Breaking Free of Victim Mentality: Narcissism, Patriarchy, and the Locus of Control

Part of the problem with patriarchy involves the idea that by living a certain way, that behavior will have a controlling effect on other people.  If the wife behaves properly, her husband will become more “godly,” and this will not only give her the kind of husband she wants but will provide her with self-worth and identity.

Much of the book by the Botkin Sisters, “So Much More,” promotes this idea, suggesting that men can’t be the men God wants them to be without intervention on behalf the women in their lives.  Women need to prop up their men, be they daughters or wives, but this idea sells so well in the book because the mindset and theology strip women of much independent identity, authority, and worth.  Everyone needs to feel significant and valued, and patriarchy encourages followers to find these things in performance, outcome, and outward appearance.  I suppose this system works well for people who are very physically healthy and are enjoying pleasant seasons in life.  Things work well during fair weather.

On a more basic level, these beliefs suggest that we can have control over events in our lives if we follow “THE” formula, and assumption that life tends to be fair (if you do all of the right things).  Life is even more “fair” for those who are elite among the elect like the leaders and model citizens.   Under patriarchy, following a particular “law” yields particular results when those results have been properly merited, especially concerning spiritual things according to patriarchy’s mindset.

I recently spoke with a wife whose husband has a problem with a particular sin.  She admitted that she became involved with patriarchy because she believed that it would somehow make him stop engaging in this sin.  Her husband didn’t like the ideology, as many men don’t at first, but he definitely enjoyed the benefits that came with his dutiful wife’s submission after awhile.  Soon, he felt entitled to those benefits, just as he felt entitled to his particular sin.  Ahhhh.  There is that “entitlement” word again.

Formulaic Thinking

Excerpts from "Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves" by Drs. Stoop and Masteller.

From pages 54 - 57:

Donna was trapped in linear thinking. She figured that the way to move Fred in a certain direction was to give him a shove in that direction. If he did not move, then she simply needed to shove harder. What she did not realize was that Fred was shoving back. Every time she pushed him, he resisted. And the harder she pushed, the more stubbornly he resisted.

We pointed out to Donna that her experience reflected a basic reality of linear thinking; that trying harder only gets you more of the same result. We began to look at her relationship with Fred, not just in isolation but as part of a broader family system. She began to grasp that action “A” does not necessarily produce result “B” – that there might be a host of other factors to take into consideration...

By this point Donna could see that her efforts to “help” Fred become more sociable only provoked this well-practiced response, and that “trying harder to help him” was only going to generate more of the same. This realization came as a tremendous relief. If she wasn’t the cause of Fred’s problem, and if she couldn’t “fix” him by working on him, then she felt released to explore some of her own interests.

Interestingly enough, the minute Donna stopped “working on” Fred and began pursuing things she simply liked to do, Fred began to respond. Her nagging kept his reclusiveness in place. Now that she had given up the role of Family Nag, he seemed free to give up the role of Family Hermit. When he saw her doing things she wanted to do, without putting any pressure on him to join in, he started – very tentatively – to come out of hiding...

The value of seeing things this way is that it makes clear that either party can change the situation by changing his or her own behavior. Before, Donna thought nothing could change in her marriage until Fred decided to be different. But she discovered that she could impact their relationship positively by taking certain actions herself...

The case of Donna and Fred is a fairly simplistic one. It involves only two people, and it has a quick, happy ending. Most family systems are far more complex and unpredictable, and the outcomes are not usually so tidy. Still, the story of Donna and Fred really did happen, and the reason it happened the way it did is because Donna learned to see her situation as one component of a system. She learned how to think in interactive terms rather than in straight lines.

Excerpt from
Dr. David Stoop & Dr. James Masteller's
"Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves:
Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families"
Regal/Gospel Light, 1996 (Servant, 1991)

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