This Week In Recovery Lesson
Strangulation by Triangulation vs. Healthy Confrontation
The teachings of Scripture plainly unveil the truth of invasive infectious self-centered thinking and behavior hastening the procurement of ‘me’dom values as the destructive dysfunction of families.
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. James 4:1-3 (NIV)
Some very famous people and families in Scripture struggled with this in their family systems. It is painfully clear that as they willfully participated in self-centered ‘me’dom behavior borne out of their obsession with their dissatisfaction, those families self destructed. There seemed to be no limit to the lengths they would go to try in vain to achieve contentment. Your family may not resort to incest and murder to find satisfaction; you probably haven’t sold anyone lately into slavery; but do you use sarcasm to reduce someone else in order to hopefully feel better? Do you lie to protect yourselves? Do you gossip and triangulate to feel better?
Triangulation occurs when you are in conflict with someone but feel anxious about confronting the person. So, to relieve the anxiety it becomes “necessary” to bring in a third party. Once you have pulled in a third party, that person tends to share in your feelings about the person the two of you are talking about. Then, based on your story about the person you’re in conflict with, the third party now has a problem with that person as well. Then, when the person you are in conflict with meets the third party, the person you’re in conflict with is now in conflict with the third party. And then you all triangulate with other folks who each have their own ‘me’dom agenda until you have a mess—disorder.
Triangulation is a key ingredient in family conflict and codependency. Family members are withdrawn, distant, and cold. No one is taking unless alliances have formed in these triangles and back-biting and back-stabbing conversations occur in secret. Holidays and family gatherings are full of tension with extended family members walking on egg shells. Perhaps you’re walking on egg shells in your home now. Who’s talking to whom? Who’s on whose side? Ultimately, interactive triangles in the family system reap destruction to the system. Call it “Strangulation by triangulation”.
“Mean what you say; say what you mean; but don’t say it mean.”
We may as well get real right off the bat about the most profound challenge in faith-driven Christ-centered recovery. Inside-out transformative recovery is most evident in what comes out when we open our mouths. Communication, however, is not restricted to what we say. We communicate with our entire body. We communicate with our eyes and facial expressions, our hands and arms, our legs and feet, our posture… This, of course, is not a secret. Even an infant seconds old can communicate most effectively. So much of who and what we are is measured in what we communicate. What we communicate is an accurate reflection of what resides in the heart.
A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart. Luke 4:45 (NLT)
A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. Luke 4:45 (NIV)
When we are truly committed to faith-driven Christ-centered recovery in the experience of an empowered transformed life, we cannot help but communicate through verbal and non-verbal expression what God is changing in our life. We are in our person a reflection of what God is doing in us from the inside out. When we are in a committed relationship with Jesus Christ, it is within our new nature to express outwardly the fruit of God’s Spirit alive in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
- Here is a little exercise you can do:
- Pour water into a clear glass and a pitcher, preferably with a couple of other people.
- Put food coloring, or Kool-Aid, or a tea bag, into one of the glasses.
- Observe the water changing color.
- Add more color to the water in the glass.
- Pour some clear water from the pitcher into the glass with the colored water (it would be wise to do this over a sink or outside since water will overflow from the glass).
- Notice that even with the addition of clear water there is still color in the glass.
- Add more color into the water in the glass.
- Hold the glass out with your outstretched arm.
- Ask a bystander to bump or hit your outstretched arm.
- Notice that what is coming out of the water is colored water.
- Dump out the dirty water.
- Fill the glass with clean water from the pitcher.
- Continue pouring slowly from the pitcher over the sink as the water overflows.
- Ask the bystander to bump or hit your arm as the water continues to pour from the pitcher.
- Add drops of food coloring or place in and out a tea bag while the water is poured from the pitcher and the glass overflows while your arm is being bumped.
- Notice that what continues to overflow from the cup is clean water.
- What does the glass represent?
- What does the original clear water in the glass represent?
- What does the coloring mechanism represent?
- What does the bumping of the outstretched arm represent?
- What does the colored water spilling out of the glass represent?
- What does the pitcher represent?
- What does the pure water in the pitcher represent?
- What is the meaning of dumping the dirty water out of the glass?
- What is the meaning of pouring pure water from the pitcher into the glass?
- What is the meaning of continually pouring pure water from the pitcher as it overflows from the glass?
- What is the meaning of adding color to the glass as water continues to overflow from it?
- What is the meaning of bumping the outstretched arm while pure water is continually being poured from the pitcher and color is being added while the pure water from the pitcher overflows from the glass?
- How does this exercise represent how transformative recovery works and parlays into healthy, effective interaction and communication?
PAC Interaction & Communication
In the 1950s, Dr. Eric Berne began developing a theory concerning communication that he referred to as Transactional Analysis. By the early 1960s, Dr. Berne published a couple of books regarding his theory, including the rather famous “Games People Play” in 1964 that serves as the handbook for Transactional Analysis. Dr. Berne suggests that adults communicate from alter ego states, or personas, he called Parent, Adult, and Child.
PARENT:
The Parent persona is the underlying voice of authority conditioned by what we have beentaught. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, clergy, Sunday School teachers, our friends’ parents, neighbors, television and radio personalities, government authority and law enforcement, doctors and nurses, social norms, etc., have instructed, shaped, and conditioned the values of the Parent persona all of our life. External events, said and done, have been ingrained into our psyche, having influenced how we think and feel, and now, as then, drive our attitudes and behavior.
The Parent persona tends to be critical and judgmental, and can be sarcastic, patronizing and condescending. The Parent persona is angry and resentful and can be spiteful andvengeful. The Parent persona wants its own way and is persistent in getting it.
When the Parent persona communicates, it is addressing the Child persona within the adult person the Parent is interacting with.
CHILD:
The Child persona is the underlying voice of experiences felt growing up from early childhood to adulthood. The experiences of external events that have shaped and conditioned the Child persona within each of us evoke feelings of anger, shame, failure, disappointment, rejection, helplessness, resentment, bitterness, isolation, alienation, etc. The Child persona is also influenced by experiences of entitlement, privilege, covetousness, envy and jealousy, selfish greed, etc. As the Child persona is affected by present circumstances and stimuli, the Child reaction is the expression of a lifetime’s evolution of feelings and learned responses that come back into play in adulthood.
The Child persona will react automatically when its senses are cued by the Parent persona that it is communicating with. The manifestation of the Child persona can be an attitude of rebellion and defiance, but can also come from the place of a victim. The Child persona is subject to psychological abuse.
The Child persona reacts to the communication of the Parent persona, but can also react to another adult communicating from a Child persona. Spouses fighting can transition from Parent talking to Child, and Child reacting/responding to Parent, to Child exchanging fiery dialog with Child. As the verbal conflict heats up, escalating into something nasty and ugly, the health of communication, and ultimately relationship, deescalates, descending into something bitter and isolating.
ADULT:
The Adult persona in this process of interactive communication relies on reasonablethought. The Adult persona tends to remain rational and sensible while the Parent and Child personas trend toward irrationality, and their interaction is ineffective and dysfunctional. Since the Adult is relatively healthy and functional, its interactive efforts to communicate are directed to the Adult persona internal to the other person, for the purpose of effective and productive interaction.
PAC Model A:
Initiator- Recipient-
P Parent
A Adult
C Child
The following is a husband and wife engaging in interactive communication. Consider the model above as you read through the dialog. You will be asked to draw arrows above between the two columns.
Husband/Initiator: “How many times do I have to remind you not to put my softball jersey in the dryer?”
Wife/Receiver: “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
Husband: “How many jerseys have you ruined this year? I’m going broke replacing them.”
Wife: “I’ve got the kids laundry… your laundry… it’s too much!”
Husband: “You’re so careless… I can’t believe you sometimes.”
Wife: “If you weren’t so self-absorbed…”
Husband: “You’re the one always complaining.”
Wife: “Could you be more selfish? You’re impossible!”
Husband: “You’re an idiot!”
Wife: “You’re a fool!”
- What persona was the husband communicating from? Explain.
- What persona was the wife communicating from? Explain.
- On the model above, draw an arrow for the husband from the persona he initiated communication from to the persona his words were directed to. Mark the arrow with an ‘H’. Then draw an arrow from the recipient, according to the persona she responded from, to the persona she was responding to, and mark with a ‘W’.
- Did the conversation maintain the same pattern all of the way through, or did at some point the pattern between personas change? Explain.
Unfortunately, the prognosis for this kind of Parent-Child banter is that this couple needs help to make necessary changes or the temperature of the confrontation will escalate and this couple will regress into Child-to-Child combat. Most of us participate in ways similar to this married couple in the heat of the battle.
I am angry and stressed, so I yell or say something cutting to you. I got it off my chest, so I feel better. But now your angry and stressed, so you return fire by yelling back at me with words that hurt. You got it out, and so you feel a little better.Now I am angrier than I was when you started this thing, and I return fire back at you. I don’t feel any better, but I have to say what I have to say, or I’ll go insane. You return fire back at me using language I’m not used to. You feel lousy because I broke your heart with my stinging words and because you stooped to my level, but you had to say what you did. It just came out; you couldn’t stop yourself.
- In this particular example of confrontation between the husband and the wife about the laundry, who won? Explain.
PAC Model B:
Let’s examine another scenario between this husband and wife considering the same issue of putting the jersey in the dryer:
P Parent
A Adult
C Child
Husband: “How many times do I have to remind you not to put my softball jersey in the dryer?”
Wife: “I’m sorry, I suppose I could have paid better attention.”
Husband: “How many jerseys have you ruined this year? I’m going broke replacing them.”
Wife: “I understand that you’re frustrated. I assure you that it was an accident; I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Husband: “I understand, too, that you have an awful lot of responsibility around here. I guess it isn’t so important that I tear you apart over it. You didn’t deserve that.”
Wife: “Thanks for understanding. Do you think you could help me out with a few things I need so I can be more attentive to what you need?”
Husband: “I know of a few of the things that are important that you need help with. Would you jot a few of the other things down for me?”
Wife: “Sure, I appreciate your willingness to help.”
Husband: “Thank you for being so patient with me.”
Wife: “Because I love you… that’s marriage.”
- Is this happy ending too good to be true, or is it actually possible? Explain.
- What persona did the husband communicate from and what persona was he directing his words to in this confrontation? Explain.
- What persona did the wife respond from and what persona was she directing her words to in this confrontation? Explain.
- What changed about this pattern of PAC communication as the confrontation moved along? Explain.
- Take some time to think about how you communicate in the context of the PAC model.
- What persona, or role, do you tend to take on as you interact with others? Consider responding to this question in the context of the following adult relationships: Spouse/mateAdult children (16+ years old), Parents, Siblings, Friends, Professional relationships, Colleagues/peers, Service relationships (waitress/waiter, check out clerk, attendants, creditors, etc.)
- How might interaction in your relationships improve if you commit to Adult-to-Adult communication as a tangible expression of your commitment to recovery God’s way?
- What are you sacrificially offering up to God when you commit to fruit-producing communication in each of the relationships in your life; from those most important to you to those that are most casual?
Please proceed to this weeks application challenge by clicking TWRAC 036.
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