First posted on April 30th, 2007
“A mother who is a victim will be in the habit of always focusing on what's wrong with the people in her life (She doesn't realize that what she focuses on grows). She is projecting her own internal anxiety on others. She feels bad inside, so she looks outside for a "cause" to pin that feeling on. That way, she never has to travel inward and grow strong and new. She just projects.

So when her daughter gets good grades in everything but math, she can't stop talking about the math. When the family goes to a picnic with other family members and this mother is asked how Mona is doing, she says, "Oh pretty well! All her grades were quite good except for math. Right, honey?" she smiles at her daughter. "We're going to have to work on the math. We're very concerned about her math."

Someone at the picnic joins the conversation midway and says, "Mona is doing well in school'?" And Mona looks at her mother and says, in a shy voice, "Except for math." "Yes," her mother says. “We're very worried about her math. I don't know whether we'll be doing summer school or using a tutor."

Soon, Mona's entire self-image is focused on her trouble in math. Who Mona becomes to herself and to her mother is someone who is having trouble with math. Mona might as well changer her name to "Trouble with Math." Soon we don't even remember what her real name is or her good subjects were. She might have gotten an A in a particularly challenging English course, but that no longer has any reality to Mona because her mother is obsessed with her failure in math.

Without knowing it, Mona's mother has actually reduced the chances that Mona will improve in math. In fact, what Mona's mother is doing is pretty much guaranteeing that Mona will spend the rest of her life seeing herself as a girl named "Trouble with Math."

Why?
Mona's mother doesn't do this because she is evil and wants to hurt Mona. She does it because she is projecting. Victims project their inadequacies on others. Listen to victims speak, and it's always about other people, and how disappointing they are.

All victims do this all day long. And it is the laziest thing the mind can do. It takes no imagination, no courage, and no energy to do it. It is the default mechanism of the human mind, just as weeds are the default mechanism of the garden.

A better way to handle it
If Mona's mother were to know better, she would talk about Mona's good grades everywhere she went. She would realize that what we focus on grows. Even if someone asked about Mona's math, she would say, "Math is coming; it's on its way to being great like the others. She's going to be great at math because no one can get an A in an English class as hard as that one and not be able to absolutely do anything she wants in school."

Now Mona would have the freedom to play around with doing a little better at math. There is no pressure. There is nothing wrong. There is nothing wrong with Mona! Imagine Mona living in a world where there is nothing wrong with Mona.

Victim parents are always drawn to their children's shortcomings, because they are always projecting their own. That’s all they think and talk about. It is the easiest and most common way of raising children.

Seeing their children’s faults is the easiest thing parents do. It can be done with very little thinking. All they do is let their worries and fears bubble to the surface, and then do all of their thinking in response to that. But it is a habit that ends up ruining their relationships with their children.

Is Mona herself ruined by having a mother like this? Will she become depressed and try to take shortcuts to hap¬piness for the rest of her life? No, not necessarily. Mona is free to invent herself in any direction she wants. But she's beginning with something that feels like a disadvantage.

When a child's attention has been repeatedly directed at "what's wrong with me," it is very difficult for the child not to enter adult life with a feeling of "I'm not good enough."” [1]

The above is an example of what some socio-psychologists [2] call “Attributions”. It is one of the ways we affect our children, sometimes for life. Parents have the power to literarily cast a spell on their children. We affect the way our children feel & think and how they will grow up to view themselves.

One may tell someone to feel something and not to remember he has been told. Simply tell him he feels it. Better still; tell a third party, in front of him, that he feels it. This is especially true for children: What we explicitly tell them is of less account. What we indicate they are, is, in effect, an instruction for a drama, a scenario. An example: Parents who might be confused by a child who does x, when they tell him to do y and indicate he is x:
- I keep telling him to be more careful, but he is so careless, aren't you Mostafa?
- I am always trying to get him to make more friends, but he is so self-conscious. Isn't that right, dear Isam?

Again, no matter what “spell” was cast upon us while young, we can break that spell. It takes effort though, and the first step is to learn.

Salam
Ahmad
Footnotes
[1] – Source: “Re-Invent Yourself : by Steve Chandler”, with some editing.
[2] – See “Scripts People Live”, by Claude Steiner, and “Re-Decision Therapy”, by Mary M. Goulding & Robert L. Goulding