What happened may not be your fault, but it doesn’t have to control what you do next

There are times in life when you really are a victim. Someone abuses you, exploits you or deliberately deceives you. Something is done to you that you neither asked for nor deserved.

There are also painful things that happen where there may be no victim at all. A relationship ends. You lose a job. A business fails. These experiences can hurt deeply, but pain and victimhood are not the same thing.

We don’t simply experience events. We explain them to ourselves. When something painful happens, we naturally want to know why. Why did my marriage fail? Why was I fired? Why did that person betray me? Why does this keep happening to me?

The answers can become stories about our lives. Sometimes those stories are accurate. Someone really did behave badly. The system really was unfair. We really did get unlucky. But an explanation for one experience can gradually become an explanation for everything.

A betrayal can leave you thinking people can’t be trusted. A failure can convince you that you’re a failure. Being treated unfairly can leave you believing the world is against you.

You may recognize this in the way you talk about your own life. Do you find yourself saying nobody gives you a chance or things never work out for you? When someone suggests something you could do, is your first response to explain why it won’t work? Are you waiting for another person to change before you allow yourself to move forward?

Or maybe you spend a lot of time replaying an old wrong. You think about what you should have said or how different your life would be if that one thing hadn’t happened. Years may have passed, but the event still carries weight in the decisions you make today.

That’s when something that happened to you can start to feel like part of who you are. Instead of thinking, “Something bad happened to me,” you begin thinking, “This is what my life is like.”

At first, some of these conclusions can protect us. If you’ve been badly hurt, mistrust can feel safer than vulnerability. If you’ve failed, refusing to try again protects you from failing again. But protection has a price. The beliefs that keep us from being hurt again can also keep us from doing the things that might make our lives better.

You don’t apply for a job because you’re convinced you won’t get it. You keep people at a distance because you believe they’ll eventually hurt you. You stop trying because previous efforts didn’t work. Then each result seems to confirm what you already believed: See? I knew nothing I did would make a difference. Psychologists have studied something similar, known as learned helplessness. It is the tendency to stop trying when experience has taught us to believe that nothing we do will make much difference.

If some of this sounds familiar, pay attention to the story you’re telling yourself about what happened.
I’m not particularly interested in positive thinking if it means pretending things are better than they are. If something terrible happened, pretending otherwise doesn’t make you stronger. If circumstances really are difficult, telling yourself they aren’t is not optimism. It’s denial.

I’m more interested in seeing things as they really are.

A similar idea is used in cognitive behavioural therapy: learn to question what you’re telling yourself rather than automatically treating every thought as fact. Listen for words such as “always,” “never,” “everyone,” and “nobody.” When you hear yourself saying, “Nobody will hire me,” stop and ask whether that is actually a fact. “I applied for three jobs and didn’t get them” is a fact. “Nobody will hire me” is the conclusion you’ve drawn from it.

You can do something with a fact. A story built around “always” and “never” can convince you there’s no point trying before you’ve even started.

Maybe what happened really was unfair. Maybe somebody really did hurt you. Maybe you really have been dealt a difficult hand. Say so. Be honest about it. But be equally honest about the conclusions you’ve drawn since. Are they still true? Or have you repeated them for so long that you’ve stopped questioning them?

Taking control of your future isn’t the same thing as accepting blame for your past. If somebody abused you, the abuse was their responsibility. If someone deceived you, the deception was theirs. Someone else may be entirely responsible for what happened. You can still decide what you do next.

And that brings me to the question I think matters most: What is still mine to decide?

Taking control doesn’t mean pretending you control everything. You can’t control whether someone loves you, hires you, apologizes to you or treats you fairly. Illness, money, family responsibilities and circumstances beyond your control can leave you with very few choices.

But few choices aren’t the same as no choices.

The next time you find yourself dwelling on something that happened to you, try something simple. On a piece of paper, make two lists: what you cannot change and what you can still influence.

You may not be able to change the person who hurt you, undo a decision or get the apology you believe you deserve. Put those things aside for a moment and look at the other list. Is there a conversation you can have? A boundary you can establish? Is there someone you can ask for help? Something you need to stop doing?

Find one thing you can do and start there. Don’t expect it to solve everything. It probably won’t. Instead, pay attention to whether you’re doing things differently. Are you having conversations you once avoided? Setting boundaries instead of complaining that they’re being crossed? Pursuing opportunities you once would have dismissed?

Sometimes moving forward means asking for help. Trauma and ways of thinking built up over years don’t disappear because somebody tells you to look on the bright side. If the past continues to interfere with your relationships, work or daily life, talking to a qualified professional may help.

There can also be a strange kind of safety in believing we have no choices. If everything is beyond our control, nothing is required of us. We don’t have to risk failing again, have the difficult conversation or reconsider our own decisions. And we don’t have to ask the really uncomfortable question: Am I doing anything now that’s keeping me stuck?

That’s not an easy question. Neither are these: Am I waiting for somebody else to change before I allow my life to change? Am I using something that happened years ago to explain choices I’m making today? Am I so focused on who is to blame that I’ve stopped looking for what I can do?

Those questions aren’t about letting anybody else off the hook. They’re about putting your attention back on the one person whose choices you can change: yourself.

We should be able to say plainly when someone has been wronged and hold people accountable for wrongdoing. But holding someone accountable and taking control of your own future are not opposites. You can say, “What happened to me was wrong,” while also saying, “I will decide what I can do from here.”

You cannot always control what happens to you. But you can refuse to let what happened decide what you do next.

Faith Wood is a professional speaker, author, and certified professional behaviour analyst. Before her career in speaking and writing, she served in law enforcement, which gave her a unique perspective on human behaviour and motivations. Faith is also known for her work as a novelist, with a focus on thrillers and suspense. Her background in law enforcement and understanding of human behaviour often play a significant role in her writing.