This Happened. I’m Still Here.

Rethinking the tension between being victimized and refusing victimhood — and why the truth lives in the space between.

I was recently in conversation with Rev. Deborah Johnson (revdnow.com)— a voice of deep clarity and spiritual rigor — when she said something that stopped me in my tracks. She reminded me that in New Thought, we are called to teach and remember that we are not victims, even when we have been victimized. It's a powerful distinction. One that carries both freedom and complexity. In that moment, I felt the tension between two truths: the lived reality of pain, and the spiritual insistence that we are more than what happens to us. That tension has stayed with me — not as a contradiction, but as an invitation to look deeper at how we hold both of those truths at once.

We live in a culture that speaks fluently in the language of strength. “You are not a victim,” we say to ourselves and to each other, as if this sentence alone could rewrite what happened. We teach this to our children, we hold it as a badge of mental fortitude, and we repeat it like a mantra when we’re trying to survive something too large, too cruel, too humiliating to process all at once. And in many ways, that reflex makes sense. It’s a push against powerlessness. It’s a way to reclaim agency in the aftermath of damage. It’s how people get out of bed and keep moving.

But beneath that reflex is something more complicated, and it’s worth confronting. Because the insistence that we are never victims — not really, not ever — can sometimes become its own kind of trap. It can be a barrier to honesty. It can become a quiet form of self-betrayal.

Rev. Deborah wasn’t denying that we experience harm. She was pointing to something deeper — a refusal to let our identity be anchored in the violation. That’s the core of it. Not to pretend we haven’t been hurt, but to recognize that the truth of who we are was never altered by that harm. In New Thought, this is a spiritual discipline: to remember the self that was untouched by the storm, even while acknowledging that the storm happened.

You can be victimized and also refuse to live as a victim. Those are not mutually exclusive. You can be hurt — deeply, unfairly, even repeatedly — and still maintain your dignity, your autonomy, your sense of self. The key difference lies not in denying the fact of victimization, but in refusing to be defined by it. The problem isn’t that people acknowledge what’s happened to them. The problem is when we force them to skip that part entirely in favor of some fast-tracked redemption arc, all strength and no grief.

This mindset — that victimhood is a dirty word — is one of the more subtle forms of gaslighting we’ve built into modern self-help culture. We’re told to rewrite our stories with language that’s cleaner, more empowering, easier for others to digest. You weren’t abandoned, you were set free. You weren’t betrayed, you learned a lesson. You weren’t abused, you grew stronger. There’s a kind of magic trick at work here: take pain and alchemize it into triumph before the audience starts to feel uncomfortable.

But what if the transformation doesn’t happen on cue? What if someone is still in the raw, ugly middle of it? What if what they need isn’t a silver lining, but just the space to say, “Yes, I was hurt. And it wasn’t my fault.” Not forever. Not as a permanent posture. Just long enough to be honest.

The truth is, we all know when we’ve been wronged. Even if we’re taught to downplay it. Even if we’re warned that to acknowledge it too openly makes us weak or difficult or stuck. There’s something in the body that remembers. And when you force yourself to skip over that acknowledgment in order to stay palatable or “empowered,” you don’t erase the experience. You just learn to carry it in silence, and silence has weight.

We’ve developed this mental tightrope where it feels like we must choose between two caricatures: the helpless victim or the tireless survivor. And neither one tells the whole story. Because real life doesn’t move in such neat binaries. Sometimes you’re surviving and suffering in the same breath. Sometimes you’re clawing your way out while still bleeding from the fall. Sometimes you’re strong as hell and still deeply affected by what happened. And none of that makes you weak. It makes you human.

This is where Rev. Deborah’s insight hits hardest: it calls us not to deny what we’ve lived through, but to refuse to anchor our identity in it. That is spiritual sovereignty. That is what it means to be more than what has happened to you — not by pretending it didn’t happen, but by remembering that your essence was never defined by the wound.

There’s something honest — and even powerful — about claiming the full scope of your experience. To say, “Yes, I was mistreated,” and not immediately rush to narrate your comeback. To say, “That shouldn’t have happened,” without adding, “But I’m better for it.” Sometimes you aren’t better for it. Sometimes you just carry the damage, and learn how to live with it. Sometimes you build a life in the aftermath, not because of what happened, but in spite of it.

What’s really at stake in this conversation is not identity, but permission. Permission to be real. Permission to speak plainly. Permission to hold space for nuance. We don’t have to glorify victimhood to validate the pain people go through. And we don’t have to deny it to believe in their strength.

When we strip people of the ability to say they’ve been victimized, we do something worse than just policing their language — we gaslight their reality. We turn resilience into a performance. We create conditions where strength is measured by how little you let on that you’ve been hurt. But unacknowledged pain doesn’t disappear. It distorts. It leaks. It turns into anxiety, reactivity, mistrust, isolation. And often, it gets passed down.

So what if we started telling a more honest story — one that allows for both truth and power? One where someone can say, “Yes, that was abusive,” or “Yes, I was taken advantage of,” or “Yes, I was harmed,” without having to immediately package it as a learning opportunity or a stepping stone. What if we gave people permission to name what happened as it happened, and trusted that doing so wouldn’t trap them there?

The paradox is this: denying victimization doesn’t make you strong. Acknowledging it — fully, without flinching — is what actually opens the door to strength. Because that’s where choice begins. If you can’t name the ways in which power was taken from you, how can you ever take it back?

There’s a quiet violence in being told that your pain is only acceptable if it comes with a lesson. That you’re only allowed to speak if you’re already healed. That your suffering only matters if it’s inspirational. But that’s not how healing works. Healing starts with naming. With facing the thing without dressing it up. With saying: yes, I was a victim in that moment. Not because I chose it. Not because I’m weak. But because someone chose to harm me. And that was real.

From there, you get to decide what happens next. You get to write the rest of the story. But you don’t have to pretend it started with triumph.

There’s a kind of freedom that comes from this shift — from stepping off the tightrope and refusing to contort your experience into something more palatable. It doesn’t mean living in the pain forever. It means refusing to be shamed for having felt it.

What we need isn’t more insistence on being strong. What we need is more room to be whole. And wholeness includes the parts of us that were wounded. Wholeness includes the moments we didn’t win, the moments we didn’t rise above, the moments we were knocked down and stayed there for longer than we wanted to.

We don’t honor strength by denying weakness. We honor it by recognizing what it costs. We honor it by making space for the truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable, even when it doesn’t fit the narrative we wish we could tell. Because sometimes the most radical thing you can say is not “I overcame” — but simply, “This happened. And I’m still here.”