210: How to Escape the Drama Triangle - with Stephen Karpman

If you're looking for a way to improve your communication, especially in life's more challenging moments, make sure you download my new and improved, and free, guide to my top three communication secrets. These are three strategies to help you connect, feel understood, and collaborate, and stay relaxed doing it no matter how intense the situation. Let's visit nealsaton.com/relate to request your free guide. Ever feel like there's a little too much drama in your life? Well, if that's the case, then you probably have been caught in the drama triangle. If you've never heard of the drama triangle, then be prepared. You're going to start seeing it everywhere. Today you'll learn how to spot the drama triangle, and even better you'll learn how to escape it. One way to deal with the drama is to learn how to communicate better. If you haven't yet, take a moment to download my free guide to my top three relationship communication secrets. If you put these things into practice, they will help you stay connected no matter how challenging whatever it is that you're trying to communicate about. To download the guide, just visit nealsaton.com/relate or text-relate to the number 3-3-4-4 and follow the instructions. Now I'd like to take just a quick moment to thank you for helping support relationship alive. Sylvia, Angie, Genevieve, Drew, Lydia, Anne, and Valerie. Thank you all for your generous support. As a reminder, this show is my offering to you so that you can have the best relationships possible. If relationship alive is contributing to your life or the lives of people you love, please consider contributing to us. Every little bit counts. To choose something that feels right to you, just visit nealsaton.com/support or text the word support to the number 3-3-4-4-4 and follow the instructions. And last but not least, if you're looking for community of fellow listeners to get support for you and your relationship journey, come join the relationship-alive community on Facebook, where we're creating a safe space to connect and converse. Okay, I think that's it. Let's get on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neal Satin. His life can be really dramatic. There can be highs and lows. You can feel like you're the victim with people just out to get you. You can feel like you're doing your best to show up for the people in your life and they don't appreciate you. In fact, they see you as some kind of enemy. And in the end, all of this drama plays out in ways that keep us from being truly connected with the people around us. And these could just be our acquaintances or our colleagues and co-workers. Or it could be, you know, the people in our lives with whom we're most deeply connected, our children, our partners, ourselves. So I was actually going through a situation about a year and a half ago and really struggling and in reaching out to one of my friends about it, she said, "You know, this sounds like a classic drama triangle." And I had never heard of a drama triangle before. So I was like, "I'm going to have to check that out." I looked it up and there were lots and lots of references online describing what the drama triangle was and sure enough, it felt like that was what was going on in my life. But it didn't necessarily help me figure out how to solve the drama triangle. And that's where today's conversation comes in. We have with us an esteemed guest, Dr. Stephen Carpman, who is the person who created the drama triangle and whose work has evolved past the drama triangle in ways that help us see how to escape from these games that we play with each other in ways that actually build intimacy and closeness with the people in our lives, or if we're not looking for intimacy, at least they keep us from being caught in a repetitive loop. So Dr. Carpman is the author of the recent book, A Game Free Life, The Definitive Book on the Drama Triangle, and Compassion Triangle. And along with many, many other books and papers, and we will talk about that more over the course of today's conversation. If you are looking to download a transcript of today's show, you can visit nealsatin.com/triangle as in the drama triangle. Or as always, you can text the word passion to the number 3-3-444 and follow the instructions. So let's dive in today, Dr. Stephen Carpman. Thank you so much for joining us here today on Relationship Alive. Thank you, Neil, for asking me now to do what I can to help people with their lives. Great. That's the best we can hope for today. And I just want to note that I'm really excited to be talking to you. What people listening don't necessarily know is that you and I have actually been in dialogue for almost this whole past year and a half, maybe even more. So it's exciting that we've finally made it all work. You're very busy in presenting and getting your books together, and I'm glad that we're finally here today to talk. Let's just start. I mean, it's probable that a lot of people listening do know what the drama triangle is, at least on some level. But for those who don't, or for those who haven't really thought about it for a while, let's talk about it and enumerate each of the roles in the drama triangle and then talk about what actually creates the drama. So can we start there? Sure. The drama triangle is something I created many years ago. Primarily originally I was working on a strategy in football and basketball, and I do this three-corner triangle of different roles. And then it turned out to be applicable to theater, like there would be a villain and a hero and a victim. But eventually the way I originally drew it is the way it took off, which is a triangle with a point down, which is the victim in a one-down position. And the two people in the power position in the upper left corner had the persecutive role, which is the person is always blaming, always putting the victim down. And in the other corner on the upper right is the rescuer position. That person is always helping and always trying to save and trying to fix the victim who somehow never seems to get fixed, and it's a very frustrating for the rescuer. So when you're in a challenging situation at a minimum it can help to step back and say, "Okay, which of these roles am I playing and which role is the other person or person's playing in this situation?" Sure. Now there's a difference between a game playing role in real life. For instance, the persecutor might be an aggressor in real life and just being an aggressive person who might be critical at times, but it goes into the triangle when they're linked in with someone in a non-ending game. So the persecutor is always blaming, always criticizing the victim. The victim can never do anything right, but the persecutor always has to be right because they don't want themselves to feel like a victim inside, so they always have to win. Now the rescuer has to come in and save the victim from the persecutor. But more than likely the rescuer is a good-hearted person initially, and it's okay to be a rescuer in life, very good, actually, but it becomes a drama triangle when they're involved in an unending game with the victim who's always helped us, always wrong, never can do anything right and they deplete themselves in their own drain themselves in their own life, diverting their life to saving the victim, and meanwhile neglecting their own life. And the victim is a person who may be from their past, they see themselves as inadequate and insufficient and somehow get into the role of asking for help from people. But eventually, which is okay, but eventually if they get into a game, then they play the role of a victim. They're not actually the victim. They're playing the role of the victim, which is very manipulative and playing all sorts of games to keep the rescuer helping them and to keep the persecutor criticizing them. So, then you have the drama triangle, that's the drama, when people get into dysfunctional roles and dysfunctional relationships, they get into the triangle, sometimes they switch around different roles like the rescuer might suddenly become the persecutor or the victim might get even with the rescuer by becoming persecutor, so then it gets complicated. And you get into a game that can go on for years and people can't solve it or get out of it. So, how do I know if I'm in a game or not? Well, it depends on the role, but primarily it's very frustrating. You're involved with someone else, that's when you're in the triangle, and it's very frustrating because you feel drawn in, particularly the victim will draw a person in, and it's like quicksand, you get drawn deeper and deeper and try harder and harder to fix the person, to get them to think, to get them to realize things, the rescuer might have got to get you to realize things, and the persecutor might say, you're dumb because you don't understand anything. So, the relationship gets stressful, it gets exasperating, or gets the pleading of energy, and primarily nothing ever gets fixed, nothing gets clear, nothing is understood, and it just seems to stay that way on and on. So, if a situation isn't evolving, and it feels dysfunctional, then the odds are you're trapped in some sort of game. And you may not know that you're trapped, you keep wanting to try hard, it's one of the drivers, you try hard to fix things or to be perfect in your answers, or be perfect in your feelings, so maybe the victim will change, and the persecutor will make the criticism even stronger and stronger, thinking that will teach the victim a lesson, and by, with their strength, they will protect themselves from ever being criticized. So, it's primarily, it's a relationship, and other people may notice it first, and you may not notice it yourself for months and years, and you don't want to leave the other person, but you don't know how to make the situation better, or to get it livable. Yeah, and why do you think that it's not enough, is this was my experience when this particular situation, and I can't get into the details just out of respect of other people's privacy, but I saw it happening, and I was like, oh, this is very clearly what is going on. And yet, just recognizing that, you know, that I was playing a rescuer role, this other person was playing the persecutor role, and then, someone else was playing the victim role, just recognizing that wasn't enough to actually change the dynamic. And I'm wondering if you can give us a sense of why that might be so, that it's not enough to just recognize that this is what's happening. Well, primarily, most of the people that write about that triangle talk about empowering, needs to feel empowered that they are successful, and if they don't feel that they are successful, that nothing they're doing is working, at that point, they may step back and say, well, perhaps I need to change something. And it starts by knowing what the roles are in the drama triangle, that there's a persecutor rescue and victim role, and people do get trapped in it and get frustrated. And once they know the roles, then they need to get in touch with their feelings, and why they're in that role, and what's their payoff, like they're involved with people that they can't control. You can't control the persecutor or the rescuer or the victim. You can't control yourself. So at that point, you decide that you will control yourself and decide what to do about the game. Of course, you'll try to discuss it first, or you may get into counseling about it, but at some point, you need to decide that the triangle isn't working for you, and you move on if you can't make it work better for you, or if you can't tolerate it. Yeah. And I think one thing that might be challenging is probably most people arrive at thinking about the drama triangle by feeling like they're a victim to someone who's persecuting them, and that would be my guess, because that's the place where you feel like you're being stuck in a situation of powerlessness. And so it seems like it might be challenging to go to someone that you're perceiving as your persecutor and say, "Hey, I was doing some reading online, and I think that we're stuck in this drama triangle thing. And I'm pretty sure you're stuck in the role of the persecutor and I'm the victim." I don't see that going very well. Yeah. The persecutor would then tell you that you're wrong, and that you're reading all the wrong information, and your friends are telling you the wrong things, and you've got to shape up. The persecutor, often, is a narcissist or a bully, and they just like bullying people. They're just like telling people what to do, and they can get along in life that way, but in the drama triangle, there's actually a link between all the roles, and they're actually trapped in that role. And they may persecute the rescuer, telling the rescuer that they don't know what they're doing, and they're not going to stop because this is their power position. So how to get the persecutor to back off would be challenging. And maybe some insight might get through, or it won't get through, and then you would face other decisions whether you need to move on. Right, so there is that element, as always, of someone being discerning and trying to figure out, like, is this person that I'm perceiving to be a persecutor? Are they adoptable? Are they flexible? Are they willing to work with me to show up or not? Well, also, you'd need to take into account the role of the victim. Are you feeding the persecutor what they need? Are you trying to, as they say, sail a pizza past the wolf? The persecutor may not pick up on things because your way of telling the persecutor may be either accusatory, which would get the persecutor to fight back, or maybe so sympathetic and so help us at the persecutor would see it as a weakness. So the victim would need to look at their role, whether they're really playing a role that makes themselves irresistible to the persecutor. And then the victim would need to look at whether they need to empower themselves so they come across as more effective and more worthy of respect and get listened to. Yeah. And maybe this would be a good time to also talk about what you alluded to a few moments ago, which is that people often are playing more than one role and can switch back and forth, or they can perceive themselves as one role while the other person is perceiving them differently. And the example that pops into my mind immediately of that is you talk about the political parties in our country where the classic maybe Republican postures that they see themselves as the rescuer of the taxpayer and the Democrat might see themselves as the rescuer of the common person. And both of them perceive the other as a persecutor and that they're being victimized in some way by them. Well, that becomes a turn off to the voter when they realize that politics has become a game of accusing people, lying, accusing people of things switching around and only taking one position and not knowing what's going on on the other side of the aisle. So a person gets out of the political game by respecting both sides to see that each side has a following and they have a point of view. Now the other question about the switching of roles is it's very real. The persecutor may decide that they want to win the game and if they're being accused of being a persecutor, they may switch. They may switch over to be a rescuer and say, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I really care about you and I didn't mean that, it could all be a game, it could all be manipulation." Or they could play the role of victim in order to win the game and keep things confusing and keep things involved, so they could play the victim of, you know, they never can be understood. They're really trying to help the person with the criticism and they're being misunderstood. So you can wind up switching around the triangle in order to win. In order to not get pegged into one of the roles, you switch around so that you can win. Yeah, and what is winning exactly? Well, winning is the excitement, the excitement of the drama, of staying involved in some argumentative relationship or in some problematic relationship, which is very involving, they're settling for negative strokes instead of positive strokes, but some people think negative strokes are just as good or even better, or they don't even know why they're involved, but they are involved and sometimes they don't realize how involved they were until the game that somehow ends, which could be traumatic sometimes, or mind blowing, it could free them. They could all of a sudden feel free. The rest, you would say, "I'd rather be smarter than martyr." They don't want to be a martyr anymore. They want to be smart that they're out of the game and they're free again. And so the victim might say, "I'd rather be mad than sad," instead of complaining all the time, they'd get angry at the whole game and say, "Why am I in this game? Why am I playing this silly role of a victim all my life?" I can get things from myself and then they can empower themselves, which is a big part of the drama triangle and getting out as people learn to empower themselves and realize they can't change others, but they can change themselves and get what they want in life. Where does this all, how did you come up with the compassion triangle as the antidote to the drama triangle? Well, in transactional analysis, which started with Eric Burns, Games People Play, which was run away bestseller years ago, 120 weeks in a row on New York Times bestseller list, and I trained with Eric Burns, and one of the principles in transactional analysis was with these three ego states. You can either play the role, the parent, adult, or child, or be those people to others. And the thing is that the roles can be played positive and negative, like the critical parent role can be played in a negative way, which is always criticizing, but in a positive way, which is a strong leader with decisive rules and people follow them and society is stronger because of the rules. So, using that idea from Eric Burns that all these ideas can be seen in a positive or a negative way, I started looking at each of the roles in the drama triangle can be either positive or negative. So for instance, the persecutor is very negative because they keep the victim feeling terrible about themselves, but if you get out of the triangle, it can be positive. You can be an aggressive, self-empowering person who's determined to channel your energies into life and to being purposeful and productive. And the rescuer, or nearly as a person gets walked on all the time, people take advantage of the rescuer. They're always helping and giving people another chance, and then another chance, and then the third chance. And they can switch that negative rescuing to positive rescuing. They can love themselves and they can actually help themselves and help others. And the victim instead of being the negative role of always needy, always helpless, never never learning anything that they need to learn, then they can switch that into the vulnerable role, but they're actually open to helping themselves and hearing other people and changing themselves. So all three roles can be either way, but one day I developed what I called the compassion triangle, which I could go into more if you want to. Yeah, let's do that. Okay, the compassion triangle is, I put that all together and realize that people are actually in all three roles at once. There's a primary role that everyone sees, but then there's two hidden roles. So using an example of a boss picking on a secretary would be seen as a persecutor and people wouldn't like the boss. But secretly, if you want another way of looking at the boss or helping the boss, the boss is also a rescuer. The boss is rescuing the secretary who can't do it right, who can't learn fast enough. So by criticizing the secretary or being a helicopter mom to the secretary, they're really trying to impart information that would help the person. And in the way, they're also helping their own job because if people don't get their job done, then the boss could get fired. So the boss would also be a victim and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm running a ship that's going a ground and people aren't doing their job right." So then there's all three roles at once. And originally, that actually goes back to evolutionary days in which I called the drama triangle, which is another subject, but that's an evolutionary days. You have to trigger all three roles at once immediately in order to save the offspring to go on to another generation. So I'll digress a bit into a situation I saw on TV on a Discovery Channel where a tiger was approaching a baby elephant, and the bigger elephant circled the baby. So in a way, they were rescuer, they were rescuing the baby. They're also persecutor because they could chase off the tiger. And then they're also victim because they saw their own family being threatened. And with empathy, they could feel the threat to the baby elephant. So all three had to be triggered, and going through different situations and evolution, all three of those actually started at its instincts. So in a stress situation, all three of those are fired off at once. Interesting. And why did you end up calling this the compassion triangle? Well, compassion triangle was, I picked that name somewhat for its appeal, but also because it helps you have compassion for each person. So instead of the thing the persecutor is evil and critical and narcissistic, you'd have compassion for the person also being a rescuer and a victim in what they were doing. And the same you'd have compassion for the rescuer who could be criticized and saying, oh, you're a rescuer, maybe a therapist is letting their patient call them in all hours to the night or something and not paying their bills, they could say instead of being critical of the person as a rescuer, you could see them as also a persecutor, which is keeping someone in the dependent position. And they're also victim because they don't know how to get out of the situation because they get so many strokes and purpose out of rescuing people. And the victim instead of seeing them as, oh, you're a victim, you're replaying a manipulation game, you're a professional victim, you can see them as also a persecutor that they're keeping other people involved in their game. And they're also a rescuer, they're giving other people what they want, they're giving other people a victim to pick on so they don't need to look at their own lives. So it goes on from there in my book, A Game Free Life, the first half of the book deals with all the different drama triangles in different situations, like the identified patient and all sorts of situations. And the second half of the book is all about open intimate communication and listening and accountability and how to get out of the games. Yeah. And so I think that the danger is to start to get confused. Like, all right, well, if the persecutor is also the victim and also the rescuer, then like how do those distinctions even matter? And I think what you're saying is that thinking about it this way is a good way to kind of stretch you outside of the boundaries of the game thinking where you're stuck in a particular role or where the other person is stuck in a particular role to develop a little bit more flexibility in how you're thinking about it. Yeah, the word compassion could get people drawn into forgiving other people for their game playing, like forgiving a persecutor, not actually realizing what they're actually doing with all their criticism. So you don't want to get soft, you need to know the games and you need to know the roles and you don't want to first get into forgiving everybody because that will be a rescuer and will keep you in the game. But the compassion triangle is used mostly to understand why the games are played. If you want to do that, the most people just deal with the drama triangle with the roles. I'm in this role, that role. And sometimes they get into the switches, which is what the triangle or other thing was, the drama of changing roles and getting other people to line up as persecutors, rescuers and victims and getting lots of other people involved. So that's the drama and the switches. But if you want to understand the reasons why a person gets into the game, the compassion gives you three ways of talking to that person. Like that boss, you could say, "I know you're trying to rescue a person and help them by the criticism, but maybe it's not working." And also the boss saying telling the boss how they're a victim, you know, you could be victimized. You could get fired if these people don't learn their job. So it's when you want to get into understanding the roles is when you use the compassion triangle. And usually if you go on the internet to the different blogs and the other books written about the drama triangle, they mostly just describe the roles and how people get into the roles and what to do to empower yourself to get out of the role. They don't often get into the switches, which gets into the functional family games. And I have a list, my book of all the functional family games. But they don't go the next step, which is to actually understand why people are doing it. That would get them too soft and they would tend to stay in the game if they were too sympathetic to the other people. Yeah, so when you're, say, working with a couple, and let's just choose like a typical example, which is like, one person is always complaining, let's say. So one person always has complaint and the other person probably has the story of like, I can, like, it'll never be enough, what I do will never be enough for my partner. How could you help them use the compassion triangle as a way to get out of that dynamic? Well, we'll look at the three motivations behind each of theirs point. And I would do an exercise where each one would talk to the other person. One person would say, the complainer would say to the other person, I know I'm complaining as a victim, but I'm also a persecutor into keeping you feeling guilty about my complaints. And I'm also a rescuer because I'm turning up the energy between us and giving you what you need in order to feel superior. And then they would do the triangle for the other person. Like I know you're coming on as persecutor, which isn't working because I'll fight it, but I know you're also the rescuer because you're trying to help, and I know you're also victim because you feel this is intolerable and you're afraid of what the next step would be. So I would do an extra, the compassion triangle exercise, and I'd have both people do it. So the victim would go through their three roles and the persecutor's three roles. And then the persecutor would have to tell the other one, here's my three roles and here are your three roles. This compassion triangle exercises very, very moving and it's being adopted in many, many treatment centers, and I just wish more people would know about it and use, of course, wishing would be hoping in a victim position. So I'll back off that one. Well, here we are taking action that hopefully many of you will go out and grab a game free life. It's on Amazon and there's a lot of information in there. So there's a lot to absorb and even in just the description of the drama triangle and the compassion triangle. And then as you mentioned, Stephen, you move on to talking about intimacy building and communication and building trust. And obviously that's a lot of what we're talking about here on my show Relationship Alive because those are the building blocks of successful relationships. Yeah. Okay. So the second half of the book starts with the three rules of openness. It starts with the idea of how to set up communication, and the three rules of openness are bring it up, talk it up, wrap it up. And I put a whole lot in there how to bring up your points so that people listen to it or how to bring it up so they won't listen to it. And to talk it up, I talk about all the different games that go on, all the listening problems that go on, all the different blocks that occur to keep someone from listening to your point. And then the wrap it up, I have a whole different series of how rather than talk a point to death, you just, you can wrap it up and that would be the goal. In the talk it up, I do a lot about listening and I have a lot of different theoretical ideas I've written through, but they're all practical. And then the example you previously mentioned about the complainer, I have a person learn how to listen to the point the other person made. Now I have this thing called the listener's loop, which is the four things that ideally a good listener would do. And I put them on a loop because they're all connected so it's letters F, E, the F. F's are strokes. You give the person strokes for what, for who they are. And then the E stands for encouragement, you give them encouragement, you can keep talking, you can bring this up to me anytime. And that preserves the channel of communication. And the next letter is V for validation, you validate whatever's true that the other person says. And I do have a 10% rule, that 10% of everything you say is correct and 10% of everything you say is incorrect and 10% of the population would agree. And that I use in couples to make sure someone here is at least something that the other person says. And then, so that validates the point and then the final is the F for follow through. That validates the purpose of the communication that you show some results. After the communication, you show some tangible results of the discussion. That I call that the listener's loop. Yeah, that's a zone. Go ahead. There's also a loop of how you block people from ever getting their point across. I could mention that if you want. Sure. Do that. So just, and just to be clear, we're in the, in the talk it up section of, of your, of your work. Yeah. So, there's three letters, four letters there in that loop, C-A-F-E. These are the four ways that you can block a person from being effective in their communication. The first C is condescending. I guess maybe the listeners, or you could imagine a situation in which you're really earnestly trying to get through to another person. And that person in return first is condescending. They're looking down on everything you're doing and saying, oh, this is just your symptom of, you've been talking to the wrong people, you're just the fool, nothing you say is correct. So they would be condescending and look down on you. The next block would be abrupt. They were just suddenly cut off, suddenly cut off the communication. Stop. I've had enough. Stop it. No, or hang up the phone or something. That would be intimidating. And that would stop a communication. The next on the loop is F is for secretive. They would withhold all the information that you need in order to, to hear their point of view and they would withhold all the information that supports that you heard them. So they keep secretive and you can't, you don't know where you stand with the person who doesn't give you enough information, but that's an information block by not giving enough information to let the communication proceed further. And the last block would be the person that you're talking to is evasive. They would talk fast, they would change the subject quickly, they would lead you astray to another subject that's actually more interesting and you would forget your original point. So that CASC or case block would, would keep you from being effective and, but if you know the four different blocks, maybe you can address one of them and break it down. If you can break down one of the blocks, then you can, the person will be open to listening to you. And according to the transaction analysis positive negative rules, there's also a positive CASC that instead of condescending, you'd be caring for C, instead of a, a, a, you'd be approachable. Sure, be nice to talk to someone who's caring and approachable. And instead of asking for secretive, the person would be sharing, oh great, this person is sharing information with me, but now we can move forward. And instead of e for being evasive, you'd say, they're engaged, oh, they're staying engaged on the subject. We can have enough time to talk it all the way through rather than suddenly stopping the subject after 30 seconds or five seconds. So there's a positive, and in the workshops that I do, and I do workshops all over the world, the workshops, we have that exercise being done. And person practices, each of those four negatives, and then the other one deals with them, and then you switch sides and see, so on all these different information and communication blocks, people can practice them. And in a couple of therapy, you can get them to actually practice the negative CASC and then switch it to a positive CASC. All those things in the back half of the book can be practiced as social skills. I could mention that originally in games people play, the games were spelled out, Eric Bernlis over 100 games, and it's a wildly popular book, but he didn't have a way of getting out of the games. He had something called an antithesis, like maybe one sentence or two or about four or five of the games that you could say that would just stop the game right there. But he didn't take it further. Obviously, only one in transactional analysis field, they actually took that further. And my entire book is about what to do about it, social skills training, and relationship building training, and intimacy building training that you can go beyond games with. Great. So let's pull out a few more of those because there are so many in there that are really the, well, what I like about it is that it, in the way that you quantify these ways of being, it makes it really clear in ways that I wouldn't have thought about before. Before we dive into one of them, there are two important things that I think we should mention. One is, I'm wondering if you, we've mentioned transactional analysis several times. It's your, it's been your field. Can you give us just like the 10,000-foot view for, for people listening? If you don't know what transactional analysis is, this is what it is. Sure. Originally, the psychotherapy field was, was in the area of what Freud discovered, Freud was a hypnotist, and he was the psychiatrist and, and he would, with his mind as a hypnotist, he figured that if you could take people all the way back to childhood and unleash all the traumas and all the repressed energies of childhood, that this, this freed up energy would then allow them to be freer in their lives. So this was called a psychodynamic approach or this, or on a higher professional level of the psychoanalytic approach, and all had to do with going back into childhood and understanding things. Richard Burring came along in a very revolutionary time, it's in 1960s in San Francisco, very revolutionary times where everything was being rethought, and he said, why do you have to go back in childhood only? Let's, let's look at what's actually happening on the social level, what's actually happening between people in the here and now that they have to deal with, like, you can talk about such a childhood all you want, but what if you're getting divorced or what the boss has demoted you and put your desk in a hallway or something when you're on vacation or some game you have to deal with. So he brought up the games and he became very catchy names to them, like, I'm only trying to help you, or now I've got you, you have to be your, the game of kick me, and, and so he came to the book of course with a lot of popular, of course people read it to figure out the games other people were playing, and weren't necessarily using it to figure out their games, but he brought up the whole level of social level, so then transactional analysis had a social level TA, it's called TA for transactional analysis, and then a psychological level, psychological levels when you go into the depth into childhood, which is now called scripting, how people write their life scripts when they're young, and then they play out their life scripts as if they're a place, and transactional analysis has a lot about script analysis, and I have a, maybe the middle section of my book is all about script analysis, how you find out what your position is in life, like, maybe you have an "I'm okay, you're not okay" position in life, or, "I'm not okay, you're okay," which was written in Tom Harris's book "I'm okay, you're okay," which was the other big bestseller back in the 60s and 70s, so transactional analysis became a major force in psychology and psychiatry, and it's thought all over the world, we have training centers in 30 or 40 countries and conferences all over the world, so it's a major field in psychology, but because of the dominance of the psychoanalytic approach, some schools actually won't teach it, so that's one of the games people play of being, of protecting your turf, but it gets more and more popular, and my book sales, I'm probably selling about 10 a week or so, and there's transactional analysis, books, and conferences all over the world all the time, so it's gotten pretty popular, and more people are looking at what goes on between people rather than just what went on in your childhood, right, and so the idea is that you're analyzing what is actually happening between two people in the present moment, as well, right, and the only precedent to that was back in the early 1960s in the Bay Area that they started family therapy, and they actually began to have names for what people are doing back and forth in the family therapy circle, like people where there were dyads and triads, and certain things like that, but Eric Burns just jumped away into the future by actually naming the games that each individual person was playing, and he brought it up at many different levels, some of these games, he wrote up about six or seven different levels of why people were playing it, and that then appealed to the more depth-oriented people, to realize there's a lot of depth, and there's as many depths in what people are doing with each other, as there were in what they were doing in their childhood, which I guess I could dynamically, there's a dozen defense mechanisms of people with a poor that was pretty deep, but in TA you have just as many, or even more, social defense mechanisms, how you keep people from getting intimate, how you keep people from making their point, how you keep people from going down, so that's a sort of TA primarily my book, more in that direction. Yeah, and I think that is definitely one of the valuable things, as soon as you see that you're in a particular game, you talk about the title that could be kind of on the front of someone's sweatshirt, like this is the game that I'm playing with you, that it gives you a clue of like, "Oh, I'm actually not really connecting with this person. We're just doing this dance that actually prevents us from connecting with each other." Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. The sweatshirt was an idea that Eric Burns used to talk about in our seminars, and I trained with Eric Burns for, in his weekly seminars in San Francisco for almost six years. He used to talk about the sweatshirt jokingly, but I've taken it a lot further, it actually tells you what game a person's played. Imagine you're trying to get through to somebody, and you look at their sweatshirt and it says, "I don't care about you or what you're saying," and all of a sudden you say, "My gosh, look at that." And I figured there's a couple of, I boil that down to two sweatshirts. One is the less pretend sweatshirt, is, "Let's pretend I care about what you're saying," and the other was try and make me listen to you. So the less pretend and the try and sweatshirt just sort of breaks a game wide open. Sometimes you don't realize it until after you've left, and you think, "My gosh, that person had a sweatshirt, I don't care what you say," or, "I'm never going to listen to anybody." And then you realize, "Wow, that's a game," and so the whole core of a game can be wrapped up in their sweatshirt. And there's a lot of work in TA about intuition, the use of intuition, and reading what people are doing, and then also ways of checking out your intuition. Stephen, we need to take a quick break to talk about this week's sponsors. This episode is being sponsored in part by Song Finch. Song Finch is a really cool company that creates custom songs made to order for the special occasions in your life. 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And thank you so much Audible and Songfinch for giving us something beautiful, enriching, and entertaining to do with our ears, and for sponsoring this week's episode of Relationship Alive. And now let's get back to our conversation. So if I had, let's say I was with someone and I thought their sweatshirt was, let's pretend that we're going to work on our problems together. Maybe that would be a good one. How do I know if that person is actually just playing the game with me? Because like on the back of their sweatshirt, it would be actually I'm the one in charge here or something like that. Well, that was the original sweatshirt of Eric Berner's in front of the sweatshirt and what you see in the back is after the switch. And the switch is very important in games like you think you see something and then you get a switch. And all of a sudden you say, "Oh my god, that's what happened." So that sweatshirt could be an alcoholic wearing a sweatshirt, let's pretend I'm going to stop drinking this time or let's pretend that your insights get through to me. And then the rescuer or the codependent could say, "Let's pretend I'm going to be effective right now and you're listening to me." Or let's pretend we're all going to live happily ever after. So but it's an intuition that you might not be able to think of in the heat of the game. When you walk away the game you say, "My god, I'm talking to a sweatshirt that says I don't care about you and I never will on the back." Yeah. How would you test that out? How would you know if, because I think it can be easy to step back from a person and just say, "Oh, okay, I have a story about this person, which is that I'm never going to care about me or there. They're actually not interested in me. Actually, that might be a good one I'm thinking about going out on a first date with someone and trying to navigate the awkwardness of that and maybe coming away from that thinking, "Yeah, this person, they just don't care about me." How would you find out if that sort of thing was actually true? Well, probably in time it'll come out, or say if you mentioned a date, if the guy thinks he sees a girl sweatshirt and says, "I'm not romantically attracted to you," well then he moves differently. He talks to her in a different way rather than assuming, "I'm a hottie and you're my man," thinking that that's what's going on. So it's a way of catching on to what's going on. What's the game? Is there a game? What are the real positions? That's okay to be hoping and to wishing and maybe this is going to work out, this is going to be fine, but it's only when there's a game and one way of figuring out what the game is to see the sweatshirt and then you go from there, you can bring it up. There's a new type of therapy called a relational therapy in which the therapist shares their feelings with their client and they can actually say to the client, "I feel you're not interested in anything I say, and that could open up a conversation," but it's fine to express your feelings of what you think is going on as long as there's an openness contract to be open and share with each other without games. You're just reminding me of so many things that are in your book. Okay, so before we dive in there, just going back to the case, the blocks to communication that you were talking about, KC for being condescending, A for abrupt, S for secretive, E for evasive, if I sense one of those things happening in my partner or the person that I'm talking to, what's a strategy that you've seen be effective because you mentioned, sometimes you can take on one of those blocks and break it down and then you get through and then you're back to communicating with that person. Well, the first step in learning the games people play in learning intimacy, communication and so forth is to identify it. So if you identify the person that's condescending, you would say, "Wait a minute, I need a little more respect from what I'm saying. Here are my points, so you could go for that. If you heard the person's abrupt, it set up in advance, I need at least five minutes to talk to you. Will you give me five minutes?" So then you have a way of dealing with that. For the secretive block, you'd say, "I need you to tell me why you're doing this and I'll tell you why I'm doing it." So you set up a sharing substitute for the S and then for the E, the invasive, you say, "I don't want to start changing the subjects or as soon as they change the subject, you say, "Wait, you're changing the subject on me. You're not hearing me or let's stay on this one point, it's important." So knowing what the blocks are, you can actually address each one and it'd be more effective than simply just throw up your hand and say, "Well, you're impossible, I can't talk to you." Might work also. Right. Well, it would work in a different way, I guess, of keeping things the way they are. I'm curious. You mentioned earlier, very briefly, I think they're called the ego states, the critical parent, the nurturing parent, the adult, the free child, the adaptive child. I think I'm remembering those, right? And the way that each of those gives us some flexibility in how we interact with other people and maybe also how we get stuck in one or another mode. Can we talk about that for just a little bit? And then what I'd love to do is kind of bridge that into your map of intimacy and how people can think about the level of intimacy, the intimacy scale between them and another person. Okay. So, the ego states was Bern's way of externalizing Freud's super ego, ego and id, which is three factors of the internal mind. A person has a super ego that's critical to themselves, or they have an ego which deals with the world, or they have an id, which is powerful forces. So Freudian dynamics was based on that. Well, Eric Bern took it out into the real world and said, "In the real world, there are people out there you see as your parent, as your adult, or as a child." And that gave you a way of looking at people, so that was the starting point. Now each ego state gets subdivided a little bit, and they can be in the positive or negative way, like the parent is served subdivided into the matros and patros, I guess, is the father and the mother, you know, in different kinds of systems around the world. So the critical parent would be the authoritative one that maintains the rules of society and correctness and ethics, but the negative critical parent would be the one who would just domain and criticize people endlessly. So all the ego states have positive and negative side. Now the flexible person is the one who stays in contact flexibly with all of the ego states, they can move in and out easily, and one of Eric Bern's dozen books, half dozen books, it's called the moving self. At times when you're talking to someone, if you need to go to the okay critical parent, you say, "Wait a minute, you're breaking our rules, or if you need to go to the rebel child, you might say, "Oh, come on, let's have some fun, this is silly." So you need to be able to move around, or you can move them to the adult and say, "Wait a minute, I'm not sure what's going on, let's look at the process, and let's see where we're going with the information." So you need to be able to move around all the ego states, and so that's the flexible person. A person who gets locked in, they could get locked into critical parent, locked into only free child, or they're only negative free child, or they're just silly all the time, and you can't ever talk to them, or it could get locked into the negative, nurturing parent that just only wants to rescue victims, all they care about in the world is victims, and everything you do is a symptom of something. So you could get locked into a certain ego state yourself, and you can be talked to someone else who's locked into one ego state only, and that's called the excluded ego state. So there's a lot about ego states that Eric Burns writes about in his early books. In a good way, ego states is a good way of identifying who you're talking to. There's the actually an idea by Dr. Ducey called the ego cram, and you look at someone, and you see this vertical bar graph of how much critical parent they're showing, how much nurturing parent is there, nurturing parent, adult, free child, adaptive child, and you get an idea through they are, if you're talking to a real tough person, that person's critical parent could be first on the bar graph, their adult could be second, and maybe they're free child, they're vulnerable, they have the child very low, or it could be talked with a very flexible, easily manipulated person, they may be all in their child, and all either playful or sorrowful or hurtful, and they have no parent, no strength that you can rely on. So there's a lot in TA about the ego states, and I go into that in my books too, because I have this one variant of this option, this article I called, called Options, and showing you how you can switch among your different ego states in order to handle a situation with somebody else. Yeah, so what would be an example of that? So if I wanted to, let's say I was trying to assess where someone was at, and I like how you brought that up in terms of looking at them and seeing where they show up on the bar graph, are they high in one dimension or low in another, do you have suggestions for how you illicit different states from other people? Well, there's two ways, I have a summary of the Options article in my book, A Game Free Life, and then in my latest book, Collective Papers and Transactual Analysis, I have a copy of the original Options article, which gives you all the examples. That's different from the Eagogram, which is an intuition reading of the other person, in which you can tell how much ego state energy is in the other person that you're dealing with. Intuition exercise, intuition reading like the sweatshirt, or this would be the Eagogram and the sweatshirt would be ways of reading a person that you're talking to. Got it, got it. Okay, let's, if we can, in our last few minutes here, one thing that I think you describe really beautifully in your book, are the ways that we construct intimacy in relation to another person, and the two concepts that come to mind here for me are the trust contracts that we create with others, and then the intimacy, I think you call the intimacy scale, which helps you see where you're at in terms of your levels of intimacy with another person. So yeah, let's dive in there. Okay, thank you for mentioning this. Over the years, I pretty much have developed a lot of different ideas. I had an older sister who had a, who used to teach, have one new idea every year, or one new project you can master, and she would say, "Well, one year you master bowling, another year you master handcrafts." So I set upon myself that each year I wanted to create a new theory. So both of those are new theories. The five trust contracts for couples are, might turn out to be one of the most popular ideas I've done, and that is, you draw the two sets of ego states facing each other, and the trust contract between the okay critical parent and the okay critical parent, the other person is the no collapse contract. You agree to the contracts you've made, you don't suddenly stop working, you don't suddenly stop your hygiene, you don't suddenly break all the rules like you don't, you know. So the no trust contract is between the critical parents. Right, that's also like you don't, you don't threaten to leave the other person, or. Yeah, and between the two nurturing parents, the couple agrees on the protection contract that it's in your mind to protect the other person from putting them too much stress. Between the adults is the openness contract, bring it up, talk it up, wrap it up, at a good timing, you're not just any time, and then between the free child it's the enjoyment contract that you really want to give the other person lots of pleasure in whatever you can in the other, in their lives and the two of you, and between the adapted child is the flexibility contract that you agree to give in, you don't have to win 51% of all the arguments, and so this is an ideal that they, that they live by, they, now each person needs to live by it themselves, and they also look to it being maintained in the other person. But they can all break down very quickly like I had one example of an alcoholic who went out and got drunk in a restaurant, less screaming, right away he broke the no-claps contract, he just broke down and threw a scene, he broke the nurturing, the protection contract, everyone got embarrassed, the everyone's child got embarrassed, and so that was broken, the openness contract was broken because he couldn't talk things over with him, he was in a, don't think mentality, and then the free child is the enjoyment contract, there was nothing enjoyable about that dinner in the restaurant when he threw a scene with the restaurant that even Jack Nicholson would have been happy with and wanted his book of movies. And then between the, the adapted child, the flexibility contract, he was, there was no flexibility there, he wouldn't yield to people telling him to please stop or anything. So all contracts can be broken and one of marriage relationship, or long term relationship is breaking down, sometimes one by one the contracts are broken, maybe the enjoyment contract is broken first, they just talk too much about issues and drag themselves down, or maybe the no-claps contract is broken, they go out and have a partner somewhere else, so one by one the contracts can be built up, but they also can be broken down, and then you also mentioned what's at the intimacy scale, okay, I cataloged there the subjects that people talk about, I've never seen anyone do that, I go on five levels, 20%, 20%, 40%, 60% up to 100%, and these are the actual topics that people talk about, some of the topics can bring people closer, which is on the right of the scale at 100%, or they can distance people there burn once, use the example of a very awkward first date, guy looks around and looks at the room and says, my aren't the walls perpendicular tonight, that doesn't take things very far, so at the first level, at the 20% level it's silence, pretty much nothing is said, but it could be an okay silence, a break and time, just a breather. You could be staring into each other's eyes and silence, which might actually feel very intimate. >> Right, but that's a topic of conversation would be no topic, but silence, you're not sure whether what's going on, so it doesn't really build intimacy, maybe it might, the next level will be 40%, which is things, objects and places, which is the guy that's saying, my aren't the walls perpendicular tonight, or people can just talk about the restaurants in town, sort of awkwardly trying to come up with one after another until the conversation runs down, or you could hear it a diner, the truck driver's talking about the different stoplights and the police, things that doesn't develop intimacy, it doesn't get people into who they are and what they believe in, but that comes at the 60% level, and I have several different PI people, you talk about people and ideas or philosophy and issues or psychology, you talk about what people think about and believe in things, and they get into themselves and that gets a little more close and it's going, now at the 80%, I have it divided with an M Y, me or you, you actually interview the other person, find out a whole lot about who they are, what their beliefs are, what their hobbies are, their family is, and then you talk about yourself a lot, it gets uneven if one person only talks about themselves or they interview the other person to the other person, only talks about themselves, but that gets close when you learn a lot about the person, but it's not the same as 100%, at a 100% level there's you, us, talk about us, what do we feel about each other, what happened when we first met each other, what are the things we are going to do together, what's going on between us, and you talk about at the S level, and you share feelings about each other and the two of you, so that all can be practiced in workshops or between couples, you can practice each one of the different levels, so you get an idea of conversations, it's mostly useful when people first meet each other, when conversation can go dead or they can go right, I mean some party can jump too fast, the person, a guy at the first date could jump all the way over to me and you and us and perhaps this one or someone could then she could bring it back to things like wallpaper decorations or something, so it gives an idea of the different topics that people talk about whether it brings them closer or it brings, it takes them further apart. Yeah, and I could see that being instructive, just like, you know, as you're with another person, like, oh, are they in their critical parent, or they in their adult, or they in their free child, you could just easily be like, all right, what are we talking about, and what is that, like, if I want to build more closeness with this person, then I might take this to, like, trying to figure out their philosophies and ideas and interests and eventually get into, you know, our deepest beliefs, what they believe, what I believe, and that actually helps bring you closer in a situation where you're feeling a little distant from either someone you've been with for a long time or someone you're just meeting. Right. Yeah, and by the way, none of this should be called manipulative, like, okay, now I'm going to go to the 20 percent level, now I'm going to go to 60 percent. It's actually people are just identifying what, what good conversations are, and of course a salesman could learn it immediately and go right over to, all the way up to 100 percent, and con you into thinking that, you know, the new vacuum cleaner you're buying is what brings the two of them together. But all these things, you know, options, how to switch ego states, or the different levels of communication. All these things are things that you learn, and eventually they come part of you, because there are people out there who automatically know all these things. So, you know, it's okay to go to school and learn your social skills if that's what you need when you go into therapy or you read a book on, on relationship building, which is my game for your life book. Yeah, so I want to let you know, listening that, even though we've covered so much in this conversation today, it's not even half of what's in this book, and I really was struck with, you know, every several pages, like, wow, there's another valuable resource. Wow, there's another way to think about this, and to extract kind of the core of what's happening in every given, in a particular given situation to get to something meaningful. So, again, Stephen Cartman, he created the drama triangle, his book, A Game Free Life, which talks about the drama triangle, the compassion triangle, and then all of these tools for, for building intimacy and dealing with communication issues, because this, this is in a book that's just for couples. It's about kind of how you navigate the world and, and stay game free as much as possible. So, it's really, really valuable stuff in there. I should put it in a plug that it's available on Amazon. Yes, yeah, I think I mentioned that earlier, and we'll make sure that we have links to all of that in the show notes and transcript for today's episode, which, as a reminder, you can get, if you visit NealSatin.com/triangle, is in the drama triangle, or you can text the word "passion" to the number 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, and follow the instructions. And, Stephen, what's a good way if people want to find out more about your work other than grabbing the book on Amazon? What's your website? Okay, I do have about 30 papers I've written, which go into much more detail of the ideas that are in a game-free line. I just recently came out with that. It's called "Collected Papers and Transactional Analysis," about 280 pages. I can sell it from my website. All I have to do is type in my name on Google and you'll go to my website. And eventually, Amazon's going to have it. But, I really appreciate you, you're inviting me Neal and sharing some of these ideas. I would like people to have a game-free life, and that's what I've been working on. And I really appreciate the time you spent, and the time we worked on together to make this interview happen. So, I really want to thank you very much and thank your viewers for listening. Yeah, my pleasure. It's been so great to have you, and this is stuff you've been working on for decades. So, what a treat to one that you were able to put so much of it into your book, and also that we've been able to meet and chat about it for the people today who are just finding out about your work. I do have one last quick question for you if that would be okay. I'm okay. Yeah, so when we were talking about the trust contracts, I'm just wondering if I were listening to that and thinking, okay, I'm hearing the contracts that I've navigated really well with my partner, let's say. But I have, but I can see that here's a contract like the enjoyment contract that I've just let fall apart completely, or even that I feel like my partner is, let is sliding on one of those contracts. What would you suggest as a good first step for people to have the us conversation that allows them to repair around a broken contract? Well, generally, communication again, like stating what the problem is in your feelings, and if there's an actual issue or situation, you could do the compassion triangle and your motivations for that situation and their motivations. So, primarily, it's just identifying the issue and working out what you can do and what you can't do. But primarily the five-trust contract you should apply to yourself and the enjoyment contract that you really won't keep it in your heart that you want the other person to be happy and any kind of flexibility you can do on the flexibility contract would be fine. But there's some things you cannot do, and you can't be expected to, and there's some things you can do that maybe you might do. But you know, you could get more in touch with your free child, the more playful self, self, or if the other person has trouble getting into their free child and their playfulness, you could stroke them and when they do get into their free child, tell them how much you enjoy that. I don't have an actual situation to talk about. These are pretty general for people on any of the five-trust contracts. It's something to talk about, but talk about it with all the rules of sharing and communication and, you know, I mentioned the listening loop, and also there's information iceberg I didn't mention, as four levels of how you can get your point across, maybe it's too late in the interview to go through it, but one you get your point across, and then underneath the water of the iceberg it's the first-eyes information. You want to give all the information behind your point to support it, and you want to get a chance to get that information out there before the person cuts off the conversation. The next high on the iceberg is importance. You won't be able to get across the importance of your idea why it's important to be listened to. Like if you're talking at a board meeting, you won't be able to get across the importance of why your idea needs to be taken up by the business, or with someone you're talking to, why it's important that this conversation is earned. And then the last day at the eye at the very bottom is actually a trauma triangle for the bottom of the iceberg is the intent. You want to make sure you know that people know that your intent is not persecutor, or rescuer of victim, but it's to share information to move the relationship on in the five chance contracts. And you actually made me think of just revisiting briefly a question that we touched on at the very beginning, which is, I'm curious about in your experience, how do you know when someone is just kind of stuck in the game? And you know, you try all these things, and you know, is there a point at which you think one can say like, all right, I think I've given this what I can give it. And it's time to move on to, you know, this person is stuck no matter what I do. It takes a while to get stuck. You know, if you're a rescuer and you're persistent, you'll stay in there. If you have these drivers that say try hard and please them and be perfect and how you please them, the drivers can keep you stuck in the relationship a long time. Now, you could maybe not even be in the game and you meet somebody for the first time and you just, that's it. You just don't want to go further. You may give it a couple of tries and then it's over. So it's getting into the triangle takes a while to get in there because then it gets complicated because all three roles are beginning to emerge as motivations in each person and that complicates a bit. But it takes a while to get to the point where we realize, hey, we're stuck. And then you could talk about the idea of being stuck. Maybe from the compassion triangle, you could settle on a particular issue. And once you got the issues settled on, then you talk about your three motivations for hanging on to this issue. But yeah, defining an issue is usually a point to decide whether you can move on or not. Got it. And you do a good job at one point in the book of talking about it was, I think, in a work situation with two people who are, you know, having, it's impossible for them to get along and where one of them simply is willing to listen and the other one actually does the whole compassion triangle for themselves and for the other person out loud as a way of helping build a bridge of understanding between the two of them. Well, if it's a work situation, you wouldn't necessarily do it out loud with everyone listening because the boss could lose face or something like that. But it probably be in a closed room where people would share, look, let's look, is it okay, first you get the contract, you know, the contract to talk. Is it okay if we talk about this? That avoids a rescue victim situation. Or is it, yes, okay, let's set aside five minutes to talk. And you say, well, I would like to go through what I feel is going on and what I feel is going on with you. And then you can correct me or tell me what's going on with you. But then you share an awful lot of feelings. You share your persecutor rescue and victim and what you think is theirs. That's six right there. And then they share their persecutor rescue and victims of what they think their motivation is. And then their, their three and then their three values. There's actually, you know, 12 feelings to get shared. I mean, it can be a huge sense of relief when the compassion triangle exercise is done. But first you got to get a contract and agreement that let's go through and how much time be set aside and maybe even an agreement of what to do if communication goes wrong. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Well, Stephen Cartman, again, thank you so much for being here with us today. And you've shared so much valuable information. And I'm excited to see what unfolds for our listeners who take this and run with it. So thanks so much for giving us more of a perspective on how to apply the drama triangle, the compassion triangle, and all these other great ways of building trust and intimacy. Great. Thanks, Neil, and for all your listeners for listening. And we'll talk more later. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to another episode of Relationship Alive. If you like what you've heard and want to make it easier for other people to find out about us, please take a moment to subscribe to our podcast and to rate and review us on iTunes. If you have questions or comments or want to continue the conversation, you can always join our Relationship Alive Community Facebook group. And for more information about today's episode, visit us online at NeilSatin.com/podcast, or you can always text the word "passion" P-A-S-S-I-O-N to the number 3-3-4-4-4 for more information. Finally, do you have a burning question that you're hoping we can have answered here on Relationship Alive? Either for a future or past guest, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Take care and see you next time. [Music] I just want to hold your hand to the thick of it. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]