Role in Victimization

One example of this can be demonstrated in the area of victimized women
and children. Halfway houses and safe houses are established in an attempt
to both protect and retrain battered women and children. Efforts are made
to teach them how to change their perceptions and give them new feelings
of potency and control. The goal is to teach them that they can have
an effect on their environment and have the power to administer successful
positive change. For many women, assertiveness training, martial arts
classes, and seminars on how to make a strong positive statement with their
self-presentation (such as their choice of clothes) become matters of survival.
Children, however, are in a much more vulnerable situation, as they must
depend on adults in order to survive. For most children in the world, helplessness
is a reality in many situations: They do not, in fact, have much control
over what happens to them, regardless of the response they exhibit.
Adults, whether they are parents, educators, church leaders, or older siblings,
have the responsibility of being positive role models to help children
shape their perceptions of the world. If children are allowed to express their
feelings, and if their comments are listened to and considered, they can see
that they do have some power over their environment and can break patterns
of learned helplessness.

A therapist has described “Susan,” a client who as a youngster had lived
with the belief that if she argued or asserted her needs with her parents they
would leave her. She became the “perfect” child, never arguing or seeming
to be ungrateful; in the past, if she had, her parents would often get into a
fight and one would temporarily leave. Susan’s perception was that if she asserted
her needs, she was abandoned; if she then begged the parent who remained
to tell the absent parent that she was sorry and would never do it
again, that parent would return. In reality, her parents did not communicate
well and were using their child as an excuse to get angry and leave. The purpose
was to punish the other adult, not to hurt the child.
When Susan became an adult, she became involved with a man who mistreated
her, both physically and emotionally, but always begged forgiveness
after the fact. She always forgave him, believing that she had done something
wrong to deserve his harsh treatment in the first place. At her first session
with a therapist, she was reluctant to be there, having been referred by a
women’s shelter. She missed her second session because she had returned
to her lover, who had found her at the shelter. Eventually, after a cycle of returns
to the shelter, the therapist, and her lover, Susan was able to break free
and begin the healing process, one day at a time. She told the therapist repeatedly
that she believed that no matter what she did, the outcome would
always be the same—she would rather be with the man who abused her but
paid attention to her than be alone. After two difficult years of concentrating
on a new perception of herself and her environment, she began to experience
actual power in the form of positive effectiveness on her life. She became able to see old patterns before they took control and to replace them
with new perceptions.

Another example of the power that perceptions of helplessness can have
concerns a man (“John”) who, as a young boy, was very attached to his father
and used to throw tantrums when his father had to leave for work. John’s
mother would drag him to the kitchen and hold his head under the cold
water faucet to stop his screaming; it worked. The child grew up with an impotent
rage toward his mother, however, and disappointment in his father
for not protecting him. He grew up believing that, no matter how he made
his desires known, his feelings would be drowned, as they had been many
years before. As a teenager, John grew increasingly violent, eventually getting
into trouble; he did not realize that his family was dysfunctional and did
not have the necessary skills to get better.

John was never able to believe in himself, even though—on raw rage and
little confidence—he triumphed over his pain and terror to achieve an advanced
education and black belt in the martial arts. He even developed a career
teaching others how to gain power in their lives and how to help nurture
the spirit of children. Yet after all this, he still does not have much
confidence in his abilities. He is also still terrified of water, although he
forces himself to swim. 480