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Here’s my stern PSA for women regarding online dating: You can’t find love when you are in a victim consciousness.
To quote Dr. Shefali Tsabary, a clinical psychologist and author:
“When you talk about victimhood…we are victims. However, being and living in victim consciousness is where we get stuck… Victim consciousness is when you hold on to the perpetration and you now perpetrate yourself and you keep the power with the other person.
Not healing and not moving on, blaming the one who took your power away—and we don’t realize that we give them our power even more when we blame the other. We stay tethered to them. True empowerment is to take all power back, including blame.”
In today’s dating world, so many of us look to the apps.
Yes, dating apps can suck, as there is minimal ROI (return on your investment.) And while a handful get lucky, ultimately the apps reward low-quality interactions, impulsivity, short-term validation, and emotional avoidance, just to name a few.
Apps are, first and foremost, profit-seeking businesses.
Yet, we go with hope in our hearts, thinking “Maybe this time will be different.” And again leave with disappointment, frustration, and even a little disgust.
We even have data now that shows dating apps leave us dysregulated. But we keep going back. We unintentionally perpetuate our own harm.
It’s like fishing in the same pond over and over again, and being shocked that a new type of fish doesn’t randomly appear there just waiting to be caught.
Who can blame us? It’s what we’ve been told!
But when we don’t find that special fish, we then blame the pond and determine that one pond represents all fish as a whole.
We aren’t seeing our confirmation bias in action. We aren’t seeing our limited vision. We aren’t seeing our power to pick differently.
Perhaps we already have a belief: “All men are players” or “All men are emotionally stunted” or “All men are liars or narcissists,” and then we head on over to that sparkling pond where we are told we will find some good fish.
When we don’t, we say “See! I knew it! They are all worthless!” Our brain is scanning for ways to mirror back our belief to us (this is confirmation bias), and dating apps are right there waiting for us to use them as evidence. We use one place of connection without asking ourselves if this system truly even aligns with our values, and then declare all is doomed.
But where we look is just as important as who we look for.
Then we head over to Facebook groups, post comments on Instagram threads, and interact in other channels where we swim in shallow waters for camaraderie and “validation.” But these places keep our nervous systems in hyper-vigilance, fear, scarcity, and threat—again a dysregulated state, majorly amplified.
The complaining, the bonding, the righteousness, the grasp of the ego, the hits of dopamine give us a temporary feeling of relief. We sort of say to ourselves: “Ahhh, see I don’t have to change my selection pattern. Look at the all the ways I get some kind of connection when I play the victim here.” We are fed minimally, getting at least a dose of feel-good brain chemicals just by venting.
We unconsciously keep ourselves in the same pattern, and then say this is just how it is. Our narrow perspective gets rewarded.
However, it is only rewarded short-term. We find ourselves back in the same pond, catching the same fish, sharing wine and frustration stories and wondering why nothing has changed.
But validation isn’t growth. This is an old pattern that limits and prevents us from finding the deeper connection we truly want.
This is victim consciousness.
This is the self-perpetuation Dr. Shefali refers to.
When we keep looking outward to blame, we keep ourselves blind in choosing what we could do differently. We keep ourselves blind from seeing our patterns, our choices, our power. We stop zooming out and stay stuck because we have an excuse.
It’s in that moment that we can make a conscious choice to stop hurting ourselves, choose differently, and expand beyond the limited ponds we are used to fishing in. This is self-awareness in action.
Now, please don’t think I am victim blaming here.
At first, this quality of honesty and what I call “emotional mapping” I am offering here may feel jarring. Yet, it is a skill in becoming our most empowered selves.
We must look at the external systems that cage us and how we are replicating those systems internally with our mindsets and patterns.
We are in what I like to call a masculinity shift. In general, old masculine systems that tell men to repress their emotions, that emotional literacy need not matter, that women are a scoreboard of their own worth, that they should rely on sex and conquest as a coping mechanisms, or that there’s no need for rites of passage into maturity are on their way out. And that makes me hopeful.
Just like us, they too are developing self-awareness. They too are conditioned by old patriarchal systems and their unhealed nervous system patterns. They too are learning how they perpetuate their own harm. And we can meet men in whatever level of healing they are in.
I am not saying it is our fault that some men are stuck. I am not saying it is our fault that they aren’t matching our evolution. I am not simply saying “Choose better.”
But if we are still participating in apps, spaces, and threads that reward where so many wounded, unevolved men are stuck, we do have to look at what part we play.
What is our responsibility to shift our pattern? What does accountability look like here? How do our actions reinforce the old reality?
We are not responsible for men. But we are responsible for ourselves, our choices, our patterns, the environments we enter, the behaviors we accept. These are what we have power over.
Perhaps dating apps are the ponds that need to dry up. Perhaps avoiding systems that reward the old paradigm is the first line of defense in achieving our own empowerment.
Because eventually, stagnant ponds dry up.
~
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