This is part 3.2 of my ongoing video essay series, “The Subtle Art Of Taking It Personally”.
Audio/video version available on YouTube:
Why the drama triangle is important
A friend of mine asked me why I’m writing about the drama triangle, out of all the things I could take the time to write about. Or why I think it’s a useful thing to tell people about.
The answer took me only a minute or two to think of.
I want there to be more compassion in the world. I want people to feel safer and to trust each other more. I want people to feel secure that they won’t be harmed by other people, and can even be helped when they are genuinely in a bind and can’t help themselves.
And I want us to feel good about ourselves, because I think that our self-image is one of the most important factors that determines our quality of life. It’s very hard to have an enjoyable experience of being human to the extent that we dislike ourselves or feel unacceptable to others. Because of the way we’re biologically “wired” as social animals, our psychological well-being will inevitably be affected by the ways that we view one another, which is essentially the interpersonal state of our societies.
The drama triangle lens of people — over-categorizing each other as victims, villains, and rescuers — inherently makes us feel unsafe, unloved, and disempowered. It’s a dehumanizing way of seeing one another, and that makes us dehumanize ourselves. It’s not just that the drama triangle distorts reality, it’s that it does so in a way that lacks compassion and makes us feel angry, ashamed, fearful, helpless, and psychologically isolated. And it’s so everpresent that we don’t collectively realize how much we live inside it. So I think that shining a light on the drama triangle and bringing it into our consciousness can help break it’s spell on us, and free us to feel safer, more lovable, and more empowered.
Judging judgment
One of my favorite clinical supervisors once exclaimed in our session together, “I hate judgment!” And I immediately asked him if that statement was itself a judgment, and therefore an incongruous contradiction.
He replied, “yeah it’s a paradox, and I don’t even try to resolve it!”
I felt myself instantly get very curious about that paradox. What does it mean to judge judgment? Emotionally I wanted to agree with him, but logically it seemed hypocritical and contradictory.
Now I do see the paradox and not hypocrisy or contradiction. It’s like the man who says “I am lying”. If he’s lying, he’s telling the truth, and if he’s telling the truth, he lying. Or like the barber of the town who shaves only those in the town who don’t shave themselves. So if the barber shaves himself, then he isn’t supposed to shave himself. But if he doesn’t shave himself, then he is supposed to shave himself.
Judging judgment is like this. It’s calling something “bad” while at the same time saying that it’s bad to call things bad. This sometimes happens when a category (like judgments) is also an instance of it’s category, so it creates a self-referential loop as it does two different things at distinct levels of abstraction. The meta-judgment of the category “judgments” is sort of like two negatives in arithmetic that cancel each other out.
All of that paradox stuff aside, I’ll officially go on record here and join with my supervisor by declaring: I too hate judgment, and I unapologetically judge it.
Wise discernment vs defensive judgment
This is where an important semantic clarification is necessary.
There are two concepts that the word judgment typically points at, and I’m only condemning one of those concepts.
What I’m not criticising is the concept of what I’ll call, for clarity, “wise discernment”. Wise discernment is non-reactively making sensible distinctions about reality in order to decide how to live. I like the tarot a lot, and I think that the two tarots cards “justice” and “judgment” point at what I’m calling wise discernment. The justice card is about making the best decisions with the best consequences from a place of reason and clear-sightedness. The judgment card is similar, but it’s more about receiving insights from deeper intuition or even from a divine source, whatever that means to you. None of this is problematic — to the contrary, good decision-making that taps into logic, intuition, and spirit, is fundamental to surviving and thriving and woven throughout our human experience.
The concept I’m meta-judging is what I’ll label here as “defensive judgment”, which arises from our collective psychological shadow, separates us from reality, and makes our life smaller and disconnected from others. Wise discernment is healthy and expansive. Defensive judgment is fear-based and contractive.
I think that the tarot card that represents this harmful — dare I say immoral — kind of judgment is neither the Judgment card nor the Justice card, but rather the Devil card. The devil in the tarot represents the psychological shadow that influences us to avoid challenging but important experience through addictive and reactive behavior, which makes us smaller and limited. I think that the devil card broadly points at the energy of psychological defenses, including defensively judging one another. The drama triangle is a social complex of this “devilish”, or compulsive and addictive human tendency applied interpersonally, because it comforts us with a dehumanizing illusion of security at the expense of love and trust, shackling us with fear to rigid roles and their restrictive options of relating to one another. It offers us the Faustian bargain of a soothing narrative of certainty, but at the cost of demonizing and dehumanizing our fellow brothers and sisters, eroding our social trust, self-love, and psychological freedom.
So I think that to shine light on the drama triangle is no less than archetypal spiritual warfare — fighting the metaphorical devil by dissolving our collective human shadow that binds and separates us. Fighting the devil is hard work, and it’s uncomfortable, because it means courageously questioning our defenses that we’ve sought sanctuary in for so long. It’s often confusing, because what has felt good turns out to hurt us in the long run, and what is hard and even scary sometimes turns out to heal us and set us free and open ourselves to love. This is why some topics like the drama triangle and the myth of pure evil can be controversial. They are like the blue pill in The Matrix — safe, secure, pleasant — but on some deep level we can’t deny, fake and sedative. Challenging the drama triangle is a Matrix red pill — uncomfortable, growth-inducing, even painful and frightening — but those are often the costs of awakening to reality and the truth that sets us free.