It’s in our primal human nature to perceive conflict in terms of an archetypal meta-story with a victim, a villain, and a hero. This can make for an entertaining movie but, usually, seeing the real world in this way limits our growth, connection, and freedom by turning each other into dehumanizing caricatures and escalating conflict. Fast moral certainty comes with a high price tag. Psychologist Stephen Karpman named this pattern “the drama triangle”, and we’re so used to it that it feels normal and even inescapable. It shows up at every level of human relating, from the family to public discourse to international relations. The first step to rising above the drama triangle is to recognize it, which is the topic of this video. I examine why the drama triangle is so psychologically addictive, and five ways that it separates us from reality.

This basic question is, in my experience, central to almost all psychotherapy: “How much of this interpersonal problem is ‘my stuff’ and how much of it is ‘their stuff’ and how much is ‘our stuff’?” The same basic question from another angle: “how much of what I’m experiencing (perceiving, thinking, feeling, saying, doing) is because of the present reality in front of me, and how much of what I’m experiencing is because of my past conditioning?” We’re hardwired for continuous and responsive feedback exchange with each other, and at the same time we’re separate bodies and minds with personality tendencies that are unconnected to each another. It’s not simple to tease apart these two factors in our own behavior. And they’re even harder to disentangle in someone else’s behavior. Awareness of circular causality is the key to separating “me” from “you” from “us”. Without it, we’re shooting blind at the target of healthy relationships. In this video I argue that circular causality blindness was likely an evolutionarily adaptive perceptual distortion for both individuals and tribes, and that it also serves psychologically protective functions. We turn away from circular causality because doing so is in our DNA, and also because it makes us emotionally comfortable. I also claim that blindness to circular causality is gradually moving toward obsolescence and deprecation as a survival adaptation, and is shifting toward becoming more of an impairment psychologically, spiritually, and even existentially, despite the ease we feel from its simplicity. The costs of ignoring circular causality increasingly outweigh the benefits to the extent the world becomes more interconnected. Not perceiving circular causality explains a great deal of conflict, grief, isolation, and fear in the world today. Courageously opening our eyes to the circular causality between us is uncomfortable and challenging, but it’s also a bridge from suspicion to trust, from distance to intimacy, and from war to peace.

The more enduring and substantive the history between two people, the more personal their behavior toward each other will be. So where better to practice the subtle art of taking it personally than in marriages and intimate relationships? A couple’s mutual awareness of the circular causality between them can make the difference between a status quo stalemate for years and empathy that yields intimacy dividends for decades. Relationship problems can largely be explained by circular causality blindness, which leads to blame and resignation rather than accountability and effort. We tend to underestimate how much our own behavior shapes a partner’s behavior, which saves us from responsibility at the cost of empowerment. From the outside, it’s obvious that when both partners wait for the other to change before they change, nothing changes. Yet that’s often what happens. Comprehending the circular causality in a relationship dispels the absurdity of trying to improve a relationship by waiting passively or convincing a partner that they must change first. While not everything a partner does is caused by or related to what we do, it’s generally wise to assume that, because of our self-protective biases, we underestimate how much of our partner’s behavior is a response to our own, and so our influence in the relationship is probably greater than it feels.

When relationships are going well, we credit good intentions and enjoy the sweetness of harmony. But in conflict, we tell stories of “good vs evil” that erase shared responsibility. Between individuals and groups, there exists a human proclivity to make our side righteous and the other side wicked, because doing so is more comfortable than listening, empathizing, and compromising. Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls this “the myth of pure evil”. It’s the psychology behind polarization, tribalism, and conflict escalation. It allows harmful behavior to insidiously masquerade as virtue under the auspices of fighting evil. The myth of pure evil is not a denial of evil. It’s a denial that evil or blame lives exclusively on one side of any ongoing conflict. Awareness of the myth of pure evil is not an excuse for harm, but rather a prophylactic against unconsciously perpetuating it by failing to see the mix of darkness and light within all hearts and tribes, including our own.

Circular causality blindness" is what I call the psychological blind spot that causes us to selectively attribute others' behavior as a situational cause for our own, while simultaneously discounting how our actions act as a trigger for their behavior. Each partner or party within a system sees their own reactions as justified responses to the behavior of others. Two sides hold mirror-image half-truths, each convinced they’re merely reacting, rather than co-creating a mutually unsatisfying or destructive loop. This video explains how, due to various cognitive biases, we often give up on relationship problems, or make them worse with “solutions” that created the problems in the first place, because we only see one half of the “court” in the social game that we’re a part of, either voluntarily or involuntarily. It’s fairly easy to see circular causality from the vantage point of an outside observer of a system, for example observing someone else’s relationship. But when we are on the inside of that system as part of the circle, it’s much harder. We can make more conscious conclusions about what is likely in our blind spots if we’re aware of them which, to some extent, reduces our blindness. Seeing the full, reciprocal circle of influence helps us better comprehend the extent of our agency and the quality of our impact on personal relationships and, to some extent, the world.

Why do we have opposite tendencies to feel invisible and insignificant on one hand, and other times experience the “spotlight effect”, overestimating how much others are paying attention to us? Why do we oscillate between overestimating and underestimating our importance to others, and what do these misjudgements depend on? How can developmental and evolutionary psychology shed light on the disconnect between the perception vs the reality of how much or how little attention is turned our way? I share a few thoughts on these questions in this video.