Playing the victim: another form of toxic maternal behavior Playing the victim often includes scapegoating a child or children, but sometimes it's primarily a form of blame-shifting and a way to get attention.
Why do people want to play the victim? A victim mentality is often subconsciously developed as a way to cope, often from past trauma. That is frequently childhood trauma. Connected to this is a lack of self-love and self-esteem.
By playing the victim and making the child responsible for her life and actions, the mother enmeshes the two identities. Assigning the child the role of rescuer—or encouraging him or her to take it on—also enmeshes and obliterates the healthy boundaries that should exist between the parent and child.
You begin to play the victim, because you believe they must be right. The psychological impact of this is incredibly damaging to self-esteem and personal growth. The impact of this on careers and relationships is not hard to see.
The Codependent Parent Has a Victim Mentality
Often this manifests in guilt-tripping behavior intended to garner sympathy from the child for negative experiences the parent has been through, with the end goal of altering the child's behavior in a way that will somehow set things right.
What Are Toxic Parents? Toxic parents create a negative and toxic home environment. They use fear, guilt, and humiliation as tools to get what they want and ensure compliance from their children. They are often neglectful, emotionally unavailable, and abusive in some cases.
Researchers say it's not uncommon for an abusive parent to single out one child as the target of physical violence. This has been called: the “Cinderella Phenomenon.” Another term is “target-child selection.”
Narcissists may play the victim if they believe they gain something from making you feel guilty. Their tendency to use manipulation tactics is one of the formal symptoms of narcissistic personality.
Poor Me Syndrome traps people in their current challenges because they believe they're at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control and therefore can't change things. When people are too busy blaming others for their problems, they don't find solutions themselves because they're not even looking for them.
People who have a victim mentality have often suffered through trauma or hard times, but haven't developed a healthier way to cope. As a result, they develop a negative view of life, where they feel that they don't have any control over what happens to them.
People who manipulate, use a number of different tactics to control and exploit others, and one of the most common is playing the victim. Everyone knows what it feels like to be wronged. And, most people have also been in a position where they've taken advantage of someone else's kindness or expectations.
Emotional immaturity can be the result of insecure attachments during early life experiences, trauma, untreated addiction or mental health problems, and/or lack of deeper introspection or work on oneself. It can manifest as self-centeredness, narcissism, and poor management of conflict.
Instead, the term “martyr” refers to parents who do for their kids things their kids ought to be doing for themselves. And they do these things primarily out of fear and anxiety, not dedication. Most martyr parents have two big fears. They fear their child might fail, or they fear their child might act out.
People often assume that abusive people mistreat everyone, but some discriminate in their abuse. It's what experts call the "Cinderella phenomenon," which is when one child in a family is singled out and abused while other children are not.
Key message: From the evidence available, it is clear that with the exception of child sexual abuse, children are most likely to be abused or neglected by parents and/or caregivers.
Babies less than one-year-old are at the greatest risk of injury from AHT. AHT accounts for about one-third of all child maltreatment deaths.
There are different types of parents and parenting styles, and most want the best for their kids. But some go over the boundaries and become toxic parents. Worse, they don't even know they're being toxic, maybe because their parents brought them up the same way.
Some of the common signs of a toxic parent or parents include: Highly negatively reactive. Toxic parents are emotionally out of control. They tend to dramatize even minor issues and see any possible slight as a reason to become hostile, angry, verbally abusive, or destructive.
According to experts, a major key to distinguishing the two is looking at how long the strife lasts. If things are nasty between you in many different areas of the relationship for years at a time, the relationship itself might be toxic. But if there's only one, sudden issue, that's probably more benign.
People with a victim mentality often feel powerless, without agency, and lack accountability in their lives. According to research, the primary root cause of a victim mentality stems from a betrayal of trust in past experiences.
A Stanford University study reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that playing the victim leads to a sense of entitlement and to narcissistic or selfish behavior.