Empowerment as a Choice: Victimhood as a Choice  –by Jim Nolan

Life happens. People do what they do, elect who they elect, love what they love, get into against-ness with what they get into against-ness with, decide who will be their Personal Satan and who will be their Second Coming.

We take responsibility for our experience or we blame the other guy.

We go into therapy or we go to the bar.

We go anti-war or we go pro-peace.

We give away our personal power or we do not.

Do people do shitty things? Yes.

Do people do neutral things that we choose to view as shitty? For sure.

Do we have the power to decide how we will respond to shitty things other people do? Well, Viktor Frankl and Gandhi, and Jesus did, and I cannot imagine my personal situation ever getting as bad as theirs, so I am saying “yes” on this one.

Do we ever attempt to take the moral high-ground when we feel like a victim? Sometimes, yes. I know I have, anyway. It feels really good for a short time—“Poor me, I’m such a nice, hard-working, well-intentioned guy, but THOSE rotten horrible bastards, well, let me tell you what THEY did…blah blah blah…”

And then, when I realize that that “Moral High Ground” I was so enjoying is like some fake psycho-politico-spiritual Shangri-La place I made up,  it embarrasses me, and I get back to re-shaping my own reality. The sooner the better.

We have a lot more choices than we recognize. We have a lot more power than we recognize. We can attract a lot more of whatever we want in life than we generally do.

You can choose to think that all of the above is malarkey. That game is available too.

And remember the sweet words of Henry Ford:

“If you think you can do a thing, or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”

Carry on.

Jim Nolan

Drjamesmichaelnolan.com

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