The Drama Triangle

SUMMARY: Drama. We all love it (hello, reality tv!).  I suppose this speaks to our human tendency toward the negative but there is something about having a good dramatic ranting and raving session with your girlfriends about the terrible thing that happened to you or someone else. It’s cathartic! 

But catharsis aside, when spending too much time extrapolating on the negative aspects of our lives, it can quickly devolve into what behavioral psychologists call the drama triangle. The drama triangle is a common character in the legal industry and I see my clients falling under its control all the time.

Today we explore the characteristics of the drama triangle, why they are so tempting in the legal practice, and how to break out of the cycle for good.

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RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:
Snap out of It: http://thelawyerlifecollective.com/snap-out-of-it/
When Your Boss is the Villain: http://thelawyerlifecollective.com/when-your-boss-is-the-villain/
Overapologizers Anonymous: http://thelawyerlifecollective.com/over-apologizers-anonymous/

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Transcript

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Hey everyone and welcome to the Lawyer Life Podcast episode #2. And today we are talking about the Drama Triangle. (Music)

Welcome to the Lawyer Life Podcast. I am your host, Autumn Noble. I am a practicing attorney as well as a life and career coach for attorneys. During my practice, I had the privilege of building and chairing my very own practice group from the ground up. I have taught in business schools, I've taught in law schools and eventually transitioned my practice in house with a Fortune 300 company. In the Lawyer Life Collective, I teach all of my clients how to do the very same thing - how to get clients, how to build the practice, find more balance, and create more success. If you are interested in that, please check out the show notes to sign up for a free consultation to get to know me and learn more about this work. For now, let's go ahead and jump into this week's episode. (Music)

Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Lawyer Life Podcast, a production of The Lawyer Life Collective Life and Career Coaching for Attorneys. I'm your host, Autumn Noble, and you are listening to Episode #2, The Drama Triangle. 

So this may come as a surprise to some of you, or maybe not, but I love a good, juicy, gossipy story. So, not surprisingly, I love terrible reality television. The juicier, the more dramatic, the better. I just love the drama of all of it. I suppose that in some ways this probably speaks to our human tendency toward the negative and that negativity bias. But regardless, there's something about having a good, dramatic ranting and raving session with your girlfriends about the terrible things that happened to you or to someone else. It's really cathartic. To soak yourself in that drama and really get into it with other people. 

But catharsis aside, when we spend too much time extrapolating on the negative aspects of our lives, it can quickly devolve into what behavioral psychologists call the drama triangle. Have you ever been in the middle of that dramatic rant…"All men are pigs…My boss is the devil…." and suddenly someone abruptly interrupts you and says maybe you're the problem, maybe you pick the wrong men, maybe you really are making mistakes at work… right? The blasphemy of it all. Like immediately seeing red. "That's ridiculous. How dare you?" I'm just enjoying my drama, how dare you suggest it has anything to do with me? 

When we are accustomed to dripping in negativity about our bosses or our jobs, it's really jarring and kind of offensive when someone suddenly stops playing along in favor of this new sort of perspective. And although our pursuit of a meaningful career is not the same as all the other dramatic circumstances and events in our lives, our tendency to fall into certain patterns remains constant. No matter the circumstances, our tendency to see ourselves as the victim and others as the villain is commonplace and often pervasive in professional environments. 

You hear these overgeneralization like "my boss hates me…this firm is toxic…." Those statements just drip with drama and this villain-victim dynamic. In those types of narratives, we are playing a role in what Steven Karpman calls the drama triangle. The triangle examines the connection between personal relationships and power in conflicts, and the triangle identifies three main characters that play a role in conflicts: the persecutor, the rescuer and the victim. So let's dig into these parties a little bit and learn a little bit more about them before we apply them to our careers. 

So we start with the victim. The victim in this model feels persecuted, oppressed, helpless, hopeless, powerless, maybe even a little bit ashamed about feeling all of those things. They seem unable to make decisions, to change their circumstances, to solve problems, to take pleasure in life, or to achieve any meaningful insights into their circumstances. So when I say the victim, it doesn't necessarily mean the actual victim, but instead it's someone who is feeling or acting like one. Very powerless, very hopeless. The victim seeks to convince themselves and others that they can't do anything, that nothing can be resolved. All attempts are futile, despite trying really hard to fix their circumstances. 

Next we have the rescuer. The rescuer's line is always "let me help you, let me fix this for you…absolutely let me jump in on this." The rescuer is a classic enabler. They feel guilty if they don't step in to the rescue and they ultimately become angry and kind of move over into the persecutor role when all of their attempts to save the day invariably fail to achieve any meaningful change. Their rescuing actually has negative effects. It keeps that victim dependent on their rescuing, and it doesn't allow the victim permission to fail and experience the consequences of their own choices that got them there in the first place. When the rescuer focuses their energy on someone else, it actually enables them to ignore their own issues. And that's true for all of these characters. And we'll circle back to that. 

Next we have the persecutor, which I call the villain. It just seems more accessible to me. The persecutor insists "it's all your fault. You are the problem. This is not my issue." They're controlling, blaming, critical, oppressive, angry, authoritarian, rigid and superior. But when you blame the villain, in turn, they often get really defensive, and they might switch over to the victim role when they're attacked by the rescuer or the victim. The victim is the primary character, and they're interacting with the persecutor, whom the victim blames for their suffering and their unhappiness and their challenges. But then there's this rescuer who's periodically stepping in to try and alleviate the victim's suffering. 

Now, in the complicated world of practicing law, I often see my clients vacillating between the victim role and the rescuer role. And let me be very clear, nobody likes that news in coaching. I hated it when my coach would say to me that I was acting in the victim role or often the rescuer role. But let's just call a spade a spade and I will explain how we kind of dip into those roles. But that's often the characteristics of the attorneys that I work with. When we're the victim, the partners, clients, bosses,… they're the persecutor. They're the reason that we're overworked, exhausted, burnt out and have no balance whatsoever. They are the sole cause of it, and they're the sole reason why we are unhappy in our particular jobs. 

In contrast, when we are operating from the rescuer role, we often rise up to solve all of the poor planning, crappy demands and ridiculous needs of the persecutors and villains around us. The rescuers are often the ones who will step in to help at the 11th hour, when others on their team have dropped the ball, you can all think about those scenarios where we get an e-mail forwarded to us from some senior attorney and you see the date and the time that they received it was a week ago, 10 days ago, whatever it was. But suddenly now that it's due and the deadline has arrived, they're dumping it on your desk and expecting you to fix it and put your name on it. For them, that is a classic villain rescuer kind of a dynamic. 

As young attorneys, it's not uncommon for us to feel like "I don't have any other choice but to do this for them and to cover up the fact that they have actually dropped the ball and this is not really my issue." So we work late. We disregard our own boundaries and we try to step in and save the day for the rest of the team. In one role we're angry and suffering in our victimhood, and in the other, we're often energized by that action because we imagine that all of this rescuing and savior service will mend that relationship with our persecutors will give us some value in their eyes. 

The reason this situation persists is that each participant has their own, frequently unconscious psychological wishes or needs met without ever having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm that is done in the situation as a whole. The victim often disregards opportunities to stand up for themselves and own their own power, whereas the rescuer rarely connects with their own value and worthiness outside of all the rescuing activity. They're searching for meaning and worthiness there, and that is partly what drives those actions. But as long as we're caught in this triangle we're not ever able to look inwards and address those underlying needs that drives us to show up in those roles. 

I can think about this concept a little bit more easily, and I find it a little bit more accessible to myself when I think about it in the context of a movie. So if you think about any cinematic drama, there's always three characters tap dancing around: the villain, the victim and the savior. But for any drama to continue, the characters have to remain fixed. For that drama to continue to go around and around, everybody's gotta continue to play one of those roles. The villain's always going to be bad, the victim's going to remain the loser, and the savior is never going to stop running around like a crazy person, never actually saving anyone and, ultimately, just destroying themselves in the process. And around and around we go. As children, many of us learned that in every story, there's a villain and there's a victim, and someone is either inherently good or inherently bad. Consider the movies that we all grew up on. We have Cruella Deville. We have Ursula, my personal favorite. Scar, Maleficent, Jafar, Gustan, et cetera. All of those characters were the bad guys, constantly tormenting the lives of the good guys, foiling all of their attempts at happiness or the simple enjoyment of an uncontaminated apple. Those stories don't allow for the complexity of humanity that the rest of us come to understand as adults, and that is, people are murky. They're a mix of light and dark, yin and yang, good and bad. 

Rarely are we ever able to agree that one human is absolutely good or absolutely evil. I know that sounds like a crazy statement, but think about some of the biggest villains in our history. There are always family members or spouses of those people that speak to their more redeeming qualities and love them despite the horrible things that they may have done. We're all humans. We are not story about characters and it's murky. We are never 100% the villain or the victim or the rescuer. We kind of move in and out of those characteristics depending upon the situation around us. Despite this awareness, many of us make habits out of classifying others strictly as villains. Either consciously or unconsciously, we see others as out to get us or to torment us. They're committed to making our lives miserable, and we use phrases like. "They're ruining my life. They're destroying my career. They're freezing me out. They've completely written me off. This workplace is toxic." Whatever. We invest in those statements and we close the book as if that is simply the end of the chapter in some Disney movie, as if those humans are fixed, inherently good or bad. 

Whenever we find ourselves dripping in that kind of dramatics and seeing others as the villain and all the heightened emotions that come with that characterization, we really have to ask ourselves:  if they're the villain, what role am I playing? On the one hand, we blame the persecutors for our experiences, but then we shift to rescuers, aiming to please our persecutors and seeking some kernel of appreciation from those villains. The dynamic is incredibly toxic and codependent, and many of the women that I work with feel really compelled to seek out that positive feedback from those around them that they view as their persecutors. They spend their entire career trying to please these seemingly impossible to please humans. They're perpetually rescuing others in hopes that one day their value will be recognized and realized. And it never works out. The drama triangle just continues to go around and around and around. 

What we fail to recognize in those instances is the complexity that we know resides within all of us. When we position others as the villain, it disregards any other possibility than how we're currently seeing things. Most importantly, if they're the villains, then somebody has to be the victim. And typically it's us the one pointing the finger. We're at their mercy, at the whim of their cruelty, and there's nothing that we can do about it. Not only does this mentality ignore the true complexity of human relationships, it provides us an excuse to stop trying. It offers justification to leave the relationship where it is, to not take any action because after all, you're really busy being the victim to the circumstances beyond your control. There's simply nothing you can do and there's no way to fix it. 

I know I'm sort of over dramatizing this, which is, you know, kind of the topic for the day, but truly we all kind of buy into those thoughts. In one way or another. And it's like "I've tried everything. It's just never gonna get better." And then we all know how that plays out. We leave jobs. We keep moving along, not recognizing that part of the problem is that we are investing in this cycle, in this triangle. So in keeping with this theme of movies, when we allow ourselves to camp out in this world where there is no solution, "I just don't know what to do and it's never going to get better." We ignore the best parts of those children's movies that we love so much. We loved those movies as kids because they teach us about transformation. They invariably revolve around a character who refuses to be a victim, who refuses to roll over and accept their reality. We love those movies because we all want that big transformation. We all want to see the main character stretch outside of their comfort zone, use their voice, and give their villain the middle finger. We love seeing people rise above adversity and step outside of the victim model. 

No one wants to read a story where the victim gives up, packs up their toys, and goes home to find a new team to play with. No one wants to see a story where the victim gives up, packs up their toys, and goes home. We all want to see the victim become empowered and seize life by the sensitive bits!

So why am I going down this rabbit hole? Because in every day we have opportunities that allow for this transformative story for ourselves. So many of us camp out in that victim mentality without even realizing that that's what we're doing. And truthfully, none of us would choose to characterize ourselves as the victim. But we do it unconsciously, and we tell ourselves "there are no solutions. I've tried everything. Nothing's ever gonna get better. This is just what it's like to practice law." 

We immerse ourselves in these disempowering thoughts sprinkled with a boatload of self justification and victim mentality. "I've tried everything. It just won't work. I know they won't be responsive. They're gonna turn me down. Coaching is dumb. It won't make anything any better, right? It's just the way that it is." These thoughts are all fraught with victimhood. And here's the thing, people. I have yet to find a single human on the face of the planet who has tried everything! But yet we develop justifications for our inaction. "I have tried everything and nothing has fixed it," right? We tell ourselves there's nothing more to be done and we stay put, often unhappy and miserable, because after all, we've concluded there is no solution. So we might as well just stay here, because that's fun too. 

Nobody wants to read that story. So why do we do this to ourselves? The reason we do this is because it's a heck of a lot easier to be a victim than it is to do the hard work that comes with that transformation. Being a victim is really easy. Growing and stepping out of that dynamic is really hard. 

So what's the solution? The solution to the drama triangle is the empowerment dynamic developed by David Emerald Womeldorff . The empowerment dynamic asked the victim to start taking ownership of their lives to creatively solution their problems and start focusing on what they want and what they can control. Similarly, the rescuer shifts to a coaching role where the codependency is broken and they offer detached support, no longer making the victim's problems their own. These shifts are the only solution to the drama triangle. You can leave the job. You can leave the practice of law saying "that's just the way that it is, That's the way practicing law is." You can do that. But your tendency to fall into one of those roles, it's gonna follow you. Resolution of the drama triangle requires us to take ownership of what is ours and let others take ownership of what is their own. 

I work with women every day to recognize the roles that they play in the power dynamics of their careers. My work supports women to take back their power and take control over their careers. We may not be able to fix all of the difficult personalities attendant to practicing law, but we can stop blaming them for our unhappiness. We can take control and we can start taking active steps to create the life that we want and the life that we deserve. When we realize that this is the root of the issue, we can train ourselves and our brain to develop a new pattern for relationships. So that when and if you leave that job, that practice, working with them all together, you will have a different skill set available to you, and you will be able to avoid the tendency to fall back into the drama triangle and assuming one of those roles all over again. The way we do one thing is how we often do all things. And so when we leave an environment, because we're driven by that drama triangle, we're gonna create it somewhere else. 

There's always going to be scenarios in our lives that afford us the opportunity to write our own transformative stories. Similarly, life will give us challenging hands and ample opportunities to see ourselves as the victim and fall right back into the drama triangle. And of course there's gonna be times when you give in to that tendency and you give in to those habits, and that's OK. But the thing is, we cannot become skilled at giving up and letting the drama triangle push us away from things that we really want. We can't become skilled at falling into that victim role, falling into that rescuer role. Instead, we have to use all of those opportunities available to us to become skilled at transformation. We have to start practicing, doing that hard thing, trying just one more way to breakthrough to your boss, to ask for that raise, one more time to voice your feelings, to honor those boundaries, to try and develop that relationship with your coworkers one last time. 

Too often I see women who have dug in their heels and they refuse to see how they've given up to victimhood. They're convinced that those around them are the bad guys and there's just no way to fix it. And while that's certainly one way to live your life, wouldn't it be so much more fun to write your own hero story, your own transformative story? And look, I totally get it, it's really painful to recognize and own when you're being the victim to some perceived villain. But sometimes that is just the kick in the ass that we need to start writing a different story to have that painful realization that, like, "wow, I'm really acting like a victim here. I don't wanna be that way. How can I move outside of that and do something different and develop a different skill so that when and if I leave, it's not because I feel like a victim, it's because I truthfully have tried a lot of different things to make this work for me, and maybe those were all unfruitful."

So to put a bow on this and conclude all of this rambling. Whenever you catch yourself in that space where you're pointing your finger at someone and looking at them as if they were the villain and the cause of all of your problems, or any problem really, you have to own that you become the victim in that dynamic. If there's a villain, there's gotta be a victim. And ask yourself, is that you? Are you allowing yourself to play that part? And is that how you want your story to go? If your life and your villain were victims in one of those great children's movies, how would you want it to end? 

Ultimately, the goal is not to try and find a perfect workplace where there are no drama triangles, there is no drama in general. The goal is to do our best to make it work, to actively invest in our own happiness and stop giving them all of the power. And that's one of the biggest issues that we have in that drama triangle is that most of the characters don't really have a lot of power other than that villain. And the roles that we typically fall into are the powerless ones. And so recognizing our role in the triangle allows us to take back that power and start taking ownership for what we actually do want. 

So if you catch yourself in the drama triangle today, ask yourself what role am I assuming and why? What could you do instead to empower or coach others or even yourself through this and out of this? Ask yourself, why are you doing the things that you're doing? Is it because you're being driven by one of those roles? Am I saying yes to that last minute project because I'm used to falling in to that rescuer role? Because I'm motivated by that search for approval, that confirmation that I'm doing a good job? Am I spinning in frustration and anger right now and sending a snarky e-mail because I've fallen into the victim role? Sometimes one of the easiest way to identify the drama triangle in our lives is to simply question our motivations for acting in any circumstance. And when we start asking those questions, why am I doing this? What's my motivation? What's my rationale? We can often kind of see where we are acting as a victim, or where we're acting as a rescuer. 

Alright my friends, that is all for today. Thank you so much for listening and thanks for telling your friends. (Music)

Thanks everyone for checking into this week's episode of the Lawyer Life Podcast. Next week, we explore the ever pervasive topic Why We Aren't Happier at Work. Looking forward to seeing you then. (Music)

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