3 February 2021
Let’s continue our discussion of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy in which victimhood is a chosen status. Last week, our schoolyard bullying saga ended with the beaten person’s choice: experience her feelings of sadness, aloneness, and embarrassment or depress those feelings. That last phrase, depressing those feelings, is important because it changes the emphasis. While most of us think of depression as a noun it is sometimes also a verb.
Most definitions of psychological depression (as opposed to physical depression, the pushing down of an architectural plane or a small stone into wet sand) tend to skip this component of depression. In terms of logotherapy, in the same way we choose victimhood or agency, we can choose to experience, depress, and/or catastrophize our emotions.
Aaron Beck hypothesized a model of the depressive explanation having three parts. Those parts are the self, the world, and the future (Larsen & Buss, 2014). The beaten person, in our schoolyard story, chose to see herself as an agent with perceptual and conceptual options. She did not let the brutal unfairness of the beating affect how she saw or thought about herself. Nor did she think the world a worse place or the future a hopeless sinkhole. Every person reading this has probably played the victim, if just temporarily, thinking our lives hopelessly unfair messes, the world a wildly unfair place, and the future an express lane to hell. Here’s the thing: which attitude helps, and which attitude hinders?
This is Frankl’s point: victimhood is a choice. Choosing to be an agent requires you to take enough responsibility for the events of your life that you actively plan some next steps. If we follow Frankl through, those steps will be based on our own will to meaning or a purpose to which we dedicate our time.
But what about the bully? Chances are high that she already sees herself as a helpless victim. What she dished out in the schoolyard has probably appeared on her plate for years at home or elsewhere in her life. It is a dangerous game because, as no one knows better than the bully, it depends on bluster and dispersed responsibility i.e., the “luckiness” preventing a stronger more forceful person stepping up to stop the bullying.
Some of this isn’t luck because bullies pick on the weak. There is a terrible sadness often seen in scenarios of domestic violence. The aggressor takes out what he feels he’s been served by life on the only person he thinks will allow him that behaviour: the person/people he loves. This sets up a cycle of reciprocal denial in which neither party can face themselves because to admit the truth, would be to confront the unfaceable.
The bully cannot bear knowing what he does to those he loves and the beaten cannot bear to admit that they’re effectively allowing this to happen. The remedy is essentially the same: facing up, admitting, understanding, and moving—as a conscious agent—toward health. This whole scenario hinges on meaning. If any one of the three parties involved: the bully, the beaten, or the witness faces the meaning of conscious agency versus silent consent, the cycle is disrupted.
Dan Chalykoff provides one-to-one counselling concerning life direction, addiction, and change. Since 2017 he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery: danchalykoff@hotmail.com
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