Are you a Victim?

When you experience a health crisis – whether it’s being newly diagnosed with a disease, experiencing overwhelming stress from dealing with a chronic disability or recovering from an injury, feeling angry may be a normal response.  However, ongoing anger is not a healthy response to the stressor and may keep you from healthy management and feeling better in the long run.   Chronic anger may add to your stress levels, increase the cortisol in your system, which in turn contributes to more inflammation and poorer health. The key is to learn and then act on the knowledge that there are normal and healthy anger responses and there are also unhealthy anger responses.

In addition to denial, what is another common and unhealthy anger response? In addition to denial, which I discussed last week, is a type of anger response that involves seeing yourself as victim of your circumstances, your disease, and even your overall health status. Taking on a role as 'victim' may not seem like an anger response, but it is in essence, blaming externals for your course of illness and treatment and denial of your own agency in the process. This passive denial approach to disease and illness management was in many ways, considered appropriate and a normal adjustment as few as 25 years ago. The older medical model of ‘compliance,’ inferring that the healing professional knows everything and the patient (victim of the disease or accident) must only listen and follow directions in order to heal and become whole again, was a largely accepted viewpoint in medicine for many, many years.  We now know that for most patients, the best approach to disease management involves ‘adherence’ to the treatment plan. 

Adherence involves the patient actively learning, discussing and contributing to decision making with his/her health professional.   As a result, research shows that for most, this leads to higher motivation and better success in managing their disease.   For example, if diabetes management is your issue, then together with the health care professional, you establish your goals, how you’re going to achieve them and how long you will take to meet each objective.  Having this kind of agency and ownership of your treatment plan will help you overcome feelings of anger and be successful in the long run. So then, what is one of the best ways to overcome feeling victimized?   Become an active patient, willing to learn new things, ask questions, speak up about your denial, fears and your hopes and work together with your health care professional to improve your health and your wellbeing.