this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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See :D told ya it's unpopular. Yeah, it's "victim blaming" essentially. You might not believe me, but I have been a victim most of my life in many situations. I also have or have had mental disorders.
In the end, you can only control yourself. And so while it is of course not my fault if I am being abused or whatever (it's the fault of the abuser) it is actually very much my fault if I don't find ways to remove myself from that situation. Of course, every situation is different. The difficulty of "fixing" it, and how to do it, massively differs. But in almost all situations, "suffering" only makes it less likely you'll get out of it. If you feel too bad, most people are more likely to feel powerless, to not think clearly, to be defeatist and so on.
Life literally always has challenges, things that make you feel bad. No matter how good of a situation someone has, you'll always find people that are miserable in that situation. I'm saying you can actually be fine with your situation, whatever it is.
It's not reasonable to assume that everyone has that much control in any situation. Removing yourself from a situation is not always possible. What can you do if it's caused by your environment, like family, school, etc.?
Life does have challenges & there always exists someone who can be miserable in a given situation. That doesn't mean that everything should be normal.
You can definitely affect some things & you might be able to choose how you see some other things. Still, some things are outside your control or "as they should be".
I've never said that anyone "should" have that much control. In fact I literally said almost no one can do it. The controversial thing is me even suggesting that it is possible.
I think the notion of "choice" or "fault" here is a little questionable, I understand your argument broadly (that's what I tried to do in the last paragraph), so maybe it's mostly just a language issue (I don't think saying it is your "fault" or "choice" really means the same thing as saying that it's "up to you").
But I believe you're contradicting yourself when you say that you both have to act and get out of situation such as abuse (not be defeatist) and but also learn to be fine with the situation (which reads like admitting defeat to me). I think this confusion between an actionable scenario (you can change things around you) and a non-actionable scenario (you can only change your outlook) is at the core of it.
Regardless I agree that self-pity is an absolute poison, but I'd tend to believe the way you put it is perhaps more controversial (because of what it implies or leaves out) than the point itself. Choosing not to suffer can also be a form of defeatism.
Yeah but you can not suffer and still act to get out of the situation is what I'm saying.