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Victim and perpetrator: an introduction

Welcome, everybody. I want to talk about some aspects concerning victim and perpetrator. I think this is a big subject to cover, because for me — and I think for many people — it’s maybe the most challenging psychodynamic structure we have created in us: this victim–perpetrator dynamic.

I’ll present some aspects of it, and maybe some new perspectives too. I’ll talk for around an hour, and then we’ll have enough time to cover all the questions you have, and see where it goes.

Everyone feels like a victim

In my work, I realised after a while that when I’m listening to people — especially when they’re in conflict — they are all, in some way, in a victim position. Everyone feels like a victim. And the question for today is: how does this happen?

So I’ll take you on a little journey.

Separation: the first deep experience of childhood

Let’s look back at childhood. When a baby is born, there’s an ongoing process of the baby becoming more and more separate from the mother. In the beginning, every cell of the baby is made of the mother; then, continuously after birth, there is more and more splitting, more and more separation. The child gets more and more the feeling: here’s me, and here’s my mother, and here’s my father.

This starts on a physical level, and that ends around when the child is two years old. Then on an emotional level, that ends normally when the child is six. And in puberty — around 13, 14, 15, a bit later for boys — we separate on a mental level too. We get more and more the feeling: here is me, and here are other people.

So very deep inside, there is a feeling of being separated, of being alone. When you ask people around 16, 17, 18, 20 years old, they normally feel quite alone, and separate. For me, this is because we all have to go this way: I’m separated, I’m alone.

Fear: the second deep experience of childhood

The second thing that happens in childhood: when we are very little, we need shelter, we need love, we need to be cared for. But this isn’t always available.

As a child, we sometimes experience an angry adult. We experience a mother who is ill, or not available to us — maybe she’s in hospital. Maybe the father has left the family. Maybe father and mother are arguing a lot with each other. A lot of things happen in childhood, and the child — especially when it’s a baby, or very young — is in a very weak position. It can’t do much about it. So trauma happens.

There are normally two main kinds of trauma for a child: acute, single traumas, or an ongoing trauma in the relationship — maybe the father is very critical, or the mother is often depressed. Either way, the child can’t really stop the trauma from happening in the outer world.

There’s little or nothing a child can do. It can’t run away, it can’t really prevent others from doing harm to it. So when the father is abusive, for example, the child is really in a weak position.

Fear is the feeling that arises because the child doesn’t feel safe. That’s the second deep experience of childhood. The first is: I’m separated. The second is: I’m not safe, life is not safe.

How the child copes: body, heart and mind

These are very deep experiences: I’m separated, life is not safe. In the outer world, the child can’t do much — but in the inner world, three things normally happen.

On the physical, the body level, the child tightens somewhere in the body. The breathing isn’t as deep as it could be — it becomes superficial — and tension builds, often around the heart. The heart closes more and more, because the child doesn’t want to feel the painful things that are happening; the child learns to close its heart.

The third thing that happens is on the mental level: we retreat into the mind, because in the mind we can create a fantasy world. We can get more control, think things through, find a new perspective. So the whole energy moves upward — retreating from the body and the heart, and more and more into the mind.

The central drama

And the child, in order to control the whole situation, builds up what I call the central drama. In psychology it’s sometimes called the “false self” — there are many names for it, but I don’t like “false self”; I prefer “central drama.” Central, because it’s an individual drama: everyone has their own. My drama is different from someone else’s.

When we’re a child, being in the drama feels very dramatic. But as we grow up, and work with it, and gain some perspective on it, we see it’s just an old habit — something we built up to deal with a difficult life situation when we were a child.

For me, the central drama is an atmosphere we create. It’s an inner habit, an inner energy field we build up — and everyone does this in childhood, to cope with the conditions of their life as a child. For example, we might build a drama like: “I have to be strong, in order to survive.” Or: “I have to be cleverer than other children.” Or: “I have to care for other people — for my mother, and for others.”

The little me and the inner critic

When you take a closer look at the drama, there are two main parts. One is what I call the little me. And there’s also a critical voice that comes up more and more — a voice we’re not really aware of. I call this the inner critic.

The rule of thumb is: the more trauma that happens, the harsher it is, or the less love comes to the child from father or mother, the stronger this inner critical voice becomes. This inner voice is always pushing me somewhere — telling me I have to learn more, I have to be more — in order to get more love, or to be rejected less by mother or father, and to avoid pain. You could say this critical voice is the perpetrator part in us.

And when you look closely at the drama, there’s always a lack at its root — the lack the trauma left behind. As a child I missed love, or I missed being seen, or I missed shelter or protection. That’s one leg. The other leg is that, because the central drama is based on fear, there’s always a lack of trust in life. We no longer trust life.

Why we build the central drama

We create the central drama for three reasons.

First, the child desperately wants to feel safe again, to control the life situation better — to get out of this weak position.

Second, the drama always wants to compensate for the deep lack of love; we’re all searching for love, or to be happy again.

And third, we build this drama because we want to confirm an identity — through the drama, we come to know who we are.

The point of avoidance and the ideal point

In the drama, there are also two other aspects. One is what I call the point of avoidance: all the feelings we don’t want to feel — fear, panic, helplessness, hopelessness, dependency on others, shame, guilt, abandonment, and so on. On the other side, there’s the ideal point.

The inner critic always wants to protect us from the difficult feelings in the point of avoidance, and always wants to push us toward the ideal point, where we feel safe again, where we think we’ll get love. So when my central drama, for example, is “I have to be strong,” my inner critic always says: you have to be strong.

People with this drama desperately want to avoid feeling weak, or helpless, or dependent on others. The inner critic is always pushing toward “I’m strong.” Donald Trump is maybe a candidate for this particular drama — he always has to be strong, and really avoids showing any weakness or helplessness; he knows everything, and so on.

A short exercise

Let’s do a short exercise — take two or three minutes. Think about your inner critic, your inner voice. Take a little time to notice: in which direction is your inner critic always trying to push you? And what are you trying to avoid falling into? Take a minute for that.

The inner critic as storyteller

When we take a closer look at this inner controller, or inner critic: as I see it, the inner critic always keeps the central drama alive in us. It’s the main part of it. But the thing is, we’re not usually aware of how harsh or how rude this voice is.

When I look at my clients — even myself — 99.9% of the time, we’re not aware of how harsh or rude this voice is. Think about when you fail: for most people, the inner critic shows up with “how stupid I was,” “I’m the worst person in the world.” It’s always a big thing for the inner critic — very harsh, and very rude.

In normal life, when we’re not triggered, when we’re fairly relaxed, the inner critic appears more like a storyteller — narrating us from morning until evening. From the moment we wake up, there are always stories running, lots of thoughts coming up. When you take a close look at them, 98 or 99% of our everyday thoughts really aren’t very precious. And they’re always the same stories, coming up again and again.

So the storyteller is always creating a kind of fog of thoughts, and we end up quite disconnected — from life, from our feelings, from our body. That’s because of this inner structure of the inner controller: it wants to prevent us from feeling, especially the deep, painful feelings. It’s always creating separation — from our body, from the heart, from the world. We end up disconnected from others.

Five signs you are inside your central drama

So how can we recognise when we’re in our central drama? I’ve found five important signs.

The first is: I am right. The second is: it’s your fault. The third is: I’m the victim. The fourth is: you have to — or I have to — do something about it. And the fifth is: complaining, or ranting.

For example, say you have a conflict with a partner, and you tell them: “You’re so mean to me,” or “You never see me.” When you’re really in it, you feel: I’m right about what I’m saying, totally right. It’s your fault — it’s not my fault that I’m suffering, it’s your fault, because you’re mean to me. And I feel like a victim in this.

Then, normally, we tend towards: I have to quit this relationship, or I have to find another partner, or you have to go to therapy so you learn to see me, to be kinder to me. And afterwards, after the conflict, we complain — about the whole situation, about the other person, and so on. Does that sound familiar?

Normally, we are really trapped in this drama. And the crucial point is that we’re maybe a little bit aware that we always feel like a victim, but we’re mostly completely unaware of how rude, or harsh, or hurtful we ourselves are being in conflict — because we’re acting from our inner critic side, and that’s the aspect of ourselves we don’t want to see.

So I say “you’re so mean to me,” without noticing that my own voice is harsh too. I feel like a victim, but I’m not aware of how rude or harsh I am — while I’m very aware of how harsh the other person is being towards me. That’s always the main focus inside the central drama: we feel, always, like a victim.

Why the victim position is so easy to fall into

Why is it so easy to fall into this victim position? The first reason, for me, is that it’s really rooted in childhood — very deeply rooted in us, and it starts very early. Sometimes it really starts at the beginning of pregnancy, when trauma happens and continues through into having a baby. We build this drama within the first five or six years of life, when we were very little — that’s when the main aspects are formed — but it’s hidden in our unconscious. That’s why it’s so important to do inner work, to really deal with this.

The second reason is that a victim always feels a little better than a perpetrator. We feel a bit better when we’re in conflict and think: I’m the victim, the other person is wrong, I’m right. And the third reason, for me, is that a perpetrator always justifies his actions by seeing himself as a victim.

When I was a young doctor, I worked in a psychiatric hospital, and at that time we sometimes had to give assessments for a court — for example, examining people who had committed murder. And when I examined and talked with them, they all felt like victims.

A murderer normally can’t really see his own perpetrator side. That’s an extreme example, but it points to something we all do: we don’t want to see our perpetrator side, and in the beginning, we’re all somehow identified with the victim side.

There’s another reason, too: the child finds a very creative way to get out of the weak position. Inside the drama, we can easily switch — within seconds — between the little me, the weak position, and the perpetrator, the harsh, rude voice. It’s a way of getting into a more powerful position. We create the whole drama in order to escape that weak little-me position.

Switching between victim and perpetrator

When you look at the world, you see this pattern everywhere. Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine: Putin, and Russia, also act from the victim position, always accusing NATO and the Western world, but unable to really see their own perpetrator actions — always seeing the perpetrator side of the other.

And when you look at the Ukrainian side, or the Western side, or NATO, it’s the same: they blame Russia for being the perpetrator, and feel like the victim. When you look closely, both sides have many reasons to feel like victims. It’s a pattern you see nearly everywhere — when you look at leaders like Xi Jinping, or Trump, they’re all acting out of their own drama, all wanting to get into this powerful position, without being aware of it.

And they all need someone to push into the weaker, little-me position instead. The best way is always to find an outer enemy, and then build an army. Because when you’re causing fear — when you’re a dictator — you’re always trying to bring people into fear, because then, since our drama is based on fear, it’s easier to control people. They always try to bring other people into that weaker position.

Question: the inner critic turned outward

A participant asks: This perpetrator role, in a way, seems to be both your inner critic, which is harsh towards yourself, and a perpetrator role towards others — your aggression can be directed towards yourself and towards the other person. Earlier you talked about the perpetrator against ourselves, and then, talking about the victim position, more about the perpetrator directed outward, externally. Do you see them as the same thing, just expressed in different directions? Could you say something about this double aspect, to help us understand better?

Answer: Yes — it’s the same drama, the same drama pattern. Sometimes the drama plays out inside us, and the inner critic is blaming me. Or we can project these two parts onto other people.

For example, when the central drama is something like “I have to protect myself, because the world is so aggressive” — because my mother or father was aggressive — then there’s an aggressive world out there, and a little me that always wants to protect itself. We can project these parts onto other people.

Sometimes we get very angry — and especially when you have children, you can see this very clearly. Normally, when we have children, we do the same thing our parents did to us. We use, sometimes, exactly the same words, when we shout at the child. So these two positions — the little me and the inner critic — are sometimes inside us, and sometimes we project them into the outer world.

For example, with borderline personality, people always tend to project one or the other aspect onto the other person: they might get very angry at others, or feel devastated, thinking the other person is trying to destroy them. And this can switch within seconds — we can switch between these two roles. You can see this everywhere. And the problem is that we always feel like a victim, and in the beginning we’re completely blind to the fact that we are, ourselves, really perpetrators in relationships too.

The body as the little me

This inner drama sometimes plays out inside us, and very often our body is given the role of the little me. The inner critic tells the body things like: “You’re so ugly,” “No one likes you, look at your stomach,” “You have too many kilos,” “You’re too small,” or “too big.” The body is very often placed in this little-me position — and we’re not aware of it.

Getting out of the drama: the inner warrior

Only when we were children were we truly victims — up to the age of, let’s say, ten or twelve. There, we really were victims, because we couldn’t handle all those traumas. But as we grow older, as adults, we’re not victims anymore.

Of course, on an adult level, there are genuinely life-threatening situations — earthquakes, wars — where we really can be victims. But in normal, everyday life, in ordinary conflicts, we are not victims; we are much more the perpetrators. And the way out of this drama, the way out of conflict, is really to dare to look at my own perpetrator side.

This is one step, and it’s a tough one, because for this you need what I call the inner warrior. The warrior is really connected to the heart, and dares to feel, and to take responsibility for his or her actions in the world.

This is really tough — in a conversation with your partner, when you’ve been shouting at each other, maybe for years, in an ongoing conflict, and you always think: I am right, the other is wrong, it’s their fault, not mine, I’m the victim, I have to find someone else — and then you complain, and argue. What I described before — when we’re really trapped in this drama — it takes real courage to notice: I feel like a victim. Why? How? There’s a little me inside too.

We always feel like a victim as an adult, because the little me is knocking at the door, wanting to be seen, wanting to be in touch — wanting to get out of the prison we were in during childhood. So the warrior, connected with the heart, needs to get in touch with the inner child, and really feel — this is the crucial point. Don’t just talk about that little child inside you: really feel it.

Dare to feel your way into what I call the point of avoidance, where the difficult feelings are, where — very deep down — there’s a deep pain. The deepest pain in our heart is always a deep fear, and it’s always the separation — from life, and from God. That’s the deepest fear we can face, and it has a lot to do with childhood, with when we were very little.

That’s more or less what I wanted to share with you today.