Before you start

This is a short book. You can read it in two or three evenings.

"Victim mentality" is mostly used as an insult. People say it to end a conversation, and they often say it to someone with a real complaint that they'd prefer not to hear. If it's been said to you, you were probably right to be annoyed. I'll use the phrase as little as I can, and I want to say what I mean by it before going any further.

I don't mean that nothing bad happened to you. I'm going to assume it did. You were passed over, lied to, left, cheated, brought up badly, or treated worse than the person next to you for no good reason. This book won't ask you to decide it wasn't so bad. It won't ask you to look for the part you played, or to be grateful for the lesson.

What I mean is a habit that can grow up after a wrong. You go over what happened. You tell it to people. You wait for whoever was responsible to put it right, and while you wait, the part of your life it touched stays where it was. Months go by like that, and sometimes years. The wrong was done to you. The waiting is something you do, and it's the only part of the whole business that this book is about.

One thing comes before all of that. If someone is harming you now, a book about habits is the wrong place to start. If a partner or relative hits you, threatens you, or controls your money or who you see, that's abuse, and the first job is your safety. A domestic abuse helpline will talk through your options in confidence, and in an emergency you should call the police. If you're being harassed or discriminated against at work, a union rep, an employment adviser or a solicitor will be more use to you than a change of attitude. Nothing in this book is an argument for putting up with mistreatment. A good deal of it argues the opposite.

The same goes for what a wrong can leave behind. If what happened still comes back as nightmares or flashbacks, or if your mood has been low for weeks, that's something for a doctor. Chapter 12 says more.

The middle chapters each take one belief that makes the habit seem reasonable. "It wasn't my fault." "Nothing I do makes any difference." "If I let it go, they get away with it." "After everything I've been through." Each of these is partly true, and I'll try to give each one its due before I argue with it.

Some of the arguments rest on research. The notes at the back say which studies, and how far I think they can be trusted. The rest is my own reasoning, and I'll say so where it matters.

The practical chapter is number 11. It comes late because the method is simple and you could guess most of it now. What stops people using it is the set of beliefs in chapters 3 to 10, so those come first. You don't have to wait, though. If you see something you could do about an old grievance tomorrow, do it. Nothing later in the book depends on you holding off.

A few chapters ask you to check a claim against your own life. Please do those. Your own history is better evidence than my say-so.