Provocative Victims: Privilege and the Art of Becoming Offended

Provocative victims are people who trigger others and then claim to be bullied when faced with pushback, representing a pattern rooted in privilege and trauma responses. This behavioral pattern extends from personal interactions to public figures, requiring clear recognition to effectively navigate without becoming emotionally entangled.

• Provocative victims display aggressive behavior then immediately claim victimhood when others respond
• White privilege often enables this behavior pattern by providing social safety to be confrontational
• Many provocative victims grew up with narcissistic caregivers, distorting their understanding of appropriate behavior
• Public figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump demonstrate this pattern on larger scales
• Understanding the psychological roots helps us respond strategically rather than reactively
• Narcissistic tendencies provide frameworks but create blind spots about how behavior impacts others
• Naming this pattern ("provocative victim") gives us tools to handle these interactions more effectively

Find me on YouTube with my podcast, music covers and originals. Visit decolonizehealthcare.com for free programs including the 21-day meditation exploration, or check out OwlChrysalisMedicine.com for links to my coaching, music, books, and more.

#mentalhealth #Trauma #Elon #Musk #elonmusk #Trump #Provocativevictim #whiteprivilege #privelege #narcisissm

Chapters

• 0:35 Introduction to Provocative Victims
• 1:42 The Facebook Confrontation Story
• 6:43 White Privilege's Role
• 11:25 Public Provocative Victims: Musk and Trump
• 15:11 Understanding the Psychology
• 19:54 Narcissism and Generational Trauma
• 24:58 Parting Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:35

Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, owl Medicine, and in today's podcast, as promised, I'm going to be talking about a person or group of people that you're probably very familiar with. It's a group of people who are online, and I say group because I'm lumping them into a group. They're all individuals, but there's a certain type of person online and just in general in life. That doesn't just happen online, but it happens more online, I think, than it happens in person. And there's the reason I want to talk about it is because it's just been prevalent in my life recently, and normally I wouldn't care. But there has recently been a person who is very close to a person who's very close to me, and that person is what I call a provocative victim, and it's not just me. This is a term, it's a sociological term Provocative victim. A provocative victim is a person who often unintentionally, behaves in ways that provoke or irritate others, leading to negative interactions and potentially bullying situations, but lacks the social or physical skills to defend themselves, to defend themselves. Or a provocative victim is a person who is easy to arouse emotionally and specifically what I want to talk about is these people are easily triggered, but what they do is they go around triggering other people. So this person twice now, who's very close to a very dear friend of mine they have shown up on Facebook comments, one time on my page and another time on a friend's page, commenting about one of my comments. So this person decided they wanted to comment about my response, which they hadn't said anything about yet. And what they said about my response, which was about the left bullying the right, because I have a real issue with it was a post from a very good friend of mine talking about the left bullying the right, and it seems like what he was talking about is what the standard person considers the left, which is Democrats. But anybody with half a brain knows that the Democrats are not left, they're not liberal, they're not liberal, they're not progressive, they're so far from that, they're centrist, if anything. But anyway, he said in his post that for a long time for his whole life he's from New York that the left has been bullying the right and now he feels like it's finally switched. And, coming from the Midwest and coming from a high school that literally had a child beat to death four years after I graduated high school. In my junior high that I attended, a kid was beat to death for being gay and our principal the one I had was still the principal there. Then he said that they don't have a bullying problem. And so when I see that the left somebody saying that the left bullies the right, I'm going to have a real fucking problem with it because I'm talking about the people. So anyway, I go off and I'm like that's fucking horseshit. And this person decided to respond by saying well, well said, even if I agree or don't.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Coherent, correctly spelled sentences, unlike that lazy owl who uses vowels instead of words, only capitalizes words in the middle of sentences, swears like a fifth grader and does absolutely no research before he spouts off on a public platform I would be embarrassed. He's fighting without any ammunition. Then a little bit later says that oh, here we go. I'm simply tired of people battering each other online. I don't like being sworn at and called name. And if this comes from Democrats, period. That wasn't a sentence. If anyone tries to ask a question or play devil's advocate, they yell so loud. There's no point in responding. He has no idea what party I belong to. He just starts yelling. He assumes I am on the right but doesn't know. He is just repeating the Democrat narrative and it gets old and less and less popular. I like Owl and I thought he liked me, but I'm done with being abused by people online, to which another person responded and said did I miss something? Did Owl quote yell at you? The only comment I see from him is directed at Jess.

Speaker 1: 5:14

This is what I'm talking about. These are people who go online or go out in public and it's almost exclusively white people. What's really fun about this is it's actually not like a just white person. It's a very white-looking person who has also got a lot of Native. But they're a Native American, north American, and the part of the country their people come from didn't get a lot of light either, so they don't have the like like Hollywood Native American look. They're basically white passing. But here's the thing about white privilege is white privilege is given to anyone else who other people deem other white people deem to be white. So if I look at you as another white person and I see you and I don't know what race you are, but I see you and you look like me. You have the same features, the same approximate skin color. I'm going to assume you're like me and you get white privilege, and that's one of the things that goes along with this provocative victim thing.

Speaker 1: 6:16

White privilege is the backbone of being a provocative victim. Even though this person isn't fully white, she lives in white privilege, fully and completely in this because only a white person, in the United States anyway, can walk into a room, start berating people, making fun of people, abusing people, and then say, oh my god, I'm so tired of people bullying other people around. People without as much privilege as white people can't actually risk the provocative aspect of being a provocative victim. They're already victims and this woman is too, I'm sure, and that's fine. Like we're all victims and we're all perpetrators. There's no getting around that for anybody.

Speaker 1: 7:04

My issue is when a person walks in and does the thing that they then immediately start accusing other people of. That royally pisses me off. That is what my family did, my father especially really good at that. It absolutely drives me insane. So I wanted to talk about this because this is a real person who is very close to someone in my life, and it's not just happening through my personal life.

Speaker 1: 7:33

This is literally what's happening with Elon Musk as well. Elon was the one who said empathy is humanity's greatest weakness, right? But then when people started destroying Tesla property, then he got all butthurt about it and was like oh well, show me empathy. Have you no heart? This is what I'm talking about. He says empathy is the problem, and then he amasses so much money through greed and his own lack of empathy that when other people stop feeling bad for him and are like, why, what the fuck? This is bullshit. You're literally illegally disassembling our entire fucking country. So we're going to do something about it. And now he wants the empathy that he was just belittling. He is a provocative victim.

Speaker 1: 8:22

Donald Trump is another provocative victim. He will walk into a situation that he caused the problem of and then point fingers at everybody else. And this is America. America is a business. We've all at least anybody with half a brain knows that America is a business. It was founded as a business and this is how business people operate. This is how America operates. You don't need to be right, you don't need to be correct. You just need to be first or loudest, and preferably both. So what they do is they walk in, cause a problem and then start yelling and screaming about the problem and pointing fingers to go, and then people who weren't aware of the problem are now immediately aware of the problem, are now immediately aware of the problem and when you immediate, when you are presented with a problem, what do you immediately want to do? You want to solve the problem. So if you're introduced to a problem and then are immediately given a person to blame or a thing to blame, you're going to just go along with that. It is a classic bait and switch.

Speaker 1: 9:28

This, this person I'm talking about that I had this interaction with online and this is twice now that it's happened where she came at me, called me names, was being ridiculous, but I wanted to be way ruder than I was. I really wanted to be hella rude back. She came at me. I stood up for myself and was like actually you know what, excuse you and then decided to say that she was being bullied. This is horseshit and it happens all the time. It's not. This is not unique to me. This is a thing that all of us have to deal with.

Speaker 1: 10:03

So I want you to understand what a provocative victim is. It's a frustrating thing and I'm sure you're well aware. So I'm just trying to give you a name to be able to go. You know what. That's what they're doing, because we've all seen it. We've all seen people show up into a chat thread online and start going off about something being super rude and super disgusting and then talking about how rude and disgusting everybody else is and they started it. Sorry, but who started it does matter sometimes. So I want you to have the ability to go oh, all right, you see a provocative.

Speaker 1: 10:41

You see somebody walking into a situation and making it far worse and being aggressive, and then, when people stand up for themselves, they then claim to be the victim. This is also white privilege. Like you stir the pot to get whatever it is that you want out of it. You get to say whatever you want and you think that you're right. You think whatever you do is fine. So you show up and you stir the pot. And when you go and stir the pot and then other people go oh hell, no, I don't think so. You go. Excuse you what. You're so rude, this is so bad. That's a provocative victim. This is white privilege in action, because what's happening is this person is so blind to their own shit, like she's clearly blind to exactly what happened, because I saw it. This other guy saw it. It's very clear, it's literally in black and white right there on Facebook. And yet she was complaining about people bullying people online, which is exactly what she did. So I commented and said, actually no, you're being a provocative victim and if you want to, you should probably check out my podcast on it, because I'm going to do one very soon on being a provocative victim. So I wanted to get into the psychology a little bit of this, because this is not a bad person.

Speaker 1: 12:03

This person is one of the most creative people I've ever met. She is a powerhouse at making anything. Like nothing stops her If she wants to set her mind. If she sets her mind to making a thing and doing a thing, she's going to do it. Now, she's not going to do it for you. She's not going to do it for, like, any reason other than she wants to, which cool? Like have your boundaries, fuck yeah, like whatevs. She is a fantastically creative individual and that's why all of this is complex and nuanced is because I can't just throw this person to the trash, because she's very close to one of the people who are very close to me. I'm not going to not be around this person. That's what makes this so difficult and that's why I wanted to do a podcast on it is I'm going to have to deal with this person.

Speaker 1: 12:59

I don't like her. I didn't like her the day I met her. The day I met her, she didn't know who I was. I hadn't gotten close with this other person yet, and so when I met her, I was actually at an open mic night and there was this lady who was walking up in the middle of a singer-songwriter set and standing up, blocking the view of a bunch of other people and loudly, loudly, talking through the entire set. Now, this was back at the Sittenbull open mic night, which I used to go to all the time. It changed my life. I'm so thankful for that open mic night, so thankful that I only one time ever left the open mic before it was over, and it was that day. I literally left the day that I met her, because she had such disgusting energy I couldn't stand to be around it.

Speaker 1: 13:53

Later I was told oh, that's understandable, but also, she's the best one in the family and that's fine. She can be the best one in the family. That doesn't mean she's not garbage when it comes to how she handles herself in public and being respectful to other people. And this is where I think she is blind, and I think a lot of these people are blind. I don't think they're aware of how nasty they are. I think whoever raised her was so vicious and so cutting and so nasty to her that her softened version of that today is as good as it gets in her mind. She's not being a bully, because at least she's not as bad as her mom or her dad or caregiver or whatever.

Speaker 1: 14:50

And, of course, this is a trauma podcast. I'm a trauma person. I'm a trauma author. That's the way my mind always goes. I'm always looking for what is that compassionate narrative? Because I have to deal with this person. I don't actually want to spend any time with her, but I do want the time that I spend with her to be positive, to be fine, and I'm only going to be able to do that once I clearly understand our relationship and I clearly understand her. And so for me, what that means is I need to be able to understand what that behavior is that triggers me and pisses me off, and it's that provocative victim thing and that same psychology I was talking about, the being unaware I think also is exactly the psychology that led to her rudely talking through a singer-songwriter set, a person who was doing a song that they had just written for the like first time, and she wouldn't shut up.

Speaker 1: 15:52

She was standing directly in front of the stage, like as close to the stage as you could be and not be on the stage, was standing there blocking the view, talking about something from her day. Right, that's the level of, that's the lack of awareness. That's the level of lack of awareness that she has in, like physical meat space. Now, when you move physical meat space, like the level of presence and awareness that you have there and you move to online, it's even less. I feel like we bring even less presentness, even less mindfulness to our interactions online. They're brief, they're short, they're quippy. Like we know by now, the way the algorithms and social media and all of that has changed a lot of our psychology and conditioning the way that we think, and social media and all of that has changed a lot of our psychology and conditioning the way that we think and process stuff and and communicate.

Speaker 1: 16:44

So if she's that way in person, she's going to be even worse online, right, and she is garbage online, at least in these two, in these two uh situations with me. She was gross to the point where I was like I'm just going to block her and I actually messaged my friend and was like I'm about to block so-and-so like for real, because, well, she came in, started attacking me, said I curse like a fifth grader, which is funny because I curse like a veteran because I am one no-transcript. Let's just leave it at that. So when she says he clearly does no research before he posts online and I would be ashamed if I were him, yeah, that's fine, you can say that. You can say that you'd be ashamed if you were me, but you're not me and I don't have to worry about what I like misspelling things online. That's because I know that I am well-spoken, I've written two best-selling books and clearly know how to use grammar when I want to. I don't think that writing a novel and having perfect grammar makes you any kind of smarter than anybody else. In fact, if you have to reduce your arguments to ridiculing a person, saying that they do no research and that they curse like a fifth grader and you'd be ashamed and all of that, and you don't actually say anything aboutard.

Speaker 1: 18:30

When I was in school, matthew Shepard was beaten and then drug behind a pickup truck to death by a group of straight kids because he was gay. So until you give me examples of the left doing that to the right like and I mean a couple hundred thousand, then you don't get to say that the left bullies the right. You don't Like I get that politically. And one of the arguments online there was abortion, and the counterpoint was COVID and being like well, the left wants women to have control of their own bodies, and the counterpoint was yeah, but the left also pushed that mandatory vaccines for everyone. And yeah, but there's a difference there. The difference is that you're not getting a COVID vaccine unless you just don't believe that COVID is real at all. You not getting a COVID vaccine can dramatically affect every single living other person on the entire goddamn planet versus you. Choosing to get an abortion affects no one but you and that baby. So that's not the same. Jess, if you're listening to this and I hope that you will that's not the same. That's not a valid argument.

Speaker 1: 19:57

But I've decided that I'm going to start doing episodes like this where, when I have something to say that's political. I'm actually just going to make a long form version of it. That way I can get all of the nuance out and you have to hear the whole thing, or you can just not if you want to shut it down whenever. But you at least get the chance to actually hear the entire philosophy altogether instead of in bits and pieces on the internet. Because I wound up just arguing well with this woman and other people way too much, wasting my time because they don't actually care, and I'm trying to get good information out there into the world.

Speaker 1: 20:37

I'm trying to get useful stuff, like the term provocative victim. So if you have a person like this in your life, one I would be interested to know is this person white? Send it in the comments. If you have a person like this who plays the provocative victim in your life, let me know if they're white. Also, let me know if they had a narcissistic parent or some piece of that in their early life and developmental stages, because I think this person did. I think she's a bit of a narcissist, just from the not the clinical version, but the subclinical version, like my father was. I think she's a bit of a narcissist, but we'll see, I would like to hear from you if you think your provocative victim has touches of narcissism. And remember, these things are inherited. So when I'm like, oh, I think they're a narcissist, a narcissist Like OK, I've been meaning to do a whole podcast on this, but I'll give you a brief synopsis.

Speaker 1: 21:42

I have a whole philosophy on generational narcissism coming out of World War Two, especially because, like the men came back, everything was different. The Industrial Revolution it was like full swing. Women had to go to work and then had to stop going to work, and everything was completely different. To go to work and then had to stop going to work, and everything was completely different. The way the world functioned is so far removed from the way that it had functioned 10 years before and the government wasn't helping these people. The government wasn't helping these vets. They went from a context of being a high schooler to a context of being deeply at war and murdering people like live in person, unlike a lot of our modern ones which happen through uh well, basically video games, because people are doing drone kills and airstrikes and that sort of stuff. Back in the day, these guys were having to do this in person and like watching the light, leave another human being's eyes so that deeply fucks with you and when you get back and you don't know how to function.

Speaker 1: 22:39

One thing that narcissism is good at is saying this is the way we do things, period, and it gives a framework. It provides a framework. So I don't see narcissism as an exclusively terrible thing. I see that it happens quite a bit. I mean, it's a very rare disorder to actually be clinically diagnosed. But these tendencies, narcissistic tendencies, occur quite a bit within the species. So clearly it does something beneficial. Right, that it does that's beneficial is provide a framework. It provides a framework for this is the way that we do things Right or wrong doesn't matter, but it says this is the way that we do things. And when you have children that are kind of made to be told this is the way that we do things at least and we enjoy at least telling them that, especially back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, I mean we still do. We tell children what to do and children do need frameworks. They need regularity, they need frameworks, they need like a way to understand how the world works and narcissism provides that.

Speaker 1: 23:52

So don't let me don't let my use of the word narcissism like think that that means I think this person or anybody with any narcissistic traits, is just atrocious or terrible or whatever, because that's not the case. I do think this person has, has a few narcissistic traits and I think there were probably inherited from their parents in the way that they were raised and like it is what it is. But I think that combination of the ridicule that you receive from a narcissistic parent and doing better than them as far as like being less condescending, I think the combination of those two things makes a person walk into a situation unaware of how selfish they are and the impact that they have on other people, because narcissists don't care are, and the impact that they have on other people because narcissists don't care, and you're going to mirror the neurology of the people who raised you. So if you were raised by a narcissist, you're not going to care as much how other people respond to you because you were raised by a narcissist. So you mirror their neurology and those people have had biological decisions made and I talk about biological versus logical decisions a lot in the book. They are having these biological decisions made, which are decisions that are essentially subconscious, decisions made by previous programming of the body based on successful experiences from the past.

Speaker 1: 25:22

So if you're raised by a narcissist and you see that narcissist going through life and doing things and being able to have really good boundaries because that's one thing narcissists are great at is they have really good boundaries and say, no, this is the way things are, this is what I expect, and blah, blah, blah, you're going to see that and be like, oh okay, cool, and it's not even a conscious thing. You are going to be unbothered by the opinions of people that you don't actively care about, which sounds like a great thing and it is. It is, to a degree, right. But when you walk into a room of strangers and people are singing a song and you can't be bothered to even look at yourself and see what's going on and what you're doing in a room and that you're physically blocking a person visually who's performing and you're speaking over their singer-songwriter set, I think that shows some of that narcissistic conditioning. Again, not unilaterally bad, but I call it as I fucking see it. So that's what I see. I see narcissism in it and that's what I'm going to call it Again, subclinical.

Speaker 1: 26:30

There's a lot of this that happens in many of our lives. Being able to name it. That whole name it to tame it thing is quite useful. So I wanted to present you with the provocative victim, because we all know some. We've got two of them who are running the country right now. I'm dealing with one via Facebook and it's not fun, it's annoying because this person is very close, like I said, to a person who's very close to me, and that's frustrating. So now you know what a provocative victim is and you have one very flimsy hypothesis as to one of the ways that you can get a person who is being a provocative victim. That's really all I have for you today. I wanted to just drop this in. I'll be doing an interview tomorrow morning with a person that I'm hoping. It will be a phenomenal interview and we'll have wonderful things to share, and then I will share that interview with you coming next week. Thank you very much for listening.

Speaker 1: 27:45

Again, my name is Owl Medicine. I am the author of Rethinking Broken and the author of. Emotions Are Logical, even the Stupid Ones. You can find me on YouTube with the podcast is posted there. I have tons of my own music covers and originals. Me on YouTube with the podcast is posted there. I have tons of my own music covers and originals up on YouTube.

Speaker 1: 28:05

You can go to decolonizehealthcarecom and you can check out the 21-day meditation exploration program I built or one of the self-care programs. We've got lots of free programs on there for you. You can learn how to read scientific articles. You can go through and get new physiology training Like I've got stuff in there a whole education page so you can learn more about your health, your life and your body. You can go through the basics of all anatomy and physiology and there's lots of good information so you can go there and check that out. You can also go to OwlChrysalisMedicinecom where there are links to my coaching, my music, the book, obviously, and the podcast is all hosted on there.

Speaker 1: 28:56

Thank you for spending your time with me today. I hope that the provocative victim is a phrase that you now can pull out of your back pocket and use when appropriate and be like oh, they're so frustrating and then just be like you know what? I know what this is. I will talk about this in one of his podcasts. They're just being a provocative victim and you know what, as frustrating as it is, it's probably not their fault and getting mad at it certainly isn't going to help me. So I love you all. Thank you for listening and remember stay curious and stay uncomfortable, comfortable. Thank you, you Bye.