itself, where they operate through the emotion and interpret situations and other people through its lens.

Hurt People Hurt People

This is when we start seeing the reality behind “hurt people hurt people.” Someone can be deeply hurt without consciously deciding to hurt anyone else, but unresolved emotions can begin influencing their behavior. Bitterness can enter the workplace and shape how a person interacts with their coworkers. Resentment from a previous relationship can follow someone into a new one and alter how they treat their partner. The environment becomes a place where unresolved material gets expressed, even when the person doesn't recognize what they're carrying.

Power dynamics make this more complicated because a position can give someone room to express what they couldn't express elsewhere. I think about the stories we hear about people in positions of authority who become controlling, abusive, or narcissistic to the people “under” them. The shadow can find an environment where it feels safe enough to be expressed, particularly when the person has power over other people.

When their pain becomes bitterness, and all that hurt they experienced turns into resentment, it can begin changing the way they operate. The constant exposure to mistreatment can eventually make a person reactive, suspicious, jealous, or cruel. None of this makes them responsible for what happened to them, but it does mean that unresolved pain can begin changing their behavior.

When they stay in these dynamics long enough without processing emotions, confronting their shadow, or integrating it, they begin to consolidate into it. They no longer experience the emotion, they’re operating through it now.

A lot of people have a hard time accepting this because they see it as victim-blaming. They think, “This happened to me, and this is why I am the way I am” but I don't think they understand that they're taking the power away from themselves and deeming themselves powerless, as if everything happens to them and they have no control over what they do. They're still able to act, but they begin believing they have no other option but to act the way they do. Therefore, they're powerless because of their circumstances.

This is how people become horrible people. I say that respectfully, because I've seen it.

Digital Spaces

The shadow has to find somewhere to express itself, and for some people, that expression comes out primarily online. There are a lot of people with what we call “twitter fingers.” Someone can appear healthy and well-adjusted in their everyday life while engaging with parts of their shadow more freely once they get online. Parts of themselves that they rarely express in person can become easier to act on when there’s a screen and some distance between them and the person on the receiving end.

Behind a screen, they can take on different personas, create fake pages, or engage in behaviors they would never openly display in real life. You see it through bitter personas, hostility toward people they envy, unnecessary criticism, unprovoked commentary, passive aggression, antagonism, and attempts to diminish other people. The shadow still has to come out somehow, and for some people, the internet becomes the place where it does.

Parenthood

Parenthood is one of the places where this becomes difficult to ignore, at least for me. People can reject their shadow for years before having children, and then those children activate parts of them that they've never confronted. Funny enough, parenthood can also become an unconscious attempt to escape parts of the self that have never been confronted. Someone could believe that becoming a parent will give them an opportunity to create the childhood, family, or love they never experienced, but having a child doesn’t erase what happened before especially if they haven’t done the work to heal from it. If anything, parenthood can become one of the most prominent environments in which the shadow reveals itself.

A parent can become triggered by their child and respond from emotions that have nothing to do with them. Abuse, neglect, projection, jealousy, and control can all become expressions of this. A mother can become jealous of her daughter, a father can become jealous of his son, and parents can want their children to live out the lives they never got to live, using their children as an extension of what they themselves didn't resolve. The child becomes the place where something unfinished gets acted out.

We also see this through enmeshment, where a parent’s unresolved emotional needs become intertwined with the child’s identity and sense of self. A mother can become overly enmeshed with her son, or a father with his daughter, creating a relationship where the child is expected to fulfill an emotional role that was never theirs to carry. This can be another way the shadow reveals itself within parenthood, its something the parent never resolved within themselves and it gets placed onto the child, and the relationship becomes organized around it.

This is one of the ways unresolved trauma becomes generational. Having children without ever doing the mental and emotional work to confront what they’re carrying can become one of the ways generational trauma continues. Someone’s earliest experience of trauma doesn’t necessarily always come from their parents, but for many people, some of their earliest experiences of love, safety, rejection, neglect, control, or harm occur within the family. When those experiences remain unexamined, an unhealed child can eventually become an unhealed adult who carries those patterns into parenthood and, sometimes without even realizing it, recreates parts of what they once experienced. The cycle continues because what was never confronted is being carried forward and expressed through another relationship.

Parenthood doesn’t require perfection. The goal is not to become a parent without flaws, because that’s impossible; but there should be a willingness to confront the parts of yourself that could otherwise become a child's burden. You can’t give a child an entirely untouched version of yourself, but you can become more conscious of what you carry and take responsibility for how it affects a child. Otherwise, what should have ended with one generation can continue through the next.

The Psychological Split

People may move through society with a rigid, limited view because they haven't confronted what's happening inside them. The shadow hasn't been integrated, so it begins expressing itself through judgments, reactions, behaviors, and interpretations of other people. They don’t necessarily recognize the connection between what they're carrying and what they're doing.

A person can experience a genuine sense of injustice while simultaneously projecting their shadow onto another person. Yes what happened to them was real, it was hurtful, and they didn't deserve it; but none of that changes the possibility that their experience can eventually become a justification for harming someone else. They can remain psychologically organized around being the victim while becoming the person causing harm.

The person still has their construction of the good self. They see themselves as good, justified, rational, or morally correct while their behavior expresses something that contradicts that identity. They're psychologically split between who they believe they are and what they're actually perpetrating. Because the trauma hasn't been integrated, their behavior can feel justified by what happened to them rather than something they're responsible for themselves.

The Victim Position as Justification

Someone can hurt someone or perpetrate harm and genuinely believe they're justified in doing so. Victimization becomes a framework for interpreting other people's happiness, success, freedom, relationships, or circumstances. Another person's life can trigger feelings about what was taken from them or what happened to them. The injury becomes part of how they understand the world, and the shadow continues operating underneath it.

Bitterness is one of the biggest pathways into this, and I don't think people recognize it. It can make ordinary situations feel very personal. Something that isn't necessarily wrong can be interpreted as wrong because of what it represents. Someone else's happiness can become offensive, their success can feel threatening, and their freedom can become something to resent. There may be no actual threat in front of them, but they experience one internally. They begin moving through everyday life from a victimized position, interpreting the world through an injury that hasn't been integrated.

How Far the Shadow Can Go

We have to be willing to take the statement “hurt people hurt people” to its furthest implications. The degree will differ, the expression will differ, and some people may never reach extremes such as exploitation, cruelty, interpersonal harm, murder, or abuse. But I don't want to sanitize what unresolved trauma can become just because the conversation is uncomfortable. People become abusers. People become molesters. People become violent offenders. People can inflict harm on their own children. Hurt people can hurt people in ways that are devastating and sometimes irreversible.

What I don't want to lose is that repression isn't integration. Someone can believe they've moved past something because they've learned how to function around it. People need to recognize that the shadow can show up in the smallest reactions and escalate into the most devastating behavior if they let it. It affects the way they love, the way they parent, the way they work, the way they exert power, how they see other people, and how they see themselves. The shadow doesn't ask for permission to exist—It will find an expression by any means possible.

A Note on Pets

Just as parents project their shadow onto innocent children, people do the same with pets. As an animal lover myself, I think this needs to be acknowledged because when I say the shadow will find an expression by any means possible, that includes the way a person treats the animals in their care. Neglect and abuse can become expressions of unresolved anger, resentment, and other emotions that a person isn't able to confront within themselves. People can't deal with what they're carrying, so they take it out on an animal.

I've seen animals lose their lives because of it, and it not be taken seriously because the victim was an animal, but that doesn't make the harm any less real. Someone can present one way to the rest of the world while their shadow shows up in how they treat an animal that depends on them.

An animal can become an easy place to project what a person doesn't want to confront within themselves because the animal can't hold them accountable in the way a human can. The shadow can come out in the spaces where a person feels they can get away with it, and pets are another example of this that people don't always recognize.

The Stages of Victimhood

Now, before anybody takes this into the conversation of victim-blaming, I want to be clear that I acknowledge the reality of trauma and what it can do to a person. Severe trauma, PTSD, and complex trauma can profoundly affect the nervous system, executive functioning, emotional regulation, and a person’s ability to navigate life outside of survival mode. There can be periods where someone is so deeply dysregulated that they genuinely cannot access the same level of reflection, regulation, or self-awareness that they might have under different circumstances. I acknowledge that.

The stages of victimhood mentioned here aren’t linear. Someone can move between them at different points in their life, depending on what they're experiencing, what has been triggered, how regulated they are, and what they have or haven't processed. There may be periods where someone is genuinely stuck in a particular stage and doesn't have the capacity to see beyond it yet.

But still, neurobiology is an explanation, not an absolution.

At some point, if someone is a competent adult, capable of functioning, capable of reading, capable of understanding what is happening around them, and they are not in a state of active psychosis that has fundamentally altered their ability to perceive reality, they have the capacity to look within themselves. More importantly, they have the power. That doesn't mean it's easy or that they can simply decide to stop having a trauma response—it means that trauma doesn’t automatically remove their capacity for self-examination, accountability, or change.

They may not have chosen what happened to them; they may not have chosen the nervous system they developed because of it. But at some point, continuing to hide behind the trauma, a diagnosis, or the label while continuing to perpetrate harm onto others becomes irresponsible. It becomes a powerless act, they’re giving away the very power they still have, which is, the power to look within, recognize what they’re doing, and make a different choice.

They may struggle and relapse into old patterns. They may genuinely not know how to get out of them at first, but if they remain in those patterns long enough, without ever even attempting to confront what’s happening within themselves, it isn't going to be good for anybody—not for them and not for the people around them.

This is not me saying that people should simply “get over” their trauma; but there has to be a point where compassion for what happened to someone can exist alongside accountability for what they’re doing now. What happened to them may explain why they became this way. It does not mean they have to remain this way.

With that being said, here is my formulation of the dimensions of victimhood—the stages that I have conceptualized people can move through as they navigate trauma, victimization, and what happens when those experiences remain unresolved.

1. Genuine Victimization

The first stage is genuine victimization. An injustice really did occur. They were wronged, harmed, violated, neglected, exploited, or placed in a vulnerable position. The injustice is real. From there, it can move in different directions:

1. The most adaptive: They acknowledge what happened and recognize the experience without allowing it to become who they are.

2. Identification: They acknowledge what happened, but it becomes increasingly connected to how they understand themselves, until the experience starts becoming part of their identity.

3. Repression: They reject the idea that they're a victim. They simply refuse to look at what happened because they don't want to carry that position. But with repression, it'll come out anyway.

Genuine victimization is the condition from which the other dimensions can develop. I don't want this stage to be confused with something inherently pathological, because it isn't. They are a genuine victim and experiencing anger, grief, resentment, confusion, fear, sadness, or the need to be acknowledged, is a completely valid response to what happened. Whatever someone is feeling within that genuine victimized lens has to be acknowledged and felt as such before they can actually begin to heal.

They have to validate themselves, even when nobody validates them. They have to say to themselves that they were wronged and that this affected them. That isn't a weakness, and it doesn't mean they're choosing to remain in that position. It's an acknowledgment of reality.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is the process of working through trauma. Someone can remain within a stage of victimization for a long time, and that doesn’t mean they are failing to heal. Trauma isn’t something that gets acknowledged one day and disappears the next. There can be periods of anger, grief, resentment, confusion, and even identification with what happened before someone is able to move beyond it. What becomes important is what they are doing with the experience over time. The goal is not to rush someone out of their pain, but to gradually move toward transmutation rather than identification.

Identification points to the notion of “this happened to me, therefore this is who I am.” While transmutation allows the person to acknowledge what happened, understand how it affected them, and eventually transform what they’re carrying into something they can live with—without allowing the experience to become the entirety of their identity. The stages of victimization arent necessarily linear, and someone can move between them, regress, or remain in one for an extended period. But throughout the process, transmutation has to remain the direction of movement—not pretending the trauma didn’t happen, but learning how to carry it without becoming it.

When the experience remains unprocessed, becomes attached to their identity, gets repressed, or begins shaping the way they understand themselves and other people—that’s where the other dimensions start to develop.

2. Internalized Victimhood

When the experience isn't fully processed, victimization can become internalized. This is where the person begins carrying the experience psychologically, even when they're not necessarily expressing it outwardly. There's a deep desire to be seen, understood, validated, and held in what happened to them. They want someone to recognize that they were wronged and that their experience was real.

That need for validation isn't inherently unhealthy. After being harmed, it's natural to want acknowledgment. The problem develops when that acknowledgment never becomes something they can give themselves. Instead, they begin looking outside of themselves for someone to confirm what happened to them, and when that validation isn't received, the sense of being wronged can become even more pronounced.

When external validation becomes necessary for a person to maintain psychological stability around the experience, the unresolved experience can become self-reinforcing.

This is also where the person can begin feeling bad for themselves in a way that keeps them psychologically positioned inside the experience. They're not necessarily saying, I'm a victim or consciously trying to make other people see them that way, or may be they are. I see it more internal than that. They're carrying the feeling that nobody sees what happened to them, nobody understands what they've been through, or what it did to them.

When that need remains unresolved, it can begin moving outward. Instead of going deeper into the experience and asking what still needs to be processed, the person can begin externalizing the need for validation. That's where internalized victimhood can begin moving into perpetrating victimhood.

3. Perpetrating Victimhood

When internalized victimhood begins moving outward, their unresolved sense of being wronged begins shaping how they interpret other people, situations, relationships, and even environments around them. The victim position starts becoming something they express rather than just something they only feel internally.

Unprocessed victim positioning can become externalized through behavior, causing someone to reproduce interpersonal dynamics that reflect the worldview shaped by their unresolved victimization.

They may find communities, relationships, online spaces, families, or workplaces where their worldview is reinforced. They can surround themselves with people who share the same grievances and begin seeping deeper into that position. Through those environments, they can learn how to maintain their victimhood, justify it, and eventually perpetuate it in ways that can be very subtle.

This can show up through jealousy, resentment, bullying, stalking, projection, constant grievance, making excuses, or interpreting other people's actions through the assumption that they're being wronged. The person may not recognize what they're doing as perpetrating anything because they're still operating from the belief (consciously or unconsciously) that they're responding to a trauma.

The distinction here is that the victim position is beginning to affect other people. The unresolved experience is no longer contained within the person. It's becoming part of how they interact with the world, and the more they operate through it, the easier it becomes to justify behaviors that reinforce the position they're already occupying.

Example of Perpetrating Victimhood

Someone doesn't get invited somewhere by someone they consider a friend; they immediately interpret it as, “People always treat me this way,” because of an unresolved trauma wound they experienced at an earlier point in their life. Usually, victimized people in this stage really don't confront anyone, but they start showing they're upset through their actions. They can begin withdrawing, being resentful, or treating the other person differently. Instead of navigating the situation through the lens of communication or expressing how it made them feel; or even recognizing that maybe they're not being received in the way that they want within the relationship and choosing to leave, instead, they start navigating through a victimized lens.

They carry the resentment into the relationship and begin to show the other person that they're upset through their behavior. They might start making little comments, withholding affection, etc. It can also look like not distancing themselves or making comments at all, but instead expressing it through subtle shifts in behavior. Nothing is necessarily said outright, but it’s being expressed passive-aggressively.

They might not communicate with the person directly, but instead start talking to other people about what happened, looking for sympathy and validation without ever addressing the person involved. They want other people to understand that this person has wronged them, and they build that narrative through the people around them without necessarily addressing the situation itself.

That's a subtle way of perpetrating victimhood because the person may not see themselves as doing anything wrong at all. In their perspective, they're just responding to something that happened to them. But what they're not seeing is that they're taking an interpretation of a situation, attaching it to an existing trauma wound of being wronged, and then allowing that interpretation to dictate how they treat another person. Usually throughout all of this, they feel right within whatever they're going through, even though they've chosen not to communicate and chosen to stay within that dynamic.

4. Consolidated Victimhood

At this stage, victimhood has become more integrated into personal identity and worldview. It's not just an experience they carry or a lens they occasionally fall into. It has become a framework through which they understand themselves, other people, relationships, and what they believe they're entitled to in response to an injustice they experienced earlier in life.

This creates a dynamic of repeated cycles. They may repeatedly seek out situations that confirm what they already believe about themselves and the world without realizing it, while rejecting anything that would require them to reconsider their role in those dynamics. The unresolved experience has become central to their identity, and stepping outside it can feel like losing their sense of self. This is where you find people in toxic friendship, work dynamics, and relationships. You can watch somebody enter a situation appearing relatively innocent, yet over time, through the repetition of these dynamics, they can become a completely different person within that environment. They can become harmful.

At this point, they become a byproduct of the very thing that hurt them. They begin reproducing the same dynamics that once wounded them, becoming an extension of what happened to them and participating in its continuation.

It's important to recognize that they have a hand in it, regardless of what happened to them, regardless of whether it happened years ago or months ago. There is an ongoing decision to continue the cycle, even when that choice isn't fully conscious. It may not be something they're willing to hear or admit because it's difficult to acknowledge that they're playing an active role in their own demise, while perpetrating harm onto others in the process; but I'm going to say it because nobody else is going to say it: they are playing an active role in their own demise, regardless of what happened to them, and they're becoming a harmful individual because of it.

Someone can experience narcissistic abuse, organize their identity around victimhood, and eventually begin reproducing narcissistic patterns themselves. At that point, we have to be willing to recognize what they've become. The original harm doesn't disappear, but it doesn't erase the harm they're now causing either. There isn't a “woe is me” anymore. There needs to be accountability for what they are doing and the person they're becoming.

Closing

I think it's important to engage in the process of shadow work for ourselves and for the generations to come. We can't continue expecting transformation on a collective level while avoiding the work within ourselves. Check out my post, A Meeting With The Shadow, for a deeper understanding of the process.

All in all, do your shadow work. That is it. That is all.

Thank you for reading.

— Sibyl¹¹

꒷꒦♛❤︎