KS&L 327 Victimhood Part 2

Let us take the concept of having a family member murdered. There are a thousand scenarios. None of them matter. What matters is that you still love the person who died. Every single time you say that your loved one was murdered or was the victim of a crime, you perpetuate the energy of victimhood. When you use these terms, you invite people to see you as a victim. What if you used different terms, just as an experiment? When you have to explain that your loved one died, you can simply say that they passed away. People will still send you their love, but they will not physically recoil at the term ‘murder victim, or suicide.’ These terms alone keep you in that place of pain.

Initially after a horrific event, you do explain in victim terms what happened. However, as time goes by, you may want to consider that not everyone has to know that this terrible event occurred. They can know you without the shadow self of ‘victim’ as part of your relationship with them. This is a choice only you can make and you make it when you decide that you want to remove the term ‘victim’ from your life.

When someone asks you how your loved one died, consider that you have a choice in how your respond. Do you want people to know that your loved one was murdered? Is it necessary? People want to know cause of death. You can respond several ways:

• If your son was killed in a drug related situation, not everyone has to know this. You can honestly say that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and he died, or you can note that he refused to join a gang and he died.
• If your daughter was attacked and murdered, you can say that she was killed. It is not always necessary to go into the details of her death everytime.
• If you or someone close to you was raped, it may not be necessary to discuss this at all outside of law enforcement. Healing such an intimate crime as rape, may not lend itself to sharing that this event happened to you.
• If your loved one committed suicide, again, it is not always necessary to explain what occurred. If enough time has passed and this person’s death comes up, say that they died. Not everyone needs every detail. If you do have to describe cause of death, you can explain that this person was so profoundly unhappy that all attempts to assist them failed and he or she died.
• If your loved one was murdered helping someone else, simply say that he died as a hero because he was doing just that: helping someone.

The following story illustrates how this can be done and how you can choose to change your life and hope to heal your grief, by speaking of your situation differently.

One Mom told the story of how her wonderful son was murdered, not long after he returned from duty in Iraq. He was helping a young child who had been beaten by his family. An irate family member simply walked up to her son and shot him in front of this abused child. From that point on the Mom saw her son as a victim of violent crime. If he had died in Iraq, he would have been a war hero. But dying on the streets of her city held no honor – or so she thought. What if she were to see that service to another human being is service – period. What if she stopped seeing her son as a victim and began to see him as a hero, which is exactly what he was? Would simply changing the terminology begin to change her perception and help her begin to heal her grief and ultimately regain some of her personal power back? Possibly it will. It is one step in the healing process, but it is a powerful one.

Perhaps the bottom line here is that words have power. The more powerfully shocking the words are, the greater the echo impact they will continue to have on you. You can choose to change those words and begin to regain that power. Nothing can change that the event happened, but you have the power of choice in how you relate to it over the rest of the years of your life.