Reclaiming my space

As the attentive reader will notice, I’ve recently removed a few of my posts. I’m not happy about it – this is my space and my creative voice. But it’s something I felt was the right thing to do in the cause of damage limitation. And I know there’ll be more life, more creativity, more to report – so perhaps there’s little lost. However, what I won’t do is to lose my freedom of speech, to watch my every word, to sanitise every one of my fictional characters from here on in. No, really, that can’t be done.

Allow me to go all psychological on you for a moment. When drama hits our lives, we readily snap into something aptly called “the Drama Triangle”.

It was first described by a guy called Stephen Karpman and is a concept that sits among the many clever ideas of Transactional Analysis. In the triangle there are three roles that people may habitually occupy: the persecutor, the victim and the rescuer. It’s all fairly intuitively understood when you look at each role’s key message and the emotions associated with it. Persecutor (angrily): “It’s all your fault”; victim (dejected): “poor me” and rescuer: “let me help you”. People will occupy various positions in the triangle whose dynamics frequently switch around – the persecutor becomes the victim, the rescuer becomes the persecutor and so on… Most importantly however, movement, resolution and real personal progress are not possible in any of those positions. Only when we step outside the triangle, do we feel the true deeper mature emotions we may harbour and we can deal with the aspects of the situation that are our responsibility and not those that are not.

So why am I telling you all this? When swinging goes foul, you will almost certainly, like myself, land yourself in the drama triangle. We are talking relationships here, so drama will follow and people will be keen to push you into one of those roles – worse, you may push yourself into one of those roles! The best thing you can do, is to stay in adult mode and step out of that triangle. Try to acknowledge everybody’s responsibility for a situation, including your own, and don’t get lured in by the stereotypes. Whatever feelings you are having, acknowledge them. Even the bad girl in a situation has every right to feel hurt and angry – don’t censor your feelings, but don’t just react to them either. Assigning absolute blame is too easy – it is so very tempting, but that is not how reality works (thanks, menthe!).

Yes, of course, for me, just now, internally, there are storms raging – I’m pinging from persecutor to victim and back again. Friends step in and try to rescue me and inadvertently push me into victimhood. I even persecute myself internally. It’s a mess!!! My chest feels like it’s been repeatedly slashed, but on some level I’m hanging on. I’ve got an image in my mind. You may find it trite or you may not. There’s a filthy grey storm raging, rain lashing, gales howling and I’m out there, right in the middle of it, getting battered.  The only thing that’s keeping me from being blown away is a dirty great big flagpole with a tattered flag. It’s not impressive, but it’s mine. I’m hanging on to it for dear life and I'm here to stay.