I love it. Without even knowing about this particular quote, this has been my standard for myself for some years now. The “it’s always your fault” concept is scary to some folks—and I understand why—but it’s changed my life since I adopted it years ago.
Generally speaking, my framework is:
1. I’m NOT a victim.
2. I accept that everything that happens in my life is my fault.
3. I control the controllables; I can’t fix what I can’t control.
4. I must be a problem solver rather than a complainer.
5. Whatever happens in life, I give myself a cap of 48 hours to get over it—this includes being sad, grieving, being unproductive, etc.
I have a few more points in my framework, but these are the key ones.
Now, I want to be clear that you can, in fact, be a victim and things can happen in your life that isn’t your fault, which makes #3 seem a bit contradictory. But if you’re thinking like this, you’re missing the point.
The point is to have a framework that allows you to progress in life without allowing room for excuses.
When my wife first started dating me, she was skeptical of my framework—she said it seemed a bit too robotic. As we’ve gone through stuff life has thrown at us and she watches me fight through it all without ever curling up in a ball, she’s fully on board now.
I say all of this to say: Take control of your life. You can do it and it works.
>Now, I want to be clear that you can, in fact, be a victim and things can happen in your life that isn’t your fault
Going to be honest here, I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you saying that people should go through life never feeling like a victim, even if they are one? I don't see how that would be helpful.
>5. Whatever happens in life, I give myself a cap of 48 hours to get over it—this includes being sad, grieving, being unproductive, etc.
You must seriously loathe yourself or live an incredibly sheltered life if you actually follow this (e.g. not just bottling up your emotions and pretending that you're okay). If your dad died, are you seriously just going to take a weekend to try and power through the grieving process? Actually, if you think spending more than 48 hours being unproductive is something that you have to "get over", do you even let yourself have weekends off from work? This is the kind of mindset that leads to people committing suicide.
I think they're saying that you can use belief as a tool in your thinking, even if you know intellectually it's not true now and certainly won't be true always.
The belief that you are not a victim is (often) a very useful belief because it prompts change in the only place you're reliably able to produce it: your own decisions. This is true irrespective of whether you're actually a victim today or tomorrow. Obviously if your "I am not a victim" mentality is prompting you not to leave a situation you really should be leaving, then that's a bad application. Note what happened here though: it's not the truthfulness of the belief that changed, it's the usefulness of the belief.
> This is the kind of mindset that leads to people committing suicide.
Citation please? That's an extremely bold claim to be throwing out as established fact.
> > This is the kind of mindset that leads to people committing suicide.
> Citation please? That's an extremely bold claim to be throwing out as established fact.
I know I’ll probably offend some folks by saying this: This is why everyone seems to expect to be coddled nowadays. Concepts like suicide are used so liberally and flippantly, and worse, they’re even weaponized at times. We’ve gone from vets committing suicide due to PTSD after being in literal war to folks considering suicide as an option the moment they feel the slightest bit of discomfort from life. I think this is really bad for society.
If anything, I think learning how to take full control over your emotions—i.e., the point of my “48 hours” system—can likely actually prevent suicide (this is obviously just my hunch, not based on any studies), because it’s usually (not always) a result of someone losing hope in their ability to control their situation/outcomes and letting their emotions take over. It’s easy to see my system as robotic, but the reality is, the end result is putting the power back in my hands and allowing myself to push through. It’s worked extremely well for me.
>The belief that you are not a victim is (often) a very useful belief because it prompts change in the only place you're reliably able to produce it: your own decisions.
I figured that this is the angle that he was going for, but I still don't believe it. Feeling like a victim can prompt change as well, and like you said, refusing to feel like a victim can prevent change. It's all about the situation, but I think that refusing to have an honest assessment of your situation will usually cause you to make bad decisions.
> Citation please? That's an extremely bold claim to be throwing out as established fact.
Grieving usually takes at least 6 months[0]. Trying to speedrun the process because you refuse to let yourself feel negative emotions is literally the absolute worst way to deal with loss, to the point that I'm actually surprised that somebody actually just suggested that. Same thing with being unproductive for more than 48 hours. That's a recipe for burnout, and trying to just power through burnout for your entire life without accepting that you might need to rest for a bit will make you feel useless and depressed that you can't reach your absurdly strict self-goals. Self-hatred increases the risk of suicide[1], and I can't imagine that anybody would use this framework unless they despise themselves or have never suffered in their life.
> This is the kind of mindset that leads to people committing suicide.
I agree with this, I’ve seen it play out numerous times. This sort of reasoning barely works on a surface level if at all and requires maintaining at least one giant blind spot — in this case it’s likely impossible to “get over” the intense need for constant unwavering control over one’s internal state that lead to the creation of the 48 hour rule.
The sort of terror underlying the thought of who a person might become if they were to slip up and be sad for three days or two weeks etc. can only be ignored, suppressed or (self)medicated — certainly not “overcome” in that window.
> You must seriously loathe yourself or live an incredibly sheltered life if you actually follow this (e.g. not just bottling up your emotions and pretending that you're okay).
Nonsense. It’s actually quite the opposite. I’m a black man who’s been told my entire life that I’m a victim. And to an extent, I was a victim; I grew up in some of the worst environments in America, I’ve been through more trauma—including serious physical violence—than most folks, and my skin color was always my victimhood pass. I’ve been blessed to have had both of my parents married and in my life, and they did their best to teach me to be a responsible person, but everyone else always told me that I had excuses for my issues in life. You know what’s actually destructive? Allowing folks to live in a perpetual state of victimhood. It’s debilitating and renders you powerless. Not allowing myself to be a victim is quite literally the most powerful and life-changing thing to ever happen to me.
Also, it’s not about “pretending” that I’m okay … I am. I’m a realist. I accept that life comes the way it does and figure out ways to move forward despite whatever comes at me. In the grand scheme of things, most of the things we tend to stress ourselves about aren’t actually that deep. And when they are, well, you’re still human, so it’s perfectly reasonable to react accordingly. If someone extremely close to me dies, you’re right, it might take slightly longer than a weekend to get through it, but I’m optimizing for the most likely situations; in my experience, most situations that have folks curling up in a ball aren’t “my dad died” situations.
Oftentimes 3 and 4 can lead to you escaping everything which may make your big picture situation worse.
"It's becoming miserable to work at X because so-and-so is very challenging to work with".
You can't control so-and-so and stewing in this environment while complaining isn't going to help the situation so the only choices are to never bring them up again and be internally miserable or leave. If you leave, the outcome of that might mean you can't pay your bills.
> Whatever happens in life, I give myself a cap of 48 hours to get over it—this includes being sad, grieving, being unproductive, etc.
This is, to me, insane. Grief, sadness, anger, etc are not truly within our conscious control. I can't say that I have a study in hand which shows this or anything, but in my own personal experience with them it definitely doesn't seem like a "choice" to feel something. Feeling and actions have mutual influence, but neither fully determines the other. Choosing to be "over it", IMO, is simply denial masquerading as self-control.
To be clear: recognizing the persistence of, say, grief is not at all the same as letting yourself be consumed by it. I think it's appropriate and healthy to set boundaries on the amount of time that you will give energy and attention to an emotion like grief, and making the decision to "move on" is absolutely possible. But to me this must take the form of "I am still feeling X, but choosing not to let my actions be dominated by it", or at the very least the simple "I am still feeling X and that's okay". In my experience people who you instead say "I am no longer allowing myself to feel X" eventually [ex|im]plode. A quote I heard a long time ago that really resonated with me is (something like) "you are not a machine, you are a garden"; my mind doesn't take orders and trying to force it to adopt one state or another will either result in frustration (bad) or deluding myself about my internal emotional state (worse). All I can productively do is provide my mind with the circumstances it needs to develop in a healthy way, and then be patient. In the meantime I can put my best effort into taking healthy and self-caring actions (doesn't have to be sleeping all day, could be taking a class or learning a new skill), without punishing myself for failing these.
Generally speaking, my framework is:
1. I’m NOT a victim.
2. I accept that everything that happens in my life is my fault.
3. I control the controllables; I can’t fix what I can’t control.
4. I must be a problem solver rather than a complainer.
5. Whatever happens in life, I give myself a cap of 48 hours to get over it—this includes being sad, grieving, being unproductive, etc.
I have a few more points in my framework, but these are the key ones.
Now, I want to be clear that you can, in fact, be a victim and things can happen in your life that isn’t your fault, which makes #3 seem a bit contradictory. But if you’re thinking like this, you’re missing the point.
The point is to have a framework that allows you to progress in life without allowing room for excuses.
When my wife first started dating me, she was skeptical of my framework—she said it seemed a bit too robotic. As we’ve gone through stuff life has thrown at us and she watches me fight through it all without ever curling up in a ball, she’s fully on board now.
I say all of this to say: Take control of your life. You can do it and it works.