The 5 of Cups as The Victim.

“I am resentful that I have to rely on others for money. I’m resentful at myself for making the decisions that led up to these choices and my present circumstances. I want to blame Kath and Rebecca for convincing me to go into the full program when I knew it wasn’t the thing I really wanted. Although I can see it all clearly now, I have a hard time accepting responsibility for it because if I do, that makes it my fault. That makes me the dumb one who made bad decisions that I am now living out the consequences of.

But maybe that’s exactly what I need to do: take the responsibility somehow. Maybe I need to just be honest about the whole thing because maybe this blame shifting thing is what’s keeping me trapped in the shame-blame spiral – the never ending cycle.”

My journal entry from this morning …

 

Before I get into it, if you are not aware of the Victim Triangle, and the work of Lynne Forest, I highly recommend reading this article not only as a reference point for the following, but also as a kind of truth of the human condition.

 

This morning’s cards spread out for me were begging me to look at many layers of my own emotional realm. Three cards, all in the suite of cups, confirming the word swirling in my mind as I shuffled the deck: Tending.

 

Tending to my emotional realm can mean so many things and today there were many themes and layers that called out to me, but one in particular stood out as a powerful opportunity to deepen the layers of healing my own victim conciousness.

 

I feel like the 5 of cups is the epitome of The Victim.

She is helpless to her circumstances. This morning I found myself consciously aware of the worry cycle that’s been going on for quite a while now.

Money.

I’ve been finding myself rolling my eyes at mentors and people, who I actually do respect, when I see them selling, making money. I am resentful at their success. I am resentful at them for doing something that I have not fully integrated in my being.

They have done nothing wrong, of course, nothing unethical or even misaligned. They are just mirrors after all.

For me the pattern of blame shifting goes way back. It was a safety mechanism – a means of surviving my childhood. Not being the one to blame meant that I was still “good” and therefore worthy of love, belonging, care, and protection. Accepting responsibility would mean certain death.

However now, in the adult world, I have found myself in a bit of a damned it I do, damned it I don’t kind of trap.

 

Images from The Light Seer’s Tarot

 

Journaling this morning on my cups cards, I noticed 2 themes: one, I feel very much resentful that I rely on others to receive money, and two, I still feel a lot of residual blame for both of my mentor as well as myself.

When I go deeper into the self blame, thats’ when I slide into the victim role – I was “coerced” into making the decision (completely untrue of course, but a whole lot easier for my ego to accept than “I didn’t give myself the resources that I needed to make the decision from a place of knowing, and instead, make a large financial decision based on illusion and fear”.

 

There it is: I made a very large financial decision based on illusion and fear. It’s hard to admit this. It’s hard to admit that part of me believed that if I did this program, and shifted these things, I would get this happy life with this thriving business. I believed that if I just spent the money, it would magically multiply, that I would get magically rewarded for doing the work.

I made a very large financial decision, ignoring my original intuitive guidance that I wanted this, but not that. I made the decision, not once, but many times over. I ignored my instincts many times over.

I am now living a very challenging consequence of those decisions: my decisions.

 

In order to get off of the Victim Triangle, we need to get honest, and we need an enormous capacity for self compassion.

This is not a place for self flagellation. Your ego has plenty of that.

So, I am writing this in a kind of transparency and a public declaration of both accepting responsibility for my choices (which I chose with full agency) and a testament of the high capacity of compassion, acceptance, and love that I have been able to cultivate (and continue to cultivate) in order to share and publish this publicly.

 

I made choices based in illusion and ignoring my intuition. It might not be the last time. However, I accept that by doing so, I am not powerless against others. I am not powerless against my own ego, or fears. I am not powerless.

 

I accept that by accepting responsibility, I let myself begin to forgive myself. I let myself begin to forgive others for their own humanness.

 

We are all just learning here.

None of us have the answers or know the Absolute Truth.

 

In the compassionate words of Ram Dass, “we’re all just walking each other home”