My painting that depicts the culture simultaneously shaming, pinning, and burning a trauma survivor–who has been flattened, toasted, and bitten repeatedly–for being unable to stand up and produce.
I’ve experienced being dismissed, blamed, and pathologized for being harmed. Caregivers minimized my distress, family members judged me for expressing it, and acquaintances labeled me oversensitive when I tried to speak about what happened. The world treated me not as a human being responding to trauma, but as someone holding onto it unnecessarily, as though my nervous system’s attempts to survive were a moral failing.
This is how mainstream culture responds to victimhood. It doesn’t want to acknowledge the cruelty, neglect, or contempt that shapes human lives. Instead, it frames being harmed as a character flaw, as a “victim mentality,” or worse, as a manipulation. When people recognize that you were hurt, the default response is skepticism or contempt. This is a defense of hierarchy. If acknowledging suffering required accountability or change, it would disrupt the systems that keep some people in power and others undergoing harm.
The mental illness industry is deeply implicated. By turning distress into a diagnosis or a set of symptoms, it moves attention away from the relational and systemic sources of harm. It allows institutions and professionals to treat survival adaptations as problems, rather than signals of unmet needs. What was done to me, and how I responded, became something to manage or correct, not something to understand or honor.
When culture labels survivors as manipulative, self-centered, or “trapped in victimhood,” it dismisses real pain. The “victim mentality” is a tool for disregarding suffering, a way to keep the narrative comfortable for those who benefit from hierarchy and denial. Being harmed is already isolating; being doubly judged for that harm compounds the trauma.
From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, these responses are predictable. Human beings respond to threat and betrayal in relational and systemic contexts. Denying or pathologizing those responses perpetuates suffering and blocks the possibility of real care, connection, and repair. Support recognizes that survivors are not the problem. The problem is the harm done and the culture that refuses to acknowledge it.
I know what it feels like to live under that shaming gaze. I know how isolating it is to have your suffering interpreted as a moral or personal failing. And I know that naming it, speaking it, and refusing to let the world dismiss it is the only path toward accountability and repair.
