Let's look deeper into the full conflict model, which for substance abusers often results in relapse rather than growth. Being able to recognize our patterns, even our childhood roles and family systems give us clarity to get beyond the black and white thinking and self denigration. What we fail to recognize will be repeated in Ground Hog Day style.
Victims are helpless and hopeless. They deny responsibility for their negative circumstances, and deny possession of the power to change them. While, as children, we were unable to be fully responsible, instead adjusting to the expressed and repressed mirrors of our parents and caretakers, we are now capable of seeing ourselves in alternate light including patterns that limit our lives.
Rescuers are constantly applying short-term repairs to a victim’s problems, while neglecting their own needs. Each of us has seen these patterns and understood from the external context beyond the thinking patterns of the rescuer how destructive such "help" can be.
Persecutors blame the victims and criticize the enabling behavior of rescuers, without providing guidance, assistance or a solution to the underlying problem. Often, recovering individuals remember feeling the emotion of shame and blame from family members more often than love. Identification with persecuors is common for small children. Early persecution glued well with emotions becomes a meme voice that lives on to derail adult mental health.
As conflict ensues, people may change roles. Perhaps the rescuer switches to persecutor when the victim won’t be “helped.” The current model, adds a couple of roles to the recipe.
These include the switcher, who is a serial role changer, but enthusiastic participant in the triangle for the sheer thrill of the conflict.
Enablers don’t engage in a particular role, but will throw fuel on the fire either for their own entertainment or as expression of outrage at unfairness in the world. Often the fuel of enablers is strong authentic emotion, which is absent from the blame of the persecutor, or the numbness of the victim.
People adopt these roles in order to feel some sort of psychological justification, which at it’s root is an attempt to release oneself from full personal responsibility for the way things are. On a basic level, ego defenses are healthy coping strategies that only become maladaptive if they enhance or protect unhealthy behaviors.
The persecutor has someone else to blame and does so. The emotional defense of superiority later serves as a disfunctional social factor interrupting intimacy. Blame without solutions are also abusive, depending on the situation and in extreme subset point to functional narcissism.
The victim claims nothing can be done due to the time and attention required to deal with persecution or unfair conditions.
While the unfair conditions do, in fact, exist, adaptation is precluded by doing something else (substance abuse, obsessive "7 deadly sin acting out" including raging, persecuting, enabling another, or doing nothing, even while in 12 Step Meetings) rather than processing the full event, in context, identifying past patterns, with attention on understanding, learning, personal awareness, and reevaluating choices.
The rescuer can neglect doing the things that really matter because they have to spend their energy saving someone else. For instance, the best personal choices for a balanced life might be continued personal family of origin counseling, educational advancement, physical exercise, rather than an altruistic load of 13 sponsees?
Nothing good comes from acting out the triangle.
So what do you do when someone else’s drama starts edging your direction?
It's tempting to jump right into one of those roles only to resent them (victim) for starting the whole thing. Perhaps this irrational impulse to do something arises from a similar experience in your history, for which you have yet to fully confront?
Often, the reaction, even in recovery, is being angry (persecutor) for involving them. The persecutor devolves into anger quickly rather than just reality share. This is especially true where they have failed to make an amends, are out-ethics with you in present or past, such as gossiping about you, calling you a "crisis cat", or in a family context, continue to withhold their honest emotional involvement, which could be expressed directly with "I feel statements".
Or you jump in and try to fix the whole thing (rescuer) even though no one is really asking for your help. Newly recovering individuals trying to maintain employment often find that not everything is help in a professional environment.
All options continue the cycle.
Fortunately, there’s another kind of triangle you can adopt as your favorite geometric shape model to live by, and it’s called the developmental triangle.
This triangle is way cooler because it’s productive instead of destructive, and who doesn’t want to be cooler?
Here are the descriptions of the roles in the developmental triangle:
Mentor - This role is based on personal potency and confidence in the capacity of people to leverage their context. The best friends mentor us, but also share their own history in deeply personal emotional ways careful not to maintain a hierarchal ego position, but drawing out greater truths, applying developmental tool to process situations and re-edit our memories.
Facilitator - This role is based on providing permission and opportunity to improve skills and competencies. The facilitator provides resources.
Companion – This role is based on comfort with sharing power, achievement and emotions. The companion provides intimacy and joy. Companions also understand and have developed skills to side step powerful memes. Memes are mental programs, including emotions and thinking patterns that can be imprinted from one person to another. Often a part of this contagion, includes misidentification that the concept and emotions are actually "them". Destructive memes are transmitted when one person shares or communicates while in relapse mode, and their power and pictures are so strong that they actually key in other similar memes. A powerful common cultural recovery program is the "Jones" meme. The danger to the newly recovering individual who has yet to identify a strong inner "I" core is the reason 12 Step meetings disallow lamenting and aggrandizing, drunkalog, and war stories.
Witness – This role is not directly involved in the situation but supports and validates the process. The witness gets emotional energy from seeing the positive roles enacted and sometimes provides evidence that helps clarify options. A good skill called active listening can be developed for this process. We actually experience the emotions and thoughts via shared reality of those who listen around us. A witness is required in many different situations within our society wherein we need objective truth.
Energizer – Some people evolve a preference for moving around the triangle and adopting different roles for the pleasure and variety of the roles themselves. The particular stance becomes less important than the energy resulting from the switch.
Ask yourself in your relationships with others, if your actions are those of a mentor, facilitator, companion, or witness. Workshops, library books, and classes are available to develop skills for constructive, creative human relationships.
Does providing money for someone to obtain drugs or alcohol fit into any of the positive roles?
Does providing your emotional truth and time just being together in a safe staged visit, with a drug or alcohol dependent family member equal enabling?
Can you, in good conscience, allow a drug/alcohol abusing friend to live at your house rather than get treatment for the issues that keep them loaded and dependent?
Can you believe a prospective husband who says he "drinks socially" while knowing full well that drinking more than 4 drinks within an hour is alcoholic binge drinking. Can you deny to yourself in victim style when he also displays personality traits classic in an alcoholic, and accept that engagement ring? Since these types of destructive "victim role" denial are so common in early recovery, reality sharing with a peer, sponsor or safely in a woman's meeting, while listening for silent feedback and taking good suggestions after a complete discussion of the full situation for the purpose of developing a solution is especially important. Remember, you can ask for what you want from others.
Don't forget that your roles extend not only to other people, but also apply to yourself?
Does continuing to live with a cyclic abusive/loving partner where your past patterns required drinking and using, provide any positive role for either yourself or your ill partner?
Does refusing all financial assistance and emotional involvement to children who binge drink equate to good recovery and positive mentoring, facilitating, witnessing or energizing?
Refusing to speak with teen children also is a means of withholding. While not speaking with lost children also serves as a way to control keying in guilt for past actions for parents who were, themselves, running amok, and while these avoidance choices are commonly rationalized as "positive recovery" and a "refusal to enable", such refusal completely denies any development. On the contrary, individuals might not be able to work with family members without professional direction or counseling. Matrix model publications are available for long distance family education, that can be worked and traded, then discussed. Contact us for more information.
How could your family roles and choices be rewritten in a development model?
Developed from Alicia Parr