“Playing the Victim” Comments, Page 2

Just click to return to the article “Playing the Victim”.

33 Comments (7 Discussion Threads) on “Playing the Victim”

  1. Oh dear, to an “extreme” extent, this reminded me of Charles Mason, and how “charming” his people considered him, and how he managed (unsuccessfully) to play the “poor victim” being sued for crimes “he did not commit”… an extreme case, of course.

  2. Hi Diane,

    He took a drug test last week for a job he’s applying for. He’s clean. The Oxycontin also reduces/eliminates sex drive, so I honestly believe that her only interest in him will be as a facilitator or to join her club. No, we will not change our mind. We have changed the locks on the doors and he’s upset about that because it indicates we don’t trust the one he loves. Ya think? I went through the pity party stage, and this weekend, the furious stage. He won’t call. We don’t know where he is. So, pretty much the lines have been drawn. If he ever asks, we will iterate that the rules at our house are absolute: no drug addicts allowed, and the girl will not be welcomed unless she’s gone to treatment and is in some very, very serious counseling.

    Difficult? I’ve asked myself several times: Which is worse? Burying a child or watching a child destroy himself? Right now, I really can’t say. I’m going into survival mode, which means back to Compassionate Friends. Praying is difficult right now. I’m in complaint mode, so I pray to be able to pray. I need to reread Frankel’s book to remind myself that relatively speaking, my load is light and I must above all keep in touch with my own humanity. Experience tells me I’ll get over the pity party and I’ll get over the anger. I do hope I somehow learn something important along the way. Right now that’s hard to envison. Sigh.

    1. Hi Amy,

      You are doing a lot of good things. Stay strong!

      Glad to hear he passed the drug test.

      God Bless You,
      Diane

  3. This and the ‘vilifying the victim’ articles really made me understand my last relationship a lot better. I wish I had taken the advice of reading your book before entering the dating world so I wouldn’t have gotten manipulated and held her accountable for her actions more. I had no idea people like this could operate so covertly. I’m glad I finally understand though!!

  4. Hello Dr. Simon,

    I wanted to add that, in addition to the standard Playing the Victim behavior, I’ve experienced being approached by a person who was actually victimized in his youth and tried to use the sympathy created by that topic to get money from me. It was a rather ham-handed attempt since the two things were totally unrelated. So, it’s possible for an actual victim of another person’s behavior to attempt to use their genuine victimhood to manipulate others. I feel sadness and pity for that person, but not for the reason he thinks. I suppose there’s a victim-becoming-the-(emotional)-abuser cycle going on with this. They learn all the wrong lessons from their abusers.

  5. I have just gotten out of an eleven year marriage to a sex addict, who continually lied to me, and used all of the avoidance and manipulation techniques you have mentioned. Primarily, when caught cheating, or using internet porn, he would use the fact that he had been sexually molested for several years as a child, (using his victimization to appear weak and helpless/ ie a victim) to get sympathy from me, and get me to stay in the relationship. I would say from your articles that I was a serious neurotic, but I’ve been in recovery myself for codependency, and in therapy for self-awareness/self discovery growth. I also had a bipolar son, who died of a drug overdose in March of 2008. My other son, who is also bipolar, and is also a drug addict, was with his brother at the time.
    I can say that I chose to let go of most, if not all, of my neurotic thinking tendencies/behaviours after my son died. It was like the seven years of recovery culminated in deep awareness and clarity of how others were treating me. After my son died, I caught my husband, again, with infidelity, and heard and felt a voice throughout my being that said “enough”. Period. I left, have paid for and obtained a divorce (he tried repeatedly to manipulate me using the tactics you describe), but I now knew what he was really doing. I had for years felt sorry for him, for the abuse, and he kept “trying” to attempt serious recovery (of course, lying and manipulating me the whole time). I believe that my primary problem was that I was NAIVE, and did not want to believe that another human being could abuse someone they supposedly loved so badly.
    He is clearly a narcissist, (which I told him the day I left), and suffers from a character disorder. You haven’t mentioned addiction in your articles, but I believe, after many years of reading about and recovery from (codependency) addiction, but addiction itself is a character disorder, whether it is inborn (which I believe is a genetic tendency/inherent or inborn personality) or is gradually assumed, and the inborn personality is submerged/lost to the addiction. Either way, THANK YOU for the great clarity your writings have brought to my life.
    My final goal, for myself, while grieving my son, watching my other son destroy himself (and staying detached and taking care of myself) and letting go of my husband and not hating him (which is another way, I believe, of just hanging on to him), is to STOP being so “super responsible” for those victims in my life, who are now adults. To stop feeling an exaggerated sense of shame and guilt for the supposed mistakes I’ve made, which I now realize is just a reverse sense of “grandiosity”. Can you comment on how addiction reflects all the signs and behaviours of many character disorders? Thanks again.

  6. I just want to say THANK YOU Dr. Simon, for this and all your related articles about manipulation.

    About 2 months ago I had to force my sister to leave my home. I had come to realize that all these years she has been manipulating me and many others relentlessly, and I told her she had to get counseling or leave my that. I still had doubts and questioned if I was right to remove her from my life or not. I see now that it was indeed the only choice I had to stop the abuse!

  7. Accidentally hit enter too soon on the last one ><
    I just want to say THANK YOU Dr. Simon, for this and all your related articles about manipulation.

    About 2 months ago I had to force my sister to leave my home (for the second time, soon after she had moved in again). I had come to realize that all these years she has been manipulating me and many others relentlessly, and I told her she had to get counseling or leave my home. I still had doubts and questioned if I was right to remove her from my life or not. I see now that it was indeed the only choice I had to stop the abuse!

    I am afraid for her state of mind when and if she does see herself sitting at the center of this blast crater! She has no one left really, she is living at a transitional housing place in the city here thousands of miles from where she grew up (though she does not have anyone left back there either, she burned every bridge). I should say she wants to believe she has no one left as I will be here if she gets help, as will the rest of the family. I think the problem right now is I have confronted her with knowing the truth, and she does not want to face me or that truth yet.

    And now when I have emailed her asking her to call me(she has no easy number to call), she replies saying she "really doesn't care" and is going to "die soon". I have alerted her case managers to this and they just ask her if she wants help, she says no, and that's that. Is she a ticking time bomb? Should I push harder to make sure someone keeps a close suicide watch on her? Or is that most likely already being done? (I sent them about 3 messages she wrote recently saying similar things about wanting to die)

    1. Ok, I have a bit more time to add to this now just to clarify a bit. I will copy the recent messages here so that it is clear what I mean, I have to censor parts of it because they are extremely vulgar:

      “I’m still homeless and I just don’t really care about what happens to me at this point, because I want to die. I just don’t want to live anymore. My life isn’t going to get better. My father, his girlfriend and my ex who should all be in jail are out free and safe while I’m homeless. My sister threw me out because I wanted to do something good for myself. I really am not meant to have a good life because I really don’t deserve it. So I really, really don’t care about myself anymore and I’m abusing myself so I can repent for what I’ve done. I let people I don’t even want to have sex with me. I gave my bank card away to my co-worker at **** and told him to just take my money which is about $10,000. I love you so much **** but I’m not a good person and you should probably just stay away from me. Maybe I’ll be a better person in my next life. Please be happy and keep love in your heart and stay a good person.”

      My response to this was to call the bank and have the ATM card cancelled, and I moved the money to a different account , and asked her to call me. Her case manager soon contacted me instead and told me my sister wanted to know how to get to her money. I explained I had moved it into another account, so I asked her case manager to have her call me, and sent her a money order for some money in the meantime. I heard nothing, I sent my sister another email asking her if she did give her ATM card away and to call me, I got a message back saying that she doesn’t care about her money because she’s going to die soon. Which is a typical thing she does when cornered, but nonetheless I took it seriously and alerted her case manager again – I can never be sure if she is just doing it as another manipulation or if she really is feeling that way. Her case manager has said to me that “if even 1/3 of the things” my sister tells her are true. I tried to explain to her that it is more like 1/3 of each thing.

      A brief example being that about 6 months ago soon after breaking up with her b/f she talked to me, and others, about how she didn’t really want to have sex with him, but did it anyway just because he wanted to. Then it was she was “too afraid to say no”. Now she has worked up to saying that she was raped, and depending on who you talk to, she has told them it was her ex, and in another case she named another guy she had actually had a one night stand with as her ex boyfriend and also claimed to have lived with this guy and been abused and raped by him.

    2. Thanks for your comments, Angelique. I’m glad you found the book so helpful.

      From what you say, it sounds like in addition to being quite manipulative, your sister is much more disturbed. We always need to take seriously a person’s threats of self-harm, but that doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t also need to know what the legitimate limits and boundaries are.

      Keep setting those limits and boundaries.

      The low spots in a person’s life can be remarkably instructive if we have the character to process the lessons life is trying to teach us. Sometimes, despondency is nature’s way of telling us that we simply can’t go on doing as we have been and need to change course. Hopefully, your sister’s case manager will not only work with her to resolve the despondent feelings but to reckon with some of the choices she may have made that might have “invited” misery into her life.

  8. Just a big, big thankyou for this and all your other articles about character disorders. I’m nearly 70 and suddenly found myself feeling a great deal of anger about an incident 30 years ago:- a theatrical sob-scene: ‘You’ve never forgiven me!” from my big sister surrounded by her family, coming from nowhere. I didn’t ask her what it was that hadn’t been forgiven … I never confronted my sister, there didn’t seem any point, it would simply have lead to the terrible rows she used to have with Mum, who had a short fuse, and I could see she wanted to play a victim role that day. I just refused to answer beyond calm logic, if I got a space between the bawlings. We were chalk and cheese anyway. I was furious with myself for being fooled into going to her house (having spotted my danger aged around five, and always wary of my ‘always-big-sister’) I could only see my sister ( we were never friends) as bewildering, illogical, unreasonable, quite apart from the theatricals, and a brilliant tongue and a very clever line in body language and facial expressions. I could see how she operated, just didn’t know why. She never told lies, exactly, she just never told the truth. After our mother’s death in the 80s and some appalling behaviour towards me afterwards (the image of those ‘delta’ creatures in glass jars flashed through my mind during one phone conversation) – well, people grieve in different ways, I told myself. – I was so frightened of her possible power to turn me into a delta creature (she was an alpha person always) I didn’t see her again for ten years, ending in the theatricals above. And I was blaming myself for my weakness in agreeing to see her again! It was shameful. I searched for ‘false contrition’, today, to try to deal with my anger, and have read many of your articles, and now I understand.What a relief! I haven’t heard from her since 2005, but am glad now she came back to mind with sufficient power to get me searching for relief! The anger has gone. I can let it be again. I had a kind of back story for her all these years which allowed for compassion, and that’s fine. I know she has done me a great deal of harm, in other relationships, but if we’d known about character disorder back thirty, forty years ago … maybe I could have helped her. I’d put it all down to low self-esteem, needing always to be a superior being, uniforms (more status, I thought) jealousy, little knocks in childhood and adolescence … but hey! I saw my danger around five years old, before anything else had happened to her, and knew I was justified when the trouble quickly spread to school, and theatricals with my mother: even my sister’s bawling when she was shouted at was ‘put on’, I could see that. So until I read your articles there was a fog …- thank you for helping me to peace of mind again. It’s terribly sad, I do hope more people can be helped through the difficulties like the young girl you mentioned in your article. :)

Page 2 of 2 1 2

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
 characters available

In accordance with our Privacy Policy, your email address will not be published with your comment or shared in any other way. Please do not SPAM. Comments which solicit personal advice, are rude or inflammatory, are not about this specific post, or are otherwise not in keeping with our Terms of Use may be deleted at our discretion. If you would like to make a comment or ask a question about something other than the subject matter of this post, please do get in touch directly.

Overseen by an international advisory board of distinguished academic faculty and mental health professionals with decades of clinical and research experience in the US, UK and Europe, CounsellingResource.com provides peer-reviewed mental health information you can trust. Our material is not intended as a substitute for direct consultation with a qualified mental health professional. CounsellingResource.com is accredited by the Health on the Net Foundation.

Copyright © 2002-2024. All Rights Reserved.