How you can learn to be someone’s wind-

No one likes to hear from someone who cries “Victim”. And it does seem that most people who cry “victim”, just have not made any obvious effort to help themselves. Now note, I use the word “obvious”- because the truth of a situation is seldom “obvious”. 

For those of us who are survivors, we are victims. In the beginning, we were victims of abuse from someone, usually someone we trusted. We learn to protect ourselves in ways that worked, to some degree, in our dysfunctional homes. But these ways don’t work in the real world, so we keep screwing up. We don’t trust people who could have or would have helped us, but we do trust people who use and abuse us. We make really bad choices, because they are all we know- and the familiar is better than the unknown to us. 

Too often we give up. We refuse help that is offered, because we know there are strings attached that are worse than doing without- or so we believe. We don’t even try to do things for ourselves because our experience is- “we’ll do it wrong, anyway!” And before you know it, we’re the person sleeping under a tarp in the park or city streets where people wearing nice clothes with places to go step right over us like we’re no better, no more a living “human” being, than the dirt on the sidewalk. If we’re lucky we have an old beat up car to live out of, and we park amongst the semi tractor trailers rigs at the nearest truck stop. Everything we own is in that car. 

Then there are those of us who find someone along the way to believe in us. It may be temporary, of being in the right place at the right time, but it is something we latch onto, at least temporarily. It could be a school teacher, it could be the parent of another student from school, it could be a neighbor or someone from a local church or food pantry or soup kitchen. 

Sometimes we are so starved for encouragement that it doesn’t take much to make us reach out and take risks- apply for the right job, enroll in a course at the community college, maybe even help someone else- which is the best way to build a sense that we are worthwhile. 

And even when we do accept encouragement and make a good choice, it doesn’t often work out for reasons that are out of our control. I can give you lots of examples of this. And this is when we hear this quote of Mother Teresa and say to ourselves, “Maybe there is a God, and maybe I’m just being tested- and maybe I know exactly what she means……. I wish he/she/higher power/God didn’t trust me so much.”