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Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

Moving from a Victim Mindset to a Victor Mindset

I thought of another area of reset that many of us need.

And this anthem we just heard, the special music was a great introduction to that, showing how things could be reset by just acts of mercy and kindness.

But the great reset that I want to talk about today is moving from a victim mindset to a victor mindset.

Moving from being a victim to being a victor.

And I think this is probably 1 of the greatest needs that we have today.

And I was reading a meta-analysis of the increasing externality of our locus of control.

Lots of times people think, you know, everything's out of my control.

And it's kind of inherent to our Human nature, isn't it?

The Lord called to Adam and said to him, where are you?

He said, I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

Is that a victim mindset or a victim mindset?

And then God said to him, verse 11, who told you you were naked?

And then he identifies right where this comes from.

Have you eaten from the tree which I command you not to eat of?

And then the man said, well, the woman you gave to me to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate.

I mean, if only I would have had a different wife.

If only I would have had a different spouse.

I picked a lemon in the trees of life where only oranges were supposed to grow.

So then, God said to the woman, what is it, this that you have done?

So Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent.

Psychologists call this the victim mentality.

Self-pity, someone wrote, is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics.

So if you want to take a non-pharmaceutical narcotic, This is a good 1.

It's the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotic self-pity.

It gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

This happened, that happened, the other happened.

How many of you have ever said it yourself?

Everything that happened in your life is somebody else's fault.

As my dad used to say to me growing up, he that's good at excuses is good at little else.

And the biggest excuse sometimes we have is that we've been victimized.

Now, there are victims, don't get me wrong.

There's 2 types of victims, true victims, many of them.

I mean, have you ever heard someone that just had a very bad situation?

And there's true victims, many of them in this world.

And false victims blame others for their own mistakes.

True victims maybe have done nothing wrong and they're victimized.

False victims always blame others for their own mistakes.

No matter what type of victim someone may be, however, holding on to this victim mentality is devastating to one's mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

So even if you're a true victim or a false victim, you say I'm a true victim so I can hang on to it.

The pastor just said, no, that's not good.

So to a large extent, success or failure depends on how you're going to relate to that.

If people, if you lose the ability to think you're in control of anything you can do about something, then that's not a very good outcome for you.

But if you think there might be something that you could grasp onto, and you grasp onto that, that's good for you.

I remember reading a book by a guy back in the 80s who was in the Nazi concentration camps, and he had nothing.

All decisions were taken away, everything.

So he wrote a book while he was in the Nazi concentration camp.

Every time he could write down something, he'd little shreds of paper and stuff.

What am I learning here in this concentration camp?

We're true victims, but what am I learning?

I'm not gonna lose the opportunity to learn something here in the situation.

If you don't lose that, then you remain in control of the situation that seems like you're out of control.

The more external the locus of control, the worse.

And the study that I was reading said this, locus of control scores have become substantially more external in college students and in child samples between the years of 1960 and 2002.

The average college student in 2002 had a more external locus of control than 80% of college students in the early 60s.

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Moving from a Victim Mindset to a Victor Mindset

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