Denial & Victim Mentality - Video Transcript

Hey guys, I'm Kristen Jacobsen, and welcome to the anxiety therapist vlog. Today, I'm going to be talking about a couple of concepts from a recent book that I've read by author Mark Manson and he talks a lot about our perception of happiness. So a lot of people think that happiness means that we don't have problems in our lives and um social media does a really great job of leading us to believe that everyone else has a happier life than us, right?

We see people on their vacations or with their families are having a great time with their friends or getting their dream job or what have you. And so we start to question um our own choices, our own experiences and our own happiness. So this is a really skewed way to view happiness and a healthier approach is to recognize that everyone encounters problems in their lives and those problems aren't going anywhere.

Um as soon as we solve one problem, another problem arises. So happiness is really kind of honing in on finding the problems that we enjoy having and enjoy solving because reaching a state of happiness is very action oriented, and happiness itself is a fleeting emotion, just like any other emotion, anger, sadness, fear frustration, right? It comes and goes, it it passes through us rather quickly.

There's no one is in a constant state of happiness. So this um this concept, this idea of sort of choosing the problems that we enjoy having, this can be very simple, such as, you know, trying to figure out how to eat a healthy diet or it can be more complicated, such as repairing your relationship with a family member, let's say, and there are two ways that we tend to self sabotage when it comes to this.

Um, the first is denial. So a lot of people will sort of deny that they even have these problems to begin with and um they'll do this by sort of distracting themselves from reality. Avoidance is a great method that a lot of my clients used to do this um where you sort of avoid the problems at hand. And so this feels good in the short term, right? You're avoiding problems, but in the long term it really leads to more insecurity neuroticism and emotional repression, because then we have all of these problems we never dealt with and they sort of build up inside of us the other way we self sabotage is through assuming this victim mentality and um this is when we tend to blame others or external external circumstances for our problems and feel like we really have no ability to solve them, um, or no control over the situation.

So, again, this might feel good in the short term, it's like I can't do anything about it, it is what it is. Um, but then it can lead to anger helplessness and despair. So how do these things relate to anxiety while anxiety is essentially, um sort of this idea that we don't have control and that there is uncertainty in the world.

And so if you think about it, a lot of these, this denial that we we tend to experience is really an attempt to not have to face the uncertainty right? Because there's a lot of fear in not knowing what's coming and then the victim mentality pertains a lot to the feeling of not having control.

So it's really hard to acknowledge that we don't have control over a lot of things in this world and so sometimes um we can assume a victim mentality and just sort of perceive things as happening to us as opposed to really um being finding out what we're figuring out what we are in control of and focusing on those things. And so the whole concept between, I'm sorry behind Mark Manson's idea of happiness is that we sort of have to accept things as they are in order to create change.

This is the concept behind um dialectical behavior therapy as well, which is a very popular therapy right now um and very effective and so we really have to practice acceptance that there are going to be distressing things in life that some things are out of our control and that um having what we would consider negative emotional experiences are actually very normal and healthy things to experience and that we need to experience them in order to sort of create resilience and um not be scared off when another distressing event occurs.

So I hope that you found this helpful as just sort of another perspective to take, or another way to sort of um look at this concept of happiness. And I put out a new video every Friday. So be sure to um check out my website or social media, um and subscribe to my youtube channel if you want to see more videos, um and be sure to click the learn more button to just learn more about what I do and how I might be able to help you. So, again, have a great weekend, um and Kristen the anxiety therapist, and I'll see you next time.

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