Lately, I have been learning a lot about drama and what to do when it is unavoidably forced upon you. One of the more recent resources that I have stumbled across is Ray Kane’s Drama Proofing Your Life series that has been airing monthly on Moody Radio’s Midday Connection program. To give you a taste of how helpful this series is when it comes to understanding and dealing with difficult people, I copied the notes that I took while listening to Part 5 of Drama Proofing Your Life (which aired on February 19th) and pasted them into the space below.
In a drama, there’s a victim, a persecutor and a rescuer. The victim says: “I’m blameless, I’m helpless.” The persecutor says: “I’m right. I’m powerful.” The rescuer or caretaker says: “I can help. I’m special.”
The five factors that make up a drama pattern are:
- Intensity
- Defensiveness
- Unresolved Fear
- Anger
- Sadness
Drama’s occur when an individual chooses:
- not to deal with his intensity (i.e., pain of the past)
- to be defensive
- not to deal with their fear anger and sadness
- failure
- rejection
- abandonment
- death (someone else is going to die, or I’m going to die an emotional death)
- How do I deal with my intensity and pain?
- How do I deal with my defensiveness that is my ego?
- How do I deal with my fear?
- Whenever there is emotionally intensity, it signifies that historical feelings and/or experiences are being triggered by current events.
- Intensity communicates to others that our needs, concerns, or disappointments are not being validated.
- When we are discounted, our natural reaction is to fight for our rights rather than enter into reasonable and rational conversations that balance our ability to think about our feelings as well as feel about our thinking.
- Un-resolved trauma (i.e., we weren’t loved well) expressed through our pain in feeling shame, insecurity, guilt, or believing that everything is wrong with me.
- Fear (i.e., failure to meet expectations, rejection of thoughts and feelings, abandonment by someone leaving physically or emotionally, fear unto death where someone else is going to die or I’m going to die or I feel emotional despair) marked by thinking catastrophically, becoming anxious, or becoming controlling and angry.
- Self-Absorbtion is marked by being egocentric or prideful, believing nothing is wrong with me, being selfish and self-centered which ultimately causes one to walk by others who are in pain. The more self-absorbed a person is, the more ego-centric they are, the more unresolved pain they have, the more trauma they have in their life that they haven’t addressed, and the more afraid they are (but they’re not willing to deal with it).
- Are you committed to growth and change?
- Do you really want to be healthy?
- wisdom and discernment
- humility
- a heart of love and respect (Love is a feeling, Respect is how you show it.)
- something happens
- skills are applied
- solutions are sought
- the outcome is evaluated
- the next action step is taken.
- something happens
- the skills needed to solve the problem are missing
- there is no search for solutions
- feelings of anxiousness and insecurity lead to emotional flooding
- aggressive tactics like the ones below are applied in an attempt to restore emotional equilibrium and get someone else to deal with the problem
- defensiveness
- using shaming, blaming, critical and judgmental language
- justifying a position
- playing the victim
- the drama becomes the new issue to be handled and the original problem takes a backseat to the drama that’s been created
We all haven’t been loved well. Because our parents weren’t loved well, we weren’t loved well, and we don’t love well. That’s a given. In our life, the unresolved pain where love didn’t exist (and where love needed to be) becomes an anchor that keeps us from being able to get up to full speed.
Either we’re moving towards Christ or away from Christ. The significant process of the Christian life is learning how to deal with pain because if we don’t transform our pain, we transmit it. And so we have to be willing to engage in a process of growth and change in order to want to be a healthy person, centered in Christ. When I become that person, I then can change my environment.
Skills vs Capacity:
- Capacity is how much energy I have in my tank to be able to use problem-solving skills to resolve an issue. Capacity will either come from my ego or from my faith. If there is a true heart’s desire to want to connect with Christ in an intimate way, Christ can help to heal the traumas of the past and, as Christ is present in the midst of those traumas, Jesus connects and attaches with the person who is hurting to increase their capacity. That is what it means to be connected with Christ in an intimate way and to experience the fullness of healing when we experience pain.
- Healthy faith is able to take truth, communicate it with wisdom, discernment, and a heart of love and respect because I’m not preoccupied with trying to look good. Jesus’ power came with his humility, purity and ability to speak the truth.
- having a more intimate relationship emotionally
- learning how to communicate our needs, feelings and pain
- to learn how to listen, hear and understand
- What is it that I can learn about myself?
- What insecurities is it raising inside of me that I need to bring to Christ?
- What skills might I need to acquire to be able to set appropriate boundaries?
- How might I need to learn how to communicate my needs, feelings and pain in more efficient ways?
- How might this experience enable me to develop a much deeper intimacy with Christ?
When I am willing to deal with my trauma, to deal with my fear, to not be driven by my ego but learn to become more humble, then I can be reflective and take ownership of my thoughts and feelings by expressing a desire to humbly confess my wrongdoings and turn from my bad habits to pave the way for negative patterns to be buried dead.If we’re triggered, it’s about our pain. There’s a point at which God hardens someone’s heart, but as long as we’re working on our pain, then we become a safer person to tell someone else that we would like them to work on theirs.
To listen to or download this or other episodes that Ray Kane has presented on Moody Radio’s Midday Connection program, click on one or more of the links below:
Drama-Proofing Your Life Part 1
Drama-Proofing Your Life Part 2
Drama-Proofing Your Life Part 3
Drama-Proofing Your Life Part 4
So thankful to find this-was looking for a specific help to understand the ‘drama triangle’ from a Christian perspective and this is so much more. Especially great to listen to Moody as I grew up in Chicago!