I'm pretty sure there's an actual name for it but I'm dead tired right now so I'll just mention the immediate meme phrase for the behavior of "the [noun] cries out in pain as it strikes you" being a pretty good equivalent.
I'm a bit late to the party on this, but there was an interesting paper from a few years ago that described a personality construct which the authors called a "tendency to interpersonal victimhood". Amusingly this was actually done by Tel Aviv University about Israelis, but anyway. Essentially (the paper argues) people with secure or avoidant attachment styles don't tend to show this, but someone with an anxious attachment style does. Preoccupied with a fear of abandonment and rejection, relying on others for reassurance and validation - low self esteem, poor emotional regulation, needing others to make them feel secure. TiV has four related dimensions.
Need for recognition - a need to have your victimhood acknowledged and empathised with. This can be because experiencing hurt undermines your understanding of the world as a just and moral place, so having your victimhood acknowledged reestablishes your confidence in your perception of reality, but also can be as simple as wanting your perpetrator to feel guilt and for others to comfort you.
Moral elitism - seeing yourself as having immaculate morals, and the other side as being immoral. This may be used to control others by accusing them of immoral, unfair or selfish behavior, while seeing yourself as highly moral and ethical, possibly as a defense mechanism against painful emotions. Collective victimhood is based on beliefs about the justness of one's group's goals and positive image, while emphasizing the wickedness of the opponent's goals and characteristics.
Lack of empathy - Clinical psychological thinking has argued that victimhood at the individual level is comprised of a preoccupation with one's own suffering, and decreased attention and concern about others. Empirically, victimhood was found to increase the sense of entitlement to behave aggressively and selfishly, and that groups that engage in competitive victimhood tend to see their victimization as exclusive, thus minimizing or outright denying their adversary's suffering, associated with entitlement to behave aggressively. Priming individuals with their group's suffering resulted in reduced empathy toward those responsible for the state of victimhood
and unrelated adversaries.
Rumination - in the psychological sense, a focus of attention on the symptoms of one's distress, and its possible causes and consequences rather than its possible solutions. Victims tend to ruminate over interpersonal offenses, which perpetuates psychological distress long after the experience of interpersonal stressors has ended and promotes aggression.
The paper argued this is manifests as a range of cognitive and behavioural consequences - such as an external locus of control (things happen
to you as a result of external forces, rather than because of your own actions or decisions), high sensitivity to actual and potential hurt (expectations of hurtful behaviour in ambiguous circumstances, attribution of negative intent to others, perceiving offenses as way more severe), heightened negative emotional reactivity (you can't let things go because you'll keep ruminating) and both a lack of willingness to forgive (especially if the adversary hasn't taking the "first step" of apologising and showing remorse) and a desire for revenge. This can be linked to poor perspective-taking (understanding that other people may think, feel or experience differently to yourself - particularly associated with autism and narcissism).
Basically people who score highly on this "tendency to interpersonal victimhood" scale generally think they're morally superior to others, but they also think they're entitled to hurt people when victimised, and are unlikely to either shrug it off (secure attachment) or merely cut ties with the person who victimised them (avoidant attachment). In fact they very specifically don't have a correlation with trying to avoid the person they've got an issue with. They will read negative intent into any percieved slight and will feel significantly more negative emotions about it, which they will dwell on, motivating behavioural revenge. This meshes with "crying out as they strike you" - you've not actually done anything, but they're attacking you because they've decided you're an aggressor and
wlll not let it go, but specifically are signposting that
they are the victim who is justifiably trying to defend themselves and they are in need of comfort, and they have a deep seated need for other people to acknowledge them as the victim while also having a deep seated need to punish you. They also have a significantly harder time accepting an apology or that you're remorseful because they have heightened negative affect (they feel more negative emotions) and heightened negative emotional recall (they remember hurt more), so an apology likely won't be good enough.
Again, this research was conducted among Jewish Israelis and their tendency towards "perpetual victimhood", and the paper argues this is likely because as a group they're essentially socialised to behave this way towards the outgroup (victimised groups ruminate over their traumatic events; many Jewish-Israelis report that they are preoccupied with the Holocaust and fear that it will happen again, though most of them were not direct victims - raised in a culture that emphasizes the continuity between past and present/future sufferings) but that this construct is not unique to them and that both on the individual and the intergroup levels, victimhood is not necessarily consecutive to a past victimization or trauma. There's certainly a lot of beats hitting here. A quick note on narcissism -
Two dispositional traits related to TIV have been examined in the past; namely, narcissism and self-esteem, and deserve comment. Similar to TIV, narcissism and self-esteem both involve a general focus on the self and a strong sense of entitlement (Stronge, Cichocka, & Sibley, 2016). In addition, narcissism, but not self-esteem, was found to be associated with experiencing ambiguous situations as more hurtful and involved showing more hostility toward others (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; McCullough, Emmons, Kilpatrick, & Mooney, 2003). Furthermore, we argue that the self-esteem of high-TIV individuals would be unstable, based on the relationship between TIV, anxious attachment, external locus of control, and sensitivity to imagined or actual offenses. An unstable self-image also characterizes narcissism (Rhodewalt, Madrian, & Cheney, 199
and leads, in turn, to vulnerability to threats to the self (Bushman & Baumeister, 199
.
We also posit that both narcissism and TIV are characterized by vulnerability to threats to the self, but that the content of these threats would be different. Narcissists present themselves to the world as strong, capable, and talented (and relatedly, differently from TIV, narcissism was found to be associated with extraversion; Stronge et al., 2016). Therefore, threats are related to anything undermining their grandiosity and superiority, such as extraordinary abilities, achievements or positive qualities. In contrast, the self-presentation of high-TIV individuals is that of a weak victim, who has been hurt and is therefore in need of protection; a considerate and conscientious person who must face a cruel and abusive world. Threats to high-TIV individuals are related to anything that can undermine their self-image of moral superiority; or elicit doubts from their environment as to whether the offense occurred, the intensity of the offense, or their exclusivity as victims. These, and additional hypotheses should be examined in future research
So in high TIV individuals, it's hypothesised you can trigger something similar to narcissistic injury by telling them "you're not a victim", "you're not morally superior", "they didn't do anything to you", "they were a bit mean but it's not really that bad" or "everyone experiences that".
So if we do an inventory on how these things might correlate with our lolcows and sideshows?
- Low self esteem, weak sense of identity, external locus of control, needing others to provide validation in order to function, high negative emotional sensitivity, high negative emotional recall, obsessive rumination (arguably, depression/anxiety correlates)
- Low empathy, poor perspective taking, cognitive rigidity (autism correlates)
- Tendency to assume that people are singling them out/being malicious, black and white thinking, entitlement towards negative/destructive behaviour, tendency towards vengefulness, sense of (moral) superiority, fear of abandonment/rejection and associated manipulative tactics (cluster b correlates)
- In-group socialisation establishes and reinforces collective victimhood narrative and overall tendency towards interpersonal victimisation (just go on any discussion forum)
It does all sort of mesh, doesn't it? It even sort of explains the seemingly paradoxical nature of "we've always been here, trans people are superior to cis people, we understand gender and we used to be goddesses don't ya know, we've won chuds, suck it, I'm going to smash in a TERF" and "I'm a vulnerable victim! They're genociding us!". Simultaneously superior to others while also being a victim needing comfort (who's justified in doing anything to defend themselves). Arguably could even cover how the situation was getting more and more extreme as various social and legal pressures set in - wasn't just enough to be recognised as having a gender identity, then it became that there's no difference biologically between a trans woman and a cis woman (and if you disagreed you were an evil villain trying to kill trans people or a pervert obsessed with genitals). You can tie a lot into this framework (e.g. external locus of control = "I'm only poor/unhappy/single because of transphobia", need for external validation = "you have to fully acknowledge me as not just this gender but also this biological sex", the "IT'S MA'AM" meltdowns over accidental misgendering etc etc). I'd continue but this comment is long enough.
The only other point here is how the paper differentiates between high-TIV individuals and narcissists. IMO high extraversion could in theory explain both - high-TIV is uncorrelated with extraversion, while narcissism is positively correlated with it. So for highly extraverted cows, we might see that they're simultaneously narcissistic and high-TIV.
