I have felt that way at times too.

I think, and of course I could be wrong, that we both give and receive in the world. We are neither all-powerful beings who can make absolutely everything go our way but neither are we completely powerless beings at the mercy of all things.

We are kind of in the middle. We have some power which we exercise, rightly and sometimes wrongly on others and the world and we are also on the receiving end of the power of others.

And this is a very fluid situation where things change with actions, reactions, reactions to the reactions so on.

I think the word "victim" means in part someone who is the recipient of an action or actions of another, actions which are detrimental to the one receiving. So I think that everyone is at some time a "victim" in this sense.

I like to walk and when I walk I try not to step on any ants because I have a certain reverence for life. The other day I was walking and lost my concentration and crushed an ant by mistake. This poor little ant was a "victim" of my action even though I didn't intend for this to happen. Its life was taken from it by my action.

Of course, I think there is also the case where one "pretends to be a victim" in order to achieve some goal. I think people do this sometimes too, some more than others perhaps. It is, I suspect a kind of survival tactic: "Please don't hurt me because I am already hurt."

Sometimes it is effective. Sometimes not. Sometimes it does more harm than good.

It is a tactic also used in the animal world. The opossum is an animal that pretends to be dead in order to escape predators. It lies still with a stiff body and even emits the scent of death from a special organ on its body.

Animals, especially prey animals have quite a few different strategies and tactics written into their being: fleeing danger, freezing, playing dead, camouflage and so on.

No one calls a rabbit a coward for always running from danger. No one calls an opossum a faker from pretending to be dead.

I think humans have quite a menu of options to choose from when it comes to acting and reacting in the world. Some are helpful. Some are not. Some are counterproductive. And I think circumstances and extenuating factors enter into all this.

Perhaps all of these things enter into the idea of "victimization." I once read a surprising thing written by a psychiatrist. He wrote: "Depression is the inability to feel that one is a victim."

I think what he meant was that depressed people can be very hard on themselves. They can blame themselves for everything. They can magnify their faults and minimize the faults of others. They can attribute the faults of others to circumstances while they attribute their faults and weaknesses to being a bad person.

I know that I myself have been a victim but that I have also at times "played a victim" as a coping mechanism. I try not to be too hard on myself for that. I did what I did to survive. Although I did not do the best I could, I did do the best I could given everything influencing me at that time. So I try to have a little compassion for myself.

Of course what works for one person might fail horribly for someone else. People are different and are in different circumstances. It is hard to know what one would do if one was someone else and in that person's life.