The primary goal of this site is to help people put victimhood behind them and craft a future of their choosing. "Living well is the best revenge."That doesn't mean you can be anything and everything you want. It does mean you can set goals and make choices. Over time, the things you choose to work at consistently will leave a mark on your life.If you have always been mistreated, you have likely internalized messages and been inculcated with behaviors that help keep you a victim. Abusers do something known asvictims. Once groomed to be a good victim, you become an easy mark for other abusive people.In fact, your behavior actively attracts abuse without you realizing it.It is possible to unlearn those behaviors. Telling you that you can learn to behave differently isn't blaming you. It's trying to empower you and deprogram you from the groomed behaviors that help keep you stuck in a cycle of abuse.I was sexually abused as a child and I was sexually harassed a lot in my youth. I was explicitly told it was because I was beautiful and that made it my fault.As a youth, I was skinny and flat-chested. In my late twenties, a health crisis had me on steroids for a few months out of the year and I put on a whole lot of weight.The harassment stopped, which fit with all the messages I had previously gotten about it being about my looks. I thought I was simply too fat to be desirable any longer.Then I moved to another state with a climate that was better for my health. With better energy levels and less medication, I began walking regularly for exercise and the weight began to come off.When I first gained the weight, it did not seem to make me busty because I got heavy all over. But as I lost the weight, it came off other areas first and for six months I was very busty (a DD cup, if that means anything to you).Men stared with their mouths hanging open. But, strangely, they didn't approach me. They no longer felt entitled to chat me up just because they liked how I looked.This was puzzling and unexpected.It flew in the face of all the messages I had received throughout life concerning the one-dimensional element that looks were everything. As a woman, I was nothing if I wasn't pretty, but I was going to be sexually harassed if I was pretty and it would be my fault for being pretty.It was a terrible, terrible mental framework for trying to live my life and it took me a long time to escape it. This was a first step in that journey, not a final one.I eventually realized that during the time that I had been heavy, something about my demeanor and body language had changed. I was no longer giving off signals that made men think they could just talk to me whenever they felt like it and impose on my time for nefarious purposes.In retrospect, some of this is about eye contact and some of it is about being overly polite, solicitous and deferential. I stopped feeling obligated to acknowledge and engage every random asshole who laid eyes on me.My looks have faded and that has reduced the amount of unwanted attention I get, but there are still plenty of men interested in me and I still get feedback that suggests some people dramatically underestimate my age. (Like I still get mistaken at times for being the older sister of my adult sons.)So looks were a factor, but they were not. When my body language changed, it became a lot safer to be me in the world.For anyone with a history of being a victim, the one thing I would suggest is don't take disrespect off of anyone. Don't persist in trying to be "polite and respectful" to people who aren't being polite and respectful to you.Instead, try to disengage. Stop responding to them. Stop maintaining eye contact. Turn away. Walk away if you can.You don't have to be ugly, insulting, aggressive or rude. In other words, refusing to be the victim doesn't require you to be abusive to other people. Just disengage, don't answer their invasive questions and play defensively.Victims get groomed into being good victims. They get taught to not resist or things will be worse. They get taught to collude in hiding the abuse. They get taught to feel complicit.Abuse almost never begins with anything really overt, like violent assault. It begins with people being rude and disrespectful and escalates from there.People who are taught that they must always be "polite" no matter how anyone else is behaving make good victims -- and I put "polite" in quotes because what they are taught is not about actual politeness. This is a set of expectations that the boundaries and needs of others matter, but yours do not.It's not politeness. It's kowtowing.Someone with a history of being victimized needs to realize they matter. They need to figure out how to look out for their own needs, respect their own boundaries and clearly signal what they are.This is the thing they are taught by abusers that they are not allowed to do: Look out for themselves. Abusers make this forbidden and it poisons the way they interact with the rest of the world.Most people aren't anywhere near as nice as they imagine themselves to be. Most people are far too willing to take advantage of other people if given an easy opening.Victims are trained to give those easy openings. Recovery involves unlearning that.Recovery also involves another important lesson: There aren't just "two kinds of people in the world: victims and abusers."You need to find another way to relate to the world. As long as you believe that there are only two options, you will find yourself choosing between being the victim or being the abuser.This will also keep you stuck in unhealthy relationships.Decent people don't want to be your bitch. They also don't want you to be their bitch.As long as you persist in believing those are the only two possible social roles in life, you will remain surrounded by people who implicitly agree.The solution starts with you and your mental models. No one but you can choose to change your mind.