"There is No Such Thing as a Victim" (& Other Dangerous Spiritual Lies)

Dear Dr. Grief,

Recently, I disagreed with a teaching — and my body did not whisper about it. My body said it loud.

I was in a mastermind talking about “victim mentality,” and the teacher doubled down on a premise that’s gotten real trendy in spiritual spaces: that there’s no such thing as being a victim, that victimization isn’t real, that safety is an inner state… and “if you were really safe, you wouldn’t need protection.”

And I just—no.

I understand soul paths. I understand initiation. I understand the spiritual impulse to alchemize experience and ask what life is forging in us. I understand radical responsibility in the adult sense: finding where I have agency and refusing to collapse into helplessness.

But I also live in incarnation. And incarnation is not a quote. Incarnation is not a vibe. Incarnation is bodies, children, consequences, and other humans with their own will.

So here’s the distinction I’m not letting anyone blur into spiritual glitter:

• Victimization is an event.

• Victim identity is a stance.

Victimization is what happens when power is misused. When coercion is present. When harm happens. When someone does something to you that you did not choose and could not prevent, and your options are constrained by threat.

Victim identity is what can happen when the event becomes a permanent address. When “this happened” turns into “this is who I am.” When the story loops with no new boundary, support, or action entering. When agency collapses everywhere.

These are not the same thing. Confusing them doesn’t make you enlightened — it makes you sloppy. Sometimes it makes you dangerous.

Because here’s what happens when you deny victimization: you don’t create empowerment. You create self-gaslighting.You train people to distrust their perception. You teach them to reinterpret danger as spiritual failure. You make them responsible for other people’s choices.

And here’s the irony: these same spaces often say, “You are not responsible for other people’s behavior.” That’s one of the core teachings: don’t take on what isn’t yours.

But then the “vibrational match” teaching sneaks in through the back door and says: actually… your frequency is responsible for other people’s behavior. Your internal state is the reason someone else harmed you. Your vibration is the cause of their coercion. Their choices get downgraded to a cosmic echo.

Inner safety is real. Objective safety is real. They are not competing.

Yes, inner safety matters. Regulation matters. Self-trust matters. The nervous system’s capacity to come back from activation matters.

And also — objective safety matters.

• Sometimes safety is a lock.

• Sometimes safety is a lawyer.

• Sometimes safety is distance.

• Sometimes safety is documentation.

• Sometimes safety is a plan.

• Sometimes safety is money.

• Sometimes safety is community.

• Sometimes safety is naming what is happening accurately.

  
  

A regulated nervous system in a burning building still needs to leave the building.

Children make this painfully obvious. Children don’t access “inner safety” as a solo spiritual achievement. Children access safety through co-regulation: attuned adults, predictable structures, and protection enacted in the external world.

Humans are co-regulatory mammals. We are designed for relationship. We borrow calm. We borrow steadiness. We borrow reality.

So when someone tells me, “If you were really safe, you wouldn’t need protection,” I hear: we are pretending we don’t live among other nervous systems. We are pretending power doesn’t exist.

Protection isn’t proof of low frequency. It’s proof I’m not outsourcing my life to a slogan.

Existential kink: don’t quote the premise and then erase it

What makes this extra funny is that earlier in the class they referenced existential kink — the idea that humans came here to experience the full spectrum of the human experience.

And part of that spectrum, whether we like it or not, includes loss, harm, threat, betrayal, and yes: victimization.

So when you try to erase victimization, you’re not transcending humanity — you’re amputating it.

You can’t cite “the full human experience” and then pretend some parts of the human experience don’t exist. You don’t get to say “we came here for all of it,” and then shame the parts of the psyche that respond accurately to danger.

That isn’t enlightenment. That’s editing.

“Vibrational match” is the new victim-blame (and it eats its own tail)

Then came the “vibrational match” logic: your frequency is everything, your vibration explains your experiences, and if you’re not safe, you must be matching danger.

But that’s where the teaching swallows itself. Because if your frequency is “everything,” then it becomes a kind of fate — a hidden god — a force you’re subject to.

Which means you’re basically a victim of your vibration.

And if there’s “no such thing as victimhood,” then what are we saying? Don’t call it harm. Call it vibrational consequence. Don’t call it coercion. Call it soul curriculum. Don’t call it danger. Call it a mirror.

We are smuggling in blame and calling it empowerment.

And if you want to see whether a model is wise or just convenient, run it through a basic stress test:

• What do you say about children?

• What do you say about trafficking?

• What do you say about genocide?

• What do you say about civilians under state violence — Iran, war zones, places where safety is actively being stripped?

• What do you say about the children and girls in the Epstein files?

If the answer is “they were a vibrational match,” your model is not spiritual. It’s morally unserious. It’s a theology of blame.

Trauma is a fact of life — and so is resilience

Trauma researchers like Peter Levine say, in essence: trauma is a fact of life — and so is resilience.

In other words: trauma happens because we are living creatures in a world of bodies, threat, loss, accident, power dynamics, and overwhelm. It’s not always a frequency problem. It’s often an organism meeting too much, too fast, too soon, with too little support.

Resilience is also a fact of life — but resilience isn’t built by bypass. Resilience is built by metabolizing reality.

Animals don’t bypass threat — they complete it, metabolize it. They shake. They discharge. They return. But humans? We override. We intellectualize. We transcend too quickly. And then we call it healing.

And here’s where spiritual spaces get incoherent: they love saying the word trauma. They love being “trauma-informed.” But then they want to deny victimization. 🤔 Trauma involves an event and an impact. Often it involves a perpetrator and a person harmed (aka victim). Even when there is no perpetrator (illness, accident, disaster), there is still something that happened that overwhelmed the system.

If you erase victimization, you don’t become beyond trauma — you just become someone who can’t tell the truth about it. And if you can’t tell the truth, you’re not doing shadow work. You’re doing cosmetics.

Real shadow work doesn’t require me to deny what happened. It requires me to feel it, integrate it, and act in accordance with reality.

“Why is this happening to me?” can be intelligence — not wallowing

Another thing I refuse to give up is the question: “Why is this happening to me?”

In bypassy spaces, that question gets treated like the “victim question,” the immature question, the powerless question. But in reality, it can be a pattern-tracking question — an intelligence question.

Because if I keep asking only “How is this happening for me?” without ever asking “Why is this happening to me?,” I might skip the exact data that prevents repetition.

Sometimes “why” is how you notice patterns. How you tighten strategy. How you mitigate harm.

Example: navigating the court system. If something was handled poorly once, I need to name it so it doesn’t happen again — or so I can address the downstream consequences. That’s not wallowing. That’s competence. That’s survival. That’s reality-based iteration.

You can ask “how is this for me?” and also ask “why is this happening to me?”

You can do soul-work and still do pattern recognition.

A bratty little inversion: what if I’m not “low frequency” — what if I’m forged?

Here’s a funny twist I can’t unsee: If the “vibrational match” story is going to be told at all, why is it always told as if suffering means you’re lower?

Why not flip it? What if I’m so evolved I attracted this initiation as a forging?

I’m not saying I believe that as literal cosmic law — I’m pointing out the absurdity. The “match” story is used selectively, often in a way that implies the person in danger is spiritually behind.

And that’s the part that makes my nervous system spit.

Gaia doesn’t need a victim identity to tell you to stop harming her

In the same class, the teacher shared a meditation she did where Mother Earth said she was “not a victim.”

I’ve heard versions of this, and I agree — in essence. Mother Earth doesn’t need a victim identity.

But “I’m not a victim” is not the same as “I’m not being harmed.”

Because Mother Earth is not bypassing what is happening on her body: pollution of oceans, depleted soil, ecological collapse, species extinction, toxic air and water, endocrine disruptors saturating the web of life. Those are not mindset issues. Those are choices, systems, and consequences.

Mother Earth can be sovereign and still say, in the plain language of biology: “Stop doing stupid shit to my body.”

If “vibration” is universal law, then ask:

• Are the oceans a vibrational match for pollution?

• Is depleted soil a vibrational match for depletion?

• Are extinct species a vibrational match for extinction?

If that sentence feels grotesque, good. That’s your ethics waking up.

Predator and prey: nature doesn’t moralize causality

Predator and prey exist. Hunger exists. Vulnerability exists. Relationship exists.

Is prey a “vibrational match” for the predator? Or is it simply true that in a world of bodies, some bodies have more power than others — and life includes dynamics of pursuit, evasion, protection, and survival?

Nature doesn’t shame the gazelle for needing to run. Nature doesn’t call the gazelle “low frequency” for being hunted. Nature doesn’t say “if you were really safe, you wouldn’t need protection.”

Nature says: move, hide, herd, adapt, survive. And then: tremble, discharge, rest, return.

That’s embodiment. That’s alchemy. That’s real.

Feminism: the scaffolding nobody wants to acknowledge

Many women teachers get to lead, teach, speak freely, build businesses, and claim authority because feminism pushed the world — imperfectly, unevenly, painfully — toward more safety and agency for women.

That is collective protection. That is systemic intervention. That is “protection as a verb” at scale.

So it’s wild to watch spiritual spaces benefit from the fruits of protection while preaching that protection is evidence you’re not safe inside.

Unity consciousness doesn’t pay legal fees. And liberation has always required both inner work and structures that reduce harm.

The violence of looking away (or: “I honor where you’re at”)

In the mastermind, when I named my distinction — victimization as event vs victim identity as stance — the response I received was: “Great response. I honor where you’re at.”

Maybe it was meant kindly. Maybe it was meant as validation. But my body heard something else.

“I honor where you’re at” can be a way of looking away.

It can be a spiritual pat on the head that avoids the actual substance. A polite dismissal wrapped in a blessing. A way of staying above the mess of someone else’s reality.

I’ve written about this before. I called it The Violence of Looking Away. The way people respond with “sending love” as if that’s contact, as if that’s presence, as if that’s care.

And when your life has been in danger — when your children’s safety has been on the line — you develop a kind of clarity that isn’t theoretical.

Danger sharpens discernment. Chronic threat makes you precise. This has been the most destabilizing experience of my life, and also the most stabilizing: it has taught me to name reality and know truth in my body more than I ever have.

So when someone can’t meet the totality of that — when they smooth it over with spiritual politeness — I feel it as another kind of violation.

Soul path doesn’t cancel survival

Yes, maybe what I’m living is part of my soul path. Yes, maybe there is initiation here. Yes, maybe my life contains a curriculum that is forging me into steel.

And also: I want to stay alive. I want my children safe. I am not offering my body as collateral to a metaphysical theory.

I will alchemize what I can — after I take action.

I will make meaning — after I protect what is precious.

I will do spiritual work — and I will lock the door.

Stop demonizing the damsel, the victim, the martyr

We demonize the damsel. We demonize the victim. We demonize the martyr. We treat them like spiritual failure modes — shameful archetypes to purge.

But they are also part of the human experience. They are parts of the psyche that carry information: need, longing, exhaustion, truth, boundary, grief.

Every archetype has shadow and light. Even the “victim” part. Even the damsel. Even the martyr.

And when we demonize them, we don’t become whole. We exile them. Which means they go underground and start running the show anyway.

It’s funny — the kind of teaching I heard today claimed to transcend shadow and light… but it was actually pointing straight to where shadow and light haven’t been integrated. Because refusing to hold paradox is not transcendence. It’s splitting.

And we are paradox embodied. We are infinite beings in finite bodies. We are animals and mystics. We are both/and. So any spirituality that cannot hold multiple truths, that insists only one truth gets to exist at a time, is not reflective of the universe.

It’s reflective of someone’s nervous system trying to control reality.

And that brings me to…there is no panacea spirituality.

There is no one teaching that cures everything. If there were, it would be the only teaching left on earth. Just like there is no single medical modality that cures every body, every disease, every nervous system.

The most trustworthy frameworks can hold paradox. They don’t claim total certainty. They don’t pretend one level of truth cancels another. They leave room for “we don’t know.”

We know so little about the universe. We know so little about outer space, the ocean, human nervous systems, etc. What we do know is vast beyond comprehension — which should make us humbler, not louder.

So when someone responds to a real safety inquiry with spiritual smoothness instead of contact, I can feel the gap between courtesy and care.

And I’m done confusing courtesy for safety.

The Recalcitrant Reality of Living Within Broken Systems...Read the rest of this post here.

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