FLIPPING THE DRAMA TRIANGLE

THE EMPOWERMENT DYNAMIC ACTION

In the last episode, we talked about drama and how it tends to play out in life and business. We talked about a framework called the drama triangle, which is a term coined by Dr. Stephen Karpman back in the 70’s to describe patterns of behavior he’d observed playing out amongst families, couples, workplace colleagues, and a variety of other scenarios. The Drama Triangle has three primary characters playing out their roles in an almost script-like fashion based on some triggering behaviors by one of the players in the story. I won’t go into deep detail about all of the characters in the triangle since I described in depth each one in the last episode. As a quick recap, there is the victim, the rescuer, and the persecutor. You can also think of those roles as the victim, the hero, and the villain. They all have a role, they all have a script that plays out in their head, and in their behavior, and they all keep each other in a set of behaviors that are typically quite limited and limiting. 

If you listened to that episode and recognized some of the patterns and roles in your own life, good! That was the point in discussing it on this show. This show is about finding and creating value in anything and everything and eliminating drama from our lives and businesses and is one of the quickest shortcuts to being able to find and add value. When you’re caught up in the infinity loop of drama, as I called it in the last episode, you simply don’t have the internal resources to do other things. It’s really tough to see and take advantage of opportunity when you’re constantly playing out dramas in your life or at work. It’s really difficult to move ahead in life or in business when you’re constantly caught up in a cycle of victimhood, of rescuing somebody else playing the victim, or judging and persecuting others for not living up to your standards. 

I’ve talked in previous episodes about living with somebody for 18 years that had a very well honed script of both the victim and the persecutor. I wasn’t mature enough, or aware enough to recognize the triangle or infinity loop playing out almost weekly. In complete transparency, I’m sure it was one of the things I was attracted to initially. The chance for me to play the hero or the rescuer was something that got triggered right away and the scripts started playing out right away. I was able to rescue her from minor situations to big situations happening within family dynamics. Not that I didn’t have my own issues, we all do, but the strongest script being played out in that relationship was that of me being a rescuer to her victimhood. Which, by the way, works great when there’s not a lot on the line. However, things tend to progress and get more serious the more committed people get to each other, and that’s exactly what happened. Marriage, careers, life, kids, businesses, money, typical struggles, and the roles get played out in a variety of ways. The problem is that, once the roles are established in a relationship, they can be very difficult to change without outside help. If you don’t recognize what’s going on and playing out, why would you seek out help? 

Nevertheless, with divorce 10+ years in the rearview and years of personal coaching and counseling, it becomes extremely clear how the scripts played out with perfect precision over and over for 18 years. I actually feel lucky to have gotten out of the loop with only half of my life stuck in it. We can all point to people much older than ourselves who might be stuck in some kind of drama loop, and have been for many decades. Most of us can probably point to our parents in some area and say, “yep, that’s them alright! Dad does this, mom says this, dad then does this and mom goes into this mode.” We see it, we can identify the pattern, but we write it off as, ‘that’s just them”, and then we chuckle it off. What we’re identifying when we do that is likely how we were trained to react and respond in life and in all of our relationships. No chuckles needed, those are the people who messed you and I up for some extended period of time. And, while you can’t fix anybody else, you can eliminate those patterns, triggers, and co-dependencies within yourself and from those relationships. 

And here’s the thing, when you fix it in you, you fix it for the rest of the world! What do I mean? We’re talking about empowerment, and when you’re empowered to take control of your own behaviors and own your BS, you begin to heal some of the dysfunction within yourself. When you start to heal the dysfunction within yourself, you rewrite the script and you start behaving differently in the world. When you start behaving differently in your world, the rest of the world behaves differently for you. That’s what it means to fix it for the rest of the world. The only thing we can ever control is ourselves and how we show up in the world. We can’t control how the rest of the world shows up. We can’t control how the other characters in our lives will show up or how they’ll behave. We can only control how we’ll respond when they do show up in our lives. When you end the drama, when you put an end to dysfunction and codependency in your relationships, in your businesses, and in your office environments, you’re no longer contributing to that particular issue in the world. When you fix it in you, you fix it for the whole world! That doesn’t mean you’ve fixed others. It doesn’t mean you’ve solved a global problem. It means that it’s the only thing you can do and, since we’re all the center of our own individual worlds, all the work to be done is within ourselves. What we can hope for, but not count on or expect, is that when you show up better in the world, others will want to follow your lead. 

So, how do we start to change the way we show up when it comes to the drama triangle? We begin to employ what has been referred to as the empowerment dynamic. Call it whatever you want, I’m a fan of simple. The empowerment dynamic, like the drama triangle, has three characters, so to speak, but they’re different from the three dysfunctions we talked about last week. The three characters, roles, or positions the empowerment dynamic encourages us to play are that of the creator, the coach, and the challenger. Having studied the drama triangle and the empowerment dynamic for some time now, and having coached thousands of people over the last 25 years or so, I would lump all three of these roles, or characters, into one role and that’s simply that of a coach. I’ll break down what the specific characteristics of each role are in a minute, but the reality is that all of these character traits and roles in the empowerment dynamic are simply descriptions of a good coach. 

A good coach listens to hear and understand, not to respond. A good coach coaches the person, not necessarily the problem. A coach is positive and has an abundance mindset. A good coach empowers the student to solve their own issues. A good coach has faith in the wisdom of the growth process. A good coach knows everyone has the innate power to solve their own issues and works to help them unleash their own strength and recognition of that power. A good coach tries to give the student the power to solve their own problems in perpetuity, not just in the moment. A good coach is patient, knowing that most problems occur because of deeply held beliefs, often limiting ones, and the behavior patterns noted in the drama triangle. One doesn’t just ‘fix’ problems that have been developed and honed over many years, sometimes decades. Remember, whatever scripts and roles we’ve learned to play in various situations and with certain people have been reinforced over many years. Imagine throwing a tennis ball at a 1 foot by 1 foot square on your garage door every day for 30 years. Do you think you’d be pretty good at hitting the center of the square? 

Coming from a martial arts and training background, I can tell you that repetition is the main driver of habits and progress, regardless of whether or not they’re positive or negative. Do something over and over daily for 10, 20, 30 years and it’s hard wired. The neurons in our brains that fire together, wire together. Every time they fire together, the wiring becomes stronger and more defined and it becomes less and less conscious. Once the proper conditions present themselves and the script is activated, it’s almost completely subconscious, it just happens. Pulling ourselves and our co-workers out of the drama triangle requires a compassionate process of coaching. 

Let’s talk briefly about the three roles in the empowerment dynamic as one may resonate more with you than another. But, please keep in mind that a good coach is all three of these things when the situation dictates it. 

The first role is that of the creator. The creator sees life through an empowered and uplifting lens of possibility and opportunity. They believe in taking radical responsibility for their own shit and for choosing their responses carefully to life’s challenges. When the creator is faced with one of life’s many ups and downs, setbacks, or struggles, they focus on what is to be learned from the struggle. The creator is constantly asking, “what is the lesson in this?” They’re always learning and growing and on a continuous journey of improving themselves. They have a strong belief that they, and they alone, control their own destiny. Creators are adaptive, resourceful, and great reframers. A reframer is somebody who takes a potentially negative situation and reframes it in a positive way so as to get the most juice and growth from it. That’s the ‘creator’ role. 

The next role, or character in the empowerment dynamic is the coach. As I mentioned just a bit ago, the coach is an excellent listener. The coach resists the natural urge to want to solve other peoples’ problems and, instead, asks, ‘how are we going to get what we want from this situation? What are our options? What’s a positive response in this situation? What are some alternatives to solving this problem?’, and then lets the student come up with the answers. This is how people learn and grow. Any parent knows this method for raising intelligent, happy, well adjusted, and empowered young people. You can’t solve all their problems every time they arise. Our job as parents, beyond a certain point anyway, is to coach our kids on how to make good choices and decisions. Coaching, like parenting, requires lots of patience and self discipline to not jump in and give all the answers or solve all the problems. A good coach lets the individual come to their own conclusions and responses, sometimes with a little extra perspective from the coach. But that’s how people grow. I’ve had people come to me 5 and 10 years later in a coaching relationship and say, “Blaine, I finally get what you’ve been trying to get me to see regarding this or that!” That means the seeds were planted that long ago with questions and insight, but the person wasn’t ready to accept, to see, or to employ that response in that way. A good coach can’t force things onto people who aren’t ready to accept them. A good coach is prepared to wait a year, three, ten, or twenty for somebody to grow beyond their issues and into an empowered state where they get it, and they can employ better responses to life and to other people. That’s the coach.

The last role is that of the challenger. The Challenger is the part of the coach that’s a little more brash, opinionated in a good way, and maybe a little more vocal about what they see as a positive path forward for somebody. Like the name implies, they speak the truth in a way that inspires learning and growth. The challenger values the ability to inspire others to reach for their highest good and to be a little better tomorrow than they are today. The challenger may initially appear like a persecutor in that they’re somewhat judgmental, but the difference is that their judgments are about issues, not people. They have strong opinions about issues, situations, and solutions, but are able to deliver the information without blame and judgment. If you remember the persecutor from last week, they try to control people through judgment and blame. They try to make people feel small as a way to create controllable chaos. If the persecutor can make you feel small and weak, you’re easy to control. The challenger, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is very comfortable in chaos and uncertainty. 

Imagine the fictional Hollywood character in an action film calmly walking through a battlezone with bullets whizzing by their head and explosions going off all around them. They’re moving with intention and don’t seem to be fazed by the chaos going on around them, that’s the challenger. The challenger is ok with not having all the answers in a situation because they have faith that answers and paths will reveal themselves with movement. The challenger has no need to be right or have all the answers. They want to help the individual see the world from a different perspective that will allow them to choose better responses in challenging situations. 

As I mentioned before going deeper on each of the roles in the empowerment dynamic, I believe each of these roles to simply be descriptions of a good coach. I think it can be a bit confusing to try to think through these three roles and then try to imagine which one you are, or can and should be in various situations. Any time we have to think about something, we slow down. When you find yourself caught up in a drama triangle in some way, you shouldn’t have to stop and think, ‘hmmm, should I be a coach, a creator, or a challenger?’ No, the point of the empowerment dynamic, in my opinion, is simply to start bringing recognition to when we get stuck in being a victim, a rescuer or hero, or when we’re being the persecutor, and then be able to transform into a good coach instead. How would a good coach handle this particular situation? How could I challenge in a positive and uplifting way instead of judging and blaming, and how could I change the energy around this so that the people involved in this situation have an opportunity to feel empowered, instead of helpless, possibly judged, and recognize their innate ability to solve their own problem. 

It’s important to remember that we don’t have the power to change other people. We can uplift, we can offer perspective, we can withdraw so as not to be a target, we can challenge in a positive way, but we can’t change another person. When people try to activate that drama script with their behaviors, it’s best to simply not play into the script. As leaders and business people, we also have something of a responsibility to recognize it when it pops up in our businesses. I coach people and companies every week where these drama triangles are occurring on a weekly basis. It’s obvious, it’s damaging, it’s time consuming, and it’s draining. It’s only when I can get the owner to see how the scripts are activated and everyone plays out their roles with precision that they start to wake up to it. Then we start to work on how to slip into more of a coaching role whereby they sometimes have to choose, do I just need to do a little coaching, or do I need to do a little positive challenging. 

So, I’ll ask you again, where do you recognize yourself falling into certain roles on the drama triangle? With whom do you most often play out the script? Who triggers you in your life to play out the victim role, the hero or rescuer role, or to become the judge, jury, and executioner? Who in your business triggers you to fall into one of those roles. The first step to growth is recognition and admitting. The first step in any 12 step recovery program is the recognition of, and admission that you have a problem. The first step in getting out of the infinity loop of drama is to recognize who triggers you, in what way, and which script and role is activated. The next step is to get really good at becoming a coach and choosing an empowered and empowering role, instead of one of the limited and limiting ones on the drama triangle. 

Until next week, my friends, I’m out…