Cover artwork by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, from an unpublished reusable sketchbook in progress. Other work from my sketchbook practice.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Neurosis is sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
Playing poor means buying attention by portraying yourself as a victim.
Victimhood is the sexualisation of our times.
The victim wants revenge, not freedom.
Therapy is the dismantling of the myth of your own unhappiness.
Victimhood is usually accompanied by a demand that the greatness of the victim be recognised.
To blame someone else endlessly is to remain a victim yourself.
The victim position rests on denying the possibilities of your own will.
Pity as a substitute for missing admiration. If you will not praise me, at least feel sorry for me.
What do people most often encounter when suffering switches off? Boredom.
The central idea sustaining victimhood: everyone must make allowances for my situation.
If you replace the word “victim” with “prey”, the status loses its charm.
Dependency is a way of fleeing what does not fit or satisfy us, outside or inside. Yet it is a kind of running in which the harder you run, the more firmly you remain in the unsuitable situation.
If mourning is withdrawing investment from the object, suffering is investing in it in order to obtain what you want.
Psychotherapy means replacing suffering with compassion, beginning with compassion towards yourself.
What instead of suffering? Making and creating are considerably more interesting than futile thrashing about.
Feeling like a victim is a way of feeling right. Whoever has suffered must be right.
A special kind of victim: the theoretically injured. “Nobody oppressed me, but they could have.”
Suffering, like any dependency, is absorbing until you notice how endlessly repetitive it is.
Escaping into drama is one way of distracting yourself from what is truly unbearable.
Psychology Notebook is a translated personal archive of observations, study and lecture notes, paraphrases, quotations and remembered ideas. A fragment’s presence here does not establish exclusive authorship or scientific consensus. These are notebook fragments, not clinical guidance.
About Psychology Notebook · Fragments from a Therapist’s Notebook