We’ve all been there. That little place where everything is interpreted as the world is working against us. People are trying to steal what is rightfully ours. Maybe they manipulate us or try to take advantage of our good nature. It’s called the victim mindset and it’s the high pinnacle of a passive aggressive mentality to the world.

As we go about our lives, we may stumble on setbacks or difficulties that are outside our control. Maybe our co-worker is getting promoted over us. Or the relationship with our spouse is deteriorating by the day. Passive-aggressive attitude means we allow these events to stagger us and draw an image of ourselves as receptive observers incapable of any action.

It’s the moment that we allow our environment to take the upper-hand and submit all our power in it. We admit defeat in a game we secretly aborted.

Later on we are going to find ourselves ranting and indulging into an eruption of anger, remembering how everybody is doing stuff to us, the victims of the situation.

We changed the viewpoint of the situation to depict us as docile subjects, recipients of an unworthy behavior from people that look after themselves a bit too much. But this is only a story we like to tell ourselves and not exactly the reality of what happened.

Refusing To Accept The Situation

The reality is that in that mini fraction of time, you found evidence that the map of your reality did not work at the level you expected to and your world shattered in a thousand pieces.

You lost the manual of what to do next because you found an unwritten path in your story. Because if you look closely, that can only happen if you have certain expectations of how the story should unfold and how things should work.

The unexpected result was kind of a violation in the version of the world that you created. Only that this version has its center on ourselves, as in all of us and is created in our own measures.

Reactive vs Proactive Mindset

The antidote to this is to remove any supplement stories on how others should act and be fully immersed in the belief that no matter what comes your way you are going to deal with it based on your value system the best way you can. Your map of reality is going to be restricted into a small circle of what you can influence. And that small circle includes only yourself and your values.

What really happened is that you allowed your ego to take a hit, refused to accept the situation at hand for what it is and act your best under the circumstances. You created a narrative that put you in the center of the world and attached intentional plans and strategies on your environment. You surrendered in it and allowed the frame through which you see the world to shatter. Your environment managed to redefine your reality as it judged more suitable.

Truth is many times people around us don’t have us exactly in mind when they do things. Most probably they act based on their own judgement and interest, which many times conflict with our goals. It’s only a human tendency to attach an intention to their action after the fact to give some meaning to it. From their point of view, most probably they were acting through completely different criteria.

The Map Is Not The Territory

Rorschach tests work by projecting your thoughts into an uncompleted design. Natural way of how the human brain works. We always try to cover the blanks. Every time we stumble on a difficulty, we try to find some cause and intention behind what happened to fulfill the story. That may be how we make sense of things but it doesn’t make it any more real than it already is. We need to find a way to cut out any attempt of control to external things and focus on what we can do. Controlling our behavior on whatever comes our way.