Shattered Assumptions by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

Author:Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE FREE PRESS
Published: 1992-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Transforming the Victimization: Benefits for Self and Others

Survivors’ self-blame is an early response to victimization, virtually a knee-jerk reaction of an organism that has believed so fundamentally in personal control over outcomes, enveloped in a culture that has powerfully reinforced such a belief. In the face of the traumatic experience, the victim reviews his or her prior behaviors to see what could have prevented the victimization. Again, this is not to suggest that the victim is to blame but rather that the victim is trying to hold onto beliefs about control and a nonrandom world.

Over time, the survivor’s motivation to reestablish fundamental beliefs in a meaningful world are also reflected in another particularly powerful cognitive strategy, one that also fosters beliefs about benevolence and self-worth. This is the survivor’s process of accepting and ultimately transforming the traumatic experience by perceiving positive elements in the victimization. By engaging in interpretations and evaluations that focus on benefits and lessons learned, survivors emphasize benevolence over malevolence, meaningfulness over randomness, and self-worth over self-abasement. Such interpretations are extremely important components in the successful rebuilding of nonthreatening assumptions, and contribute significantly to the resolution of the survivor’s existential dilemma.

It may seem remarkable, yet it is not unusual for survivors, over time, to wholly reevaluate their traumatic experience by altering the positive value and meaningfulness of the event itself. The victimization certainly would not have been chosen, but it is ultimately seen by many as a powerful, even to some extent worthwhile, teacher of life’s most important lessons.

Suffering for a Purpose

According to Aristotle, to know an object is to understand the “why” of it, an undertaking that can be satisfied by four distinct “explanatory factors.” These factors are generally known as Artistotle’s four “causes” and refer, specifically, to the material from which the object is made (material cause), the form or pattern that it takes (formal cause), the agent by which the object was wrought (efficient cause), and the end or purpose for which it was produced (final cause). Typically, our everyday use of the term cause corresponds to Aristotle’s efficient cause, that by which a change or state of being is wrought. It is this category of response to “Why” that is generally invoked when we want to explain why something happened.

In our daily actions and interactions, we typically understand events and outcomes in terms of efficient causality and generally perceive people as potent causal agents. Thus, we believe we control what happens to us, and the behavioral self-blame of victims reflects this orientation. One route to believing in a meaningful world—one in which events make sense—involves this type of efficient causality. Perceived control is maximized and perceived randomness is minimized.

A second route to belief in a meaningful world involves explanatory factors that are closer to Aristotle’s final cause. Just as we see ourselves as the efficient cause of our own actions, we also typically see ourselves as engaging in behaviors for some end. In the case of victimization, although one’s character may be regarded

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