Years may go by; decades of frustration, confusion, desperation and loneliness. We may be tempted to give up on relationship altogether, and instead stay busily distracted, but alone, for the rest of our days. Or we may compromise our authenticity and “play dead” just to have a warm body in bed with us at night.
Our culture provides us with plenty of exciting distractions and numbness-inducing substances so that we can avoid consciously encountering the core discrepancies between what we are actually doing with our lives and what we really want to be doing. By staying numb or distracted we continue creating Ordinary human relationship without a clue that something else is possible. Since infatuation could well be the best kind of intimacy we know, we may design our moves so as to snatch as many moments of infatuation as possible. But, over time, we cannot continue to stay naïve. Moments of ecstasy become jaded. Infatuation seems to fade away ever more quickly. We feel like we are driving along this relationship highway with a flat tire. Nobody has ever told us that there is a spare tire and a jack packed into the bottom of our trunk.
This book can provide you with the tools and possibilities for using previously unknown resources.
SECTION 2-B
Ordinary Human Communication
To clarify how ordinary human communication works I will use Dr. Eric Berne’s Map of Parent Adult Child Ego States, one of the central thought-maps from his system of Transactional Analysis. Berne’s map is simple and effective. Later in this book you will see this map evolve to provide even greater clarity. Right now we will use the map in its original form. To understand the map we must first understand what is meant by the term “ego state.” (In a later chapter we will replace the term “ego state” with the term “Box.”)
An ego state is a set of ideas, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors with which we are identified. Using the term “state” implies that our identification is only temporary, that we change from one ego state to another ego state. And that is exactly the point. When we are identified with a certain set of ideas, beliefs, attitudes or behaviors, we are certain that these are the only ideas possible. We regard this set of attitudes as who we are, and we assume that it encompasses all that is. We think that no option exists other than the worldview we are currently seeing and using.
Human psychology’s imperative to have and to know its own identity is astonishing. By packaging itself into one identity, the mind blinds itself to the existence of any other possible identity, even if a moment before it was packaged into a completely different identity. Then, when the circumstances change, the mind shifts identities again. The mind has dozens of prepackaged identities in store and chooses whichever identity best assures survival for us in a particular circumstance.
We are identified with the “identification mechanism” in our mind, meaning that we do not notice when our mind shifts from one identity to the next. For us it is a seamless segue, as unnoticed as blinking. We notice the identity shifting in other people, but not in ourselves. For example, remember a time when you were with a friend and their telephone rang. Your friend stops talking with you and speaks to the caller, who might be their mother, child, boss, or the police. Right before your eyes your friend’s identity instantly shifts to a strange character, with a voice, speech patterns, vocabulary, posture and attitude that you have never seen in them before. As soon as the call ends they shift smoothly back into the character who talks to you, never realizing that they shifted at all. The drastic identity shift in your friend might cause a shock in you, but more likely you will play along as if you saw nothing unusual. Ignoring the identity shift in each other is an agreement we make amongst ourselves to keep the show rolling. Nonetheless, we shift identity many times each day, most of the time without being conscious about it.
Knowing that the human mind has a bias toward identification and an uncanny deftness with shifting identity is such a radical piece of knowledge that even though this idea is presented to you in a precise and useable form in these paragraphs, you will probably forget it in the next few moments. Then, when the next person leaves the room and forgets to shut the door behind them, the identity in your mind who must have the door closed to feel secure will get offended and regard its own reality limits of greater importance than maintaining a respectful relationship with the other person. This is how we begin to get a feel for the insidious difficulties involved in ordinary human communications.
Dr. Eric Berne’s map indicates that there are three generalized ego states with which a person would normally be identified. These are the “Parent ego state,” the “Adult ego state,” or the “Child ego state.” We are typically identified with one ego state or another during most of our waking and sleeping hours. In this chapter we will investigate the Parent and Child ego states. In a later chapter we will investigate the Adult ego state.
The Parent ego state includes both the “nurturing Parent,” with a voice that praises and approves, and the “critical Parent,” with a voice that blames and disapproves. These two voices speak into our mind or out of our mouth in many of our daily conversations. Nurturing Parent voices might say things like, “You are wonderful! You are the best! You are so beautiful! You are so smart! You are so good! You are perfect!” Critical Parent voices might say, “You are not good enough. You are a failure. You are stupid. You will never make it. You are a loser. You are a slob. You are ugly. You are a reject.” And so on into creative infinity.
MAP OF PARENT ADULT CHILD EGO STATES
ORDINARY HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS
PARENT TO PARENT, PARENT TO CHILD, CHILD TO PARENT, CHILD TO CHILD
Parent Ego State
The first thing to keep in mind as we investigate the Parent ego state is that, despite how things may feel, there is really no difference between praise and blame. Both are forms of conditioning, and both praise and blame are manipulations. If you say, “That is great,” you are trying to condition somebody to keep doing what they have been doing. If you say, “That is horrible,” you are trying to condition somebody to stop doing what they have been doing. In contrast to these Parental messages, the Adult ego state does not use praise or blame. Instead, the Adult says, “I like that. Please keep doing that,” or “That hurts. Please stop doing that.”
The other thing to know about the Parent ego state is that the voices that you may hear going on in your head are not your voices. The voices came from other people, perhaps from past authority figures such as your parents, grandparents, older siblings or teachers. In order to survive, you made their voices normal, no matter what they were telling you. When you left the source of these voices you maintained a sense of normalcy by keeping the voices going inside your own head. If you listen to those voices now, or grant them credibility, you are giving your power away to others. In contrast, in the Adult ego state you speak with your own voice – which may be completely neutral and silent in circumstances where the nurturing or critical Parent voices would be screaming their heads off. In using your own voice you have your own power.
Child Ego State
The Child ego state includes both the “free natural Child” and the “scared needy adaptive Child.” These names describe their behaviors exactly. The scared-needy-adaptive-Child ego state is one in which the worst thing that could ever happen to you has already happened, and you are feeling scared that it will happen again. Here is where un-graspable fear comes from. As children, we often had needs that were not met. Unmet childhood needs leave a hollow cold empty place in our guts. We try to fill that place when we stare into the open refrigerator. We want our partner to fill that profound emptiness with endless “I love you’s.” We try to fill that place with sex or drugs or rock-n-roll, and still it is not filled.
We might do anything to get that gaping pit of needs filled: give our self-respect away, be adaptive, get enmeshed, be co-dependent – we would wait around as an invisible door-mat forever if there was a hope of filling that bottomless hole. We internally experience ourselves as forever lacking some
unattainable thing that is crucial to our well-being. This unfulfilled sensation establishes our ordinary human relationship to the world as a weak and suffering victim just trying to survive.
Ego State Conversations
Ordinary human relationship is founded in Ordinary human communication – when the Parent or Child ego state in us speaks or gets spoken to by the Parent or Child ego state of another. The all-too-familiar dialogs go like this:
Parent to Parent: “Well, I don’t like this. Too many freedoms for the children these days, don’t you think? And your Johnny certainly is going to pay for his little attitude problem when it comes time for him to get a job! Everybody knows what happens around your dining table at night!”
Parent to Child: “Pick up your dirty clothes! Why do you always lose your eyeglasses? You are so forgetful. I always have to do it for you. Can’t you figure out a way to be more organized? Don’t sit there! Sit here! This will certainly be best for you.”
Child to Parent: “I don’t know how to do this. It is all so confusing. What should I do next? Is this right? You’re always pestering me! Why can’t they make things simpler? This is impossible for me. I am too tired. It’s overwhelming for me. I can’t do it.”
Child to Child: “If you do that to me then I will do this to you! Asshole! Hey, I got you! That’s mine! Not yours! That’s my place. Your place is over here. He’s on my team! I want to sit next to him! My dress is prettier than your dress! Get out of my way! I’m angry! You’re ugly! I’m smarter than you are! I won! You lost! Haa-ha-haa-ha-haaaaa-ha!”
SECTION 2-C
Low Drama
Imagine being an ant that lives in a child’s plastic ant farm. You might live out your entire life with every intention to live fully, but the result is that you fail to have many truly interesting options and you have no idea why not. The barrier that stands between you and the world is invisible to you because you are an ant and therefore do not have the capacity to understand the concept “acrylic plastic” or “ant farm.” Lucky for us, you are not actually an ant! You do have the capacity to imagine an “ant farm.” The concept of “ant farm” can be equated to an invisible barrier that captures the minds and hearts of most twenty-first-century human beings for their entire lives. That invisible barrier is “low drama.” Low drama is any interaction designed to avoid responsibility. If we do not learn to detect and avoid low drama interactions, then we will live within an invisible “ant farm” that minimizes the quality of our relationships and we will have no idea why.
Dr. Stephen Karpman, a student of Dr. Eric Berne and Transactional Analysis, invented the model for low drama in San Francisco in 1965 and described it in an article in 1968. As the story goes, Dr. Karpman loved to diagram the action plays made during American football games. One Sunday afternoon he was watching a game on TV and his wife invited him to keep his promise of taking her to the movies. At the cinema Dr. Karpman still had his pencil and pad in hand. As the film began playing Dr. Karpman automatically started noting the interactions. In the first dramatic scene there was a bad guy persecuting a poor victim, and then along came a good guy for the rescue. Next scene there was a helpless victim being rescued and along comes a bad guy. Next scene there was a hero attacked by a villain and then rescued by his kids. On page after page Dr. Karpman diagrammed dramatic interactions and, to his great surprise, in each drama the roles being played out were identical. After thirty pages of diagrams, Dr. Karpman had created his remarkable map that he named the “Drama Triangle.”
Dr. Karpman’s Drama Triangle reveals that many of our day-to-day human interactions are simply unconscious role-playing in one of three strategic characters: the victim, the persecutor or the rescuer. In this book I have renamed the Drama Triangle as “low drama” so as to incorporate it into a bigger map called the Map of Possibility which we will explore in depth much later.
Once you have integrated a thorough understanding of low drama you then have a chance of creating “high drama,” which will be covered later when we look at The Map of Possibility in Section 13-F. First we start with low drama.
MAP OF LOW DRAMA
Any action designed to avoid responsibility is low drama.
The most powerful player in a low drama is the victim. If there is no victim, there can be no low drama. A good victim can make a persecutor out of anyone! We believe low drama is real when we unconsciously change positions on the triangle. We can detect if we are playing low drama if we are blaming, resenting, justifying, being right, complaining, or making someone wrong. We go round and round in low dramas during our days and nights. The only thing that happens in low drama is we get older. (Note: This map is adapted directly from the original “Drama Triangle” created by Dr. Stephen Karpman in 1965, used in Transactional Analysis [TA] as taught by Dr. Eric Berne. I renamed it “low drama” to reveal its relationship to “high drama” on a bigger map called The Map of Possibility.)
Of the three roles, the victim is the most powerful. This is because a skilled victim can make a persecutor out of anyone. All the victim needs is one tiny shred of evidence to prove that “the persecutor is hurting me,” and then the victim has the right to switch roles with the persecutor and go for revenge! Another way that the victim is the most powerful character in a low drama is that, if there is no victim, there can be no low drama.
When we first hear about victims and low drama we might be thinking, “oh, those poor people who get caught in low dramas! I would not want to be one of them!” Hey, baby! Wake up and smell the donuts. Them is us. Low drama is the most popular game played on Earth! You do it. I do it. We all do it. The only question is about details: When? Where? With whom? How often? And why?
Low drama is a survival game based on the perspective that there are not enough resources. Resources include such commodities as position, power, work time, space, energy, money, attention, love, fun, dessert, intimacy, and leisure. If there are not enough resources and the other person gets to have them, then we don’t. They win and we lose. Low drama is played to win.
Low drama is very exciting: there are good guys, bad guys, even a poor damsel in distress. The good guy rides up on his white horse and says, “I’ll pay the rent! I’ll save the day!” (At least we are hoping some good guy comes to save us.) If a good guy comes and does a bad job of rescuing us, we spin the low drama around, shift from victim to persecutor, and we persecute the rescuer. If no good guy comes at all then we have to rescue ourselves. We prove that the persecutor is hurting us in some way, and then we are perfectly justified in persecuting the persecutor! Revenge at last. All this is very exciting. If we run out of low dramas in our own life then we can turn on the television, open a newspaper or go to a movie. Low drama is so exciting it is almost like life. But low drama is not life. Low drama is only low drama. If we assume low drama is life we lock ourselves into the ant farm and throw away the key.
In trying to understand low drama as being a subset of life it is the rescuer who is most difficult to vilify. After all, the rescuer is trying to rescue somebody who needs their help, right? How could rescuing be bad?
First, nothing about low drama is bad. Nothing is good either, but also nothing is bad. Low drama is action designed to avoid responsibility, and these actions create certain results. It is easy to detect low drama by detecting the associated low drama behaviors: If there is blaming, resentment, justification, complaining, gossiping, being right, or making wrong, it is low drama. What low drama is, is ordinary. Very ordinary. Once we have clarity about what low drama is and how to detect low drama, then we have a choice. We can decide whether or not we want to continue creating low drama in our relationships.
Second, rescuing comes from the same emotionally charged position as persecuting. With arrogance and disrespect the persecutor says, “I’m okay. You are not okay. I must get rid of you.” (Think of Adolf Hitler and the story of the “superior” Aryan race.) The rescuer says, “I’m okay. You are not okay. You are not good enough to do it y
ourself so I must do it for you.” (Think of a mother who takes over her child’s activity even if the child did not ask for help. This too is superior and disrespectful.) Notice how both the persecutor and the rescuer maintain the same viewpoint, that the victim is not okay. Rescuing is defined as offering help that is not wanted or asked for. Rescuing is just as much low drama as persecuting.
One particularly clever swindle is victims who act as if they are being responsible. They take out the garbage, vacuum the floor, take the kids to school, wash the dishes, go to work, all like a responsible person might. But they do it all as a victim, not really wanting to do it, not truly choosing to do it, and not fully committing to do it. They do it because no one else wants to do it, or because it should be done, or because it is the right or proper thing to do. They do it as a burden. They do it out of guilt or obligation rather than out of responsibility. Such a person is not being responsible. They are being a “responsible victim.” The responsible victim is a low drama theatrical role with a very big payoff. After all, your complaints get to be truly righteous. Your woes are justified. When I first realized that I had been playing the responsible victim game for most of my adult life I sat through an entire Thai dinner crying into my pineapple shrimp curry while the rest of the people in the training went on happily eating. It was a dinner to remember.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 6