If someone’s been an actual victim, suffered harm at the choices of another, they should not be branded with the word ‘victim’, as it’s so loosely termed in the Personal Development world. This thoughtless use shifts it’s meaning from a fact, to a perspective that’s negative and shameful in connotation. To do that to an actual victim is to not acknowledge reality or care about the person’s WHOLE emotional or mental wellbeing. Frankly, it’s condescending.
Although the problem of breaking negative cycles is bigger than this, I think this is where it has to start if we are to truly help people move forward in a humane, connecting and compassionate way. Using love and compassion, not shame, as the way to help people heal and move forward.
Moving forward cannot happen if we don’t address the problem that causes a person to hold on to the past and what we’re seeing in the Personal Development World is that what we’re doing isn’t working in a way that breaks the cycle. This ‘victim’ shaming is causing suppression of the truth within a person and that always comes back as a festering sore, because eventually the band-aid of ‘being brave’ will wear off.
We’ve been fooling ourselves in the personal development world that we know best because we’ve all adopted this association with the ‘victim’ word as being ‘weak’ and “dysfunctional” and we’ve never questioned it. We’ve been righteous and cold without realizing it. I’ve been a leader in this industry for 24 years now and I too have been guilty of this for almost 2 decades.
On the flip side, I think most of the mental health sector has limiting beliefs, thus conditioning them into a sense of hopelessness in their training, which leads them to become overly sympathetic and enabling. In contrast to the traditional personal development world, which is too cold and tough. Both are out of balance and neither is creating LASTING change in numbers that truly count. We have a major crisis on our hands which is being seized upon by the pharmaceutical industry when we can do more for this than we have been. I believe if we come together and take the actions necessary for lasting change, not just keep doing the same thing and expect a different result, we can find that balance.
And don’t even get me started on the spiritual, “you’re not enlightened enough” shaming movement!
“I REFUSE TO STAND ANY LONGER WITH THESE OLD PARADIGMS” Maz Schirmer.
Let’s come together as industries who really care about creating organic solutions. Let’s break away and create a NEW way that will cause READINESS for victims so they can cross the line on to next base, which is transformation and not the kind we see that never sticks, I mean real and lasting freedom beyond the actual suffering once and for all.
If victims are not received in a balanced way, they will stay stuck, period. They need a balance of the maternal and the paternal in how they’re received and neither of them should be tainted in shame or innuendo. Letting go of a past of pain requires us to offer strength and compassion, not hardness or empathy- sympathy and pain melded together. That just makes one person with an issue, into 2 people with an issue because now there are 2 people suffering. It’s hard to rise up from that with no one to lift either of you up. This creates a holding pattern without an exit to the loop. This causes the person to revert.
This message feels deeply like it’s mine right now and it needs to be fully ‘got’ by the establishments that led and fed the epidemic we now see in society, with the amount of mental and emotional suffering and let’s face it, we all know multiple people suffering right now.
The healing, mental health and personal development industries need to step up, come together, acknowledge and make changes to what’s not working. Each one discredits each other’s importance. One focused on the past, one on the future, and one denies time and body entirely but what if it requires all?
The everyday people, like the people in the houses in your very street who are NOT OK, who are STUCK in a holding pattern or spiraling cycle in life NEED us to change what we’re doing because it’s not working long term in a way that breaks the cycle once and for all.
We’re stuck in a medication conundrum because with each medication comes a set of side effects that also require another medication and so the problem worsens. Don’t go to America and turn on a TV because every ad break has an ad for a drug saying it’s for symptoms that most people with simple stress have. Then the next ad is a legal firm offering to sue whoever harmed you with their drug.
The world’s gone crazy, so I’m proposing one change here for the personal development industry that could lead to an organic way to cause real change like the world has never seen before.
Many suicides begin with some medication fluctuation in the lead up to it and maybe causing more deaths than they’re saving. I’m not ok with this and I’m not proposing we blame anyone, I’m proposing we simply focus on creating a way out of this maze with love and organically, together.
In saying all that, some of you know I committed live on the interview with Nanine McCool (the woman who stood up to Tony Robbins bullying on behalf of #metoo movement) to remove the word victimhood from my entire language. This has really ignited this awareness. Thank you Nanine, if only you knew the pivotal influence of change you triggered. Thank you Tony Robbins for showing the deeper issue, by provoking Nanine to stand up for victims. You created a revolution in the personal development world. It’s time that it had an audit that acknowledges and considers how it regards women and their right to state “I have been the victim of something, this happened to me!” without shaming and suppressing them into silence.
This subtle form of victim blaming stops people changing their life because healing begins there, prior to Creatrix®, Innovatrix® or any life turn-around. IT BLOCKS THE VERY PROCESS OF LETTING GO.
Making people feel bad for already being harmed is not who I want to be. #metoo victims won’t be able to stand up if they fear that they’ll be told to ‘suck it up’ and stop ‘playing’ the victim without ever receiving acknowledgment. That’s like a bully actually getting away with bullying and saying well you asked for it. To finally heal this type of suppression, a person cannot think speaking up is WORSE than being abused or staying silent about it. Many women who’ve been abused (I say women because women are 3 to 1 more often a victim because they have a vagina) are too afraid of being labeled as ‘complainers’ and that’s the very culture we want to stop.
Before someone is READY to let go of their issues they require
BEING HEARD. ACKNOWLEDGED. AND VALIDATED for the suffering, all SAFELY and FREE OF JUDGEMENT and without innuendo! This must be done in a particular way and there are actually 2 ways and 6 stages. This space for healing requires a fatherly and motherly level of safety, COMBINED to put it in layman’s understanding.
Therefore, TRANSFORMOLOGY® is a new paradigm no longer merely for the transformation we can bring about through Creatrix®, Innovatrix® and now the newest tool in my pocket LUMINATRIX™ BUT through the level of understanding the entire lead up to transformation, the conditioning of a real Transformologist® in the fullest definition of the word and the 6 elements that already make this a new paradigm, because most anything else on the planet only encompasses 4 of the essential elements.
My mission is to bring the mental health and personal development worlds together for revolutionary change like the world has never seen before. I think psychology should have a little chat to endocrinology (hormones) too, seeing as they each are intricately so entwined. Maybe biology can join the club and before we know it we will have introduced the mind, body, and spirit all back together nicely how we first found them.
Maz Schirmer
MAZ SCHIRMER
Founding Director
Global Transformatrix®
