“a victim of crooked thinking” (Chapter Ten, Big Book)
I used to be a victim.
What’s a victim?
As a victim, I was hurt, by a lot of things. I found things hurtful and disappointing. The things that hurt me were either outside me or inside me but—in my perception—outside the scope of my responsibility. People hurt me. Peoples hurt me. People, places, and things hurt me. The key thing: the hurt was not my fault. I did not even attribute the hurtfulness to malice. I saw hurt as the consequence of the general way of the world, not the result of wickedness alone.
This last point entailed something deadly: this meant that people could not interact with me without me being hurt. In other words, when people interacted with me, I would be hurt, I would construe it as their fault and then react accordingly. Even if this was below the surface, people knew this was happening and instinctively avoided me. If they interacted with me, I would be hurt, and it would apparently be their fault. They did not want to be perpetually cast as the perpetrator.
The only people who willingly danced this dance were either getting a kick out of being classed as a persecutor or were playing the same victim game but in reverse.
I don’t know how to have a healthy sick relationship, and a sick person (which I was) cannot help but have sick relationships.
A sick relationship cannot be healed by attempting to heal the relationship directly, especially not by talking about the relationship to the other person in the relationship. The talking about each other and oneself to each other is the very means by which the attack and counterattack take place. More talking means more hurt.
Only if the individuals in question heal in a general sense can the relationship be healed, and this can typically take place only if the person ‘puts down the drink’: this does not mean leaving the relationship (in fact it often requires staying in the relationship, which is the classroom) but entails taking the material that arises in the relationship and dealing with it with someone else, whilst being sober, considerable, and helpful within the relationship, regardless of what the other person says or does (see pages 98–99 and 117–118 of the Big Book).