Reflections From Judith

Victimization Versus Participation

By Judith G. O’Connor

It can be so easy to ask: Why me? Why did this happen to me? Why was my childhood so difficult? Why did my relationship fail? Why does life seem so much harder for me than for everyone else? Sometimes we truly have been victimized by the actions and choices of others. Acknowledging that truth is important. But there is a difference between having been victimized and continuing to live from victimization.

I know because for many years, why me? was a question I knew very well. My own healing journey eventually taught me to ask a different question: What can I do with what happened to me? That question began moving me from victimization to participation. Participation, to me, means becoming actively involved in your own healing. I believe healing is a verb. It requires action. Participation can mean creating quiet time each day to connect with your body, mind, and spirit. It can mean reading a book that helps you understand yourself more deeply. It can mean journaling, noticing repetitive thoughts and behaviors, investigating where your patterns began, and becoming curious rather than judgmental about why you respond to life as you do. It can mean asking your higher, wiser self a question—and becoming quiet enough to listen for the answer.

It can mean becoming aware of what your body is telling you, what your mind continues to repeat, and what your spirit may be asking you to understand. Participation means doing the work. Not because there is something wrong with us that needs to be fixed, but because there may be something within us waiting to be understood. And we do not have to do that work alone. Whether you call that greater presence God, Spirit, your Higher Self, angels, guides, or simply your own inner wisdom, I believe there is guidance available when we become quiet enough to receive it.

Over more than forty years of my own healing, studying, teaching, and working with others, I have learned that awareness can change the questions we ask. Instead of asking, why did this happen to me? We can begin asking: What is this experience teaching me? What pattern am I being asked to recognize? Where did it begin? What am I doing today to participate in my own healing? That last question matters. Because insight alone is not participation. Participation is what we do with what we have become aware of. Read. Journal. Reflect. Ask questions. Listen. Become present. Seek support when you need it. Pay attention to your body, your thoughts, your feelings, and your spirit. And then make conscious choices based upon what you are beginning to understand.

I have long taught that: Awareness creates understanding. But awareness opens the door. Participation is choosing to walk through it. Perhaps the question is no longer simply: Why me? Perhaps it can become: What am I willing to do today to participate in my own healing?

Judith G. O’Connor, Empowerment Coach, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Past Life Regressionist, Energy Medicine Teacher

Practitioner, Mystics By the Sea