Blog 89. The Victim Contact Rebus: Helplessness

The Victim Contact Rebus

The victim contact rebus is the main focus of this post. My clinical experience is that this rebus is often harder to detect and handle because it is a complicated construction. It is often difficult to explain to staff members that the client’s victim role is a contact rebus (a facade) and not an honest response.

The victim contact rebus involves victim-like behavior, but the client employing it is not genuinely a victim; he is looking for a way to protect himself and in two different ways to receive life force in a life situation, the weak and strong transmission.

The Survival Function of the Victim Contact Rebus

The contact rebus functions as a defense by preventing him from experiencing his pain and being hurt by others. Its conversion to the status of victim causes the individual to feel devoid of responsibility for his life situation. It thus allows him to avoid addressing the pain that accompanies the knowledge that he bears responsibility for himself.

Weak transmission of Life Energy

The aggressor’s moral criticism of his passivity provides the person with emotional energy. Further, if the environment accepts the individual’s victim role and feels sorry for him, he will gain life force. The disadvantage of this emotional response is that its effect lasts only briefly.

The people around him only confirm his disguise (Part 2, The Motivational Relationship, Chapter 13) and not the genuine individual. Already the next day, the client needs renewed passionate reactions. It is simply another part of his survival.

Strong Transmission of Life Force

The response that the client most of all craves to be given is a strong confirmation of him who he truly is. Someone committed to him feels hope for him and has faith in him, irrespective of his helpless exterior behavior. In other words, a fellow being who affirms with a positive engagement that the client has responsibility for his situation and has the capacity to change it positively (Part 2, The Motivational Relationship, Chapter 11).

The Case 

Elin, 35, is a client at a treatment center, where she takes regular part in extensive group sessions with the staff and other inmates. She tells the group about her troubles: she has an eight-year-old daughter who has been in compulsory foster care for the past two years. Elin’s daughter is the most important thing in her life and the root of her drug abuse, and she needs to have as much contact with her as possible.

The victim role

The problem is that the foster home refuses to let Elin meet her. Through the help of the social worker, she can sporadically meet her daughter, who has to be at her foster home as Elin herself has been evicted. The next problem is that her social worker refuses to give her the money Elin needs to travel there. She lives on benefits and cannot afford the fare. (Here, tears well up in Elin’s eyes as she represses a sob. Elin hides her face in her hands).

Accepting the victim’s role

The denial of access to her child upsets many in the group, and other clients start to tell similar stories of how their social workers have refused to give them the money they need to make a better life for themselves. The staff is shocked by how the foster home has thwarted the client and her social worker, especially those who are themselves parents and can empathize with her grief.

Aggressive reaction

After half an hour of discussion, an elderly male client asks Elin in an angry yet controlled manner how much alcohol she drinks per week and how much it costs her, and how much a bus trip to see her daughter would cost. He accuses her of being unable to give up a day’s abuse of alcohol to see her daughter and then of financing her habit with prostitution. It turns out that the fare is equivalent to a day’s consumption of drinking.

Incongruences in the contact rebus

(The truth is that Elin works as a prostitute and that the social worker has repeatedly tried to motivate her to see her daughter. The social worker has consistently offered to drive Elin to the foster home. In the same way, the foster parents have many times invited her to their home.)

Strengthening the Motivation

At the end of the meeting, one staff member, Eric, acknowledges with a commitment that Elin bears pain concerning her whole destructive life situation, not so much about her daughter. Therefore, he proposes that a crisis group is immediately summoned to help Elin struggle with her destructive living.

Further incongruences of the Victim Contact Rebus

Without even checking the facts of Elin’s story, there are two immediate incongruences (Part 1 Values and Theory, page 227 – 337) built into her victim contact rebus. Elin is a drug user, which costs much more than she gets on benefits. Further, she cannot afford to see her daughter, the most important thing in her life.

Another discrepancy is that in her behavior, Elin chooses the drugs instead of her daughter, even if she says that her child is the most important to her.

Accepting the Facade

Most people attending the meeting cannot see through her contact rebus. Elin has a way of telling her story that emotionally seems appropriate if it concerns a well-functioning parent in financial difficulties.

It is a part of the complexity of the victim contact rebus. When you listen to this kind of contact rebuses, you often experience intensely that the client means what she says. You will have to analyze all the factual incongruences to discern the victim’s contact rebus.

Reacting aggressively

The one who reacts aggressively to the contact rebus is a latently motivated elderly drug addict who has probably had a mother with a similar incongruence between what she says and does. When eventually the staff discovers the fake victim role, they can also shift to an aggressive contact rebus. In both circumstances, the drug addict and the team become aggressors.

The weak reactions to the victim’s contact rebus in summary

At the group meeting, the staff members, other clients, and the aggressive drug addict give back life force to Elin. However, this energy does not last. She needs to fill up this attention every day to survive.

Strengthening the Motivation

At the end of the meeting, Eric is the only person who understands her contact rebus and gives her positive energy by trying to help her with her genuine pain, neither believing her victim role nor moralizing her.

Although she twists her version of reality, she receives a positive confirmation. In this way, Eric is boosting her inner motivation. It is this reaction she unconsciously longs for to happen. Thus, a relationship is created. Eric is the only person she trusts more because he sees her who she is and has a positive commitment to her. By not accepting her victim role, he also tells her that she has the capacity of her own to change her life.