Richard Hogan: 'The last thing I want my daughters to do is to view themselves as victims'

"We are here, now. And we can change and we can succeed."

There is no bigger thief of your happiness and ability to thrive in this world than viewing yourself as a victim. Sometimes the family we came up in was tyrannical and we were treated very unfairly in that dysfunctional system. Sometimes, we may have experienced extreme trauma. 

So, what is the cure to that? You can’t change that. It happened. But you can change how you think about yourself in relation to what happened to you. One of the most important statements Carl Jung offered the world is, "You are not what happened to you but who you choose to become".

In my clinical experience, that is the antidote to trauma in early life. This modern phenomenon of victimhood is having devastating consequences on the intrapsychic experience of humans. Lying around, looking for reasons why your life is not going the way you would like it go, will change absolutely nothing. It will only bring a considerable amount of suffering into your life. 

That type of mentality is a poor surrogate for independence and self-determination. By thinking of yourself as a victim you surrender any power or agency you potentially have while also obliterating any chance of changing the circumstances you find yourself in. I can’t think of a bigger impediment to growth than that.

I often wonder do some therapeutic approaches help the client wallow in their trauma by constantly focusing on what happened without delineating any clear signpost out of the dilemma they have come to therapy with. Looking at the origins of why you feel a certain way is important but the real work is helping the client out of their negative narratives so they can thrive. And therapy, as far as I see, sometimes lacks this. 

As the father of three girls, the last thing I want my daughters to do is to view themselves as victims. I don’t want them to view the system as stacked against them. Michele Foucault, the post-modern French philosopher says, "Where there is power, there is resistance". In my experience, when people feel powerless they don’t resist it in a positive way, they collapse under the weight of the system they feel subjugates them and become even more powerless. This is such an unhealthy response to power, perceived or otherwise.

Of course, the zeitgeist down the generations has treated women appallingly. But things have improved considerably. If we look at the data we can clearly see improvement. In 1967 only 27% of women were breadwinners, while in 2017 41% of women were the breadwinners in the household. Women now make up half the workforce, far cry from my mother’s day when she had to legally stop working when she got married. Nuts. But not so long ago.  

There have been huge strides in closing the gap in middle management and girls now in America are more likely to get a college degree than boys. So the data would indicate that things have improved considerably for women over the last 60 years. But yet, women are less likely to go for promotion than men. I’m not for a moment suggesting it's because they see themselves as victims, but rather prejudice when it becomes internalised can victimise and destroy confidence. And this needs a conversation. 

An internal report by Hewlett Packard found that men will apply for a job or promotion if they meet 60% of the job requirements while women will only apply if they meet 100% of the requirements. Why is that? Are men more confident than women? Research would say, yes. 

You could explain this by looking at biology and say, well men have over 10 times more testosterone than women after puberty. That hormone is all about aggression and competing, whereas oestrogen is generally about connecting and supporting. But I don’t think it is that simple. 

There are myriad reasons why women are underrepresented in top positions. But a significant one is found in the fact that success correlates as much with confidence as it does with competence. External and internal attribution are interesting concepts to think about. 

For example, if a client of mine sat a very difficult exam, and instead of acknowledging it was tough content (external attribution) she told me she felt it was a failing on her part, I would see this as internal attribution. Of course, this comes from centuries of being subjugated and limited by the negative views of others.

Women generally know that being visible in the working environment is good for their career but often choose to be less visible than their male counterparts for fear of backlash. Men are generally not concerned about such things. 

In my analysis, I think there is a crisis of confidence that women are experiencing currently. And this is preventing them from reaching their potential and going for top positions. I have met incredibly talented and brilliant women so many times in my clinic who fundamentally lack self-belief. "Who am I to go for that promotion?" While men might also think like this, it generally doesn’t stop them from going for it. Whereas, women, in my experience, often prevent themselves from going for a promotion they desperately want because of the limiting ideas they hold about themselves. 

This crisis in confidence is from centuries of negative societal constructs about what a woman is capable of. But society has moved on, we all need to move on and free ourselves from the destructive anachronistic ideas of the past. We are not victims of some terrible legacy. We are here, now. And we can change and we can succeed.