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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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Today I m joined by my dear friend, Courtney Smith, Enneagram and Conscious Leadership Group coach.
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We are going to dive into the drama triangle, what it is and how to get out of it.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context, the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks in their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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From my perspective, one of the reasons we tell stories is it helps give us a sense of who we are.
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We use stories to affirm our identity.
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And that s part of the reason why we don t actually like to call them stories, because if we call them stories and we begin to see that the self is actually rooted in construction,
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made-up, interpreted reality, it can be very threatening to us and to our sense of, who would I be without this story?
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And so that s one of the things that I really love about this is you can begin to see that my sense of self has to change.
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If I m willing to look at my stories, what is going to happen is my sense of who I am is going to change.
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So says Courtney Smith, a coach, facilitator, and dear friend who has schooled and trained in many different modalities, Conscious Leadership Group, Byron Katie s work, the Alexander Technique, and the Enneagram.
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She is one of my favorite thought partners because of the range of her intelligence and the structure of her mind.
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She was a math econ major who happens to have a JD from Yale and a master s in public health from NYU.
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Before taking a turn toward the mystical, she was a McKinsey consultant.
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So in short, she s a multi-hyphenate renaissance woman whose bookshelf looks much like mine.
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You might remember Courtney from our conversation on pulling the thread about the Enneagram.
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If you missed it, there s a link in the show notes.
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But today we re going to talk about Stephen Cartman s drama triangle.
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What it is, how to know when you re in it, and how to move past it, while recognizing that you ll be in another one soon enough.
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We also talk about being above and below the line and the difference between facts and stories.
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And as part of this, we do some live coaching and role play.
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So you will all get a sense of how powerful this work can be.
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Meanwhile, if you want to work with me and Courtney together, we re hosting a workshop from May 17th through 19th at the Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone, North Carolina.
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It s called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, and will be a combination of On Our Best Behavior and Courtney s techniques.
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Honestly, I can t wait.
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I hope you ll all join us.
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The link to sign up is also in the episode page or the link in bio on my Instagram account, at Elise Lunen.
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Okay, let s get to our conversation.
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Courtney, I m excited for this, as you know, because I love talking to you and I love being in a women s group with you and watching you work.
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And we have the same taste in teachers and principals and ideas and concepts.
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So today, what I m hoping to do is have you take us through some core components that people might recognize from the Conscious Leadership Group.
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We re going to do facts versus stories, above and below the line, and then we re going to do some drama triangling real time.
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Great.
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Well, I m excited to do all of this.
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And I love having you in one of my women s groups, because I know that you have strong preferences and a high taste in bar.
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So I love having you in the room to give me feedback.
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I think that you re probably not alone, that a lot of people have questions about, what s it like to do women s work, group work with women?
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And am I going to feel comfortable sharing?
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How do you build a container of trust?
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All of those kinds of questions.
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I just have been delighted how much you ve gone forward in the group.
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And I feel like I m getting a lot out of it.
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And I hope you are too.
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And I feel like the group is also.
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Group work is fascinating for anyone who s listening who hasn t done it or has considered it.
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I hadn t really.
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I love, love group experiences with teachers.
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I particularly love it when everyone s facing in the same direction towards a board.
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And I like listening to people share, typically.
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I think it s really interesting and to catch my own preconceptions and judgments and often be entirely surprised by what people say.
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But yeah, group work was hard.
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As you know, it wasn t an easy yes for me, in part because it s so intimate.
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And it s been really interesting to be present with myself, with this group of women who are wonderful.
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but to watch like how I react, what gets triggered, what buttons get pushed, how I respond is in of itself fascinating despite the content and like probably the biggest lesson for people, right, that you work with.
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Well, I think it s really interesting because when we talk about above and below the line, which is about talking about the presence of fear or threat, for me, one of the things that s really interesting about group work is we can talk intellectually about what it means to be scared and what happens to our body and what happens to our thinking when we re scared and what are we going to do about that.
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But the group work itself is triggering that for most people.
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And so it s an opportunity just by showing up.
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to actually not have an intellectual experience of one of the concepts that we re working with, but to actually practice transcending the issue of fear or threat like live.
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And so for me, that s one of the biggest upsides of group work is so much of what we re going to talk about today is about this idea of fear or threat of losing approval or others judging us.
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And typically what happens in group work is you find that people love you all the more for your flaws and vulnerability.
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And I can tell you that, and I can coach you through that as one-on-one, but there s something really special about having a lived experience of that in a group.
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Yeah, it s so interesting to hear you say that because I find I hold the most judgment, not specifically talking about our group, but in general with someone, you re watching them and you re like, I see you and you don t see yourself.
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And then when you watch someone flip and come to that own awareness of their behavior and what s actually driving them, it s very lovable.
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very lovable.
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And not just because it s like a performed act of vulnerability either, but because it s just so human to watch someone take responsibility for themselves.
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And that s really drama triangle stuff, which we re going to get to.
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But you mentioned above the below the line.
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Do you want to start there or with facts and stories?
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I think let s start with fact versus story because to some extent that really informs above and below the line.
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And
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The concept of fact versus story, I want to start by saying these tools, fact versus story, bubble of the line and drama triangle, I really consider them like life-changing practices.
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That once you internalize them, you actually see the world differently.
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You can t unsee the world.
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And so I find through this lens, it s kind of forever with you.
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And so I think these are really special, extremely powerful tools.
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And the first one that I would start with this idea of fact versus story is fact versus story is pointing to the fact that there are the events of our life.
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And then there s the way we hold and make meaning of those events, how we interpret those events.
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And I would call what s actually happening content.
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The facts and the way we hold and make meaning of it is our context.
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And typically what happens is when we re talking with friends or talking at work or any situation, most of the time we re not distinguishing between content and context.
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In other words, we re not distinguishing between the facts.
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of what is real, and then the stories that we re making up about those facts.
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They get kind of all twisted and conflated.
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And when we do that, there s a lot of fallout.
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And one piece of
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Fallout is most arguments are about a conflict in story, my story versus your story.
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And it s hard to actually resolve a conflict.
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It very rarely happens that someone flips to like, Oh, you were right.
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Like I see it now.
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I changed my story.
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That doesn t happen very often.
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And so that s typically why we see conflicts that happen over and over again.
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And we see no resolution because it s story versus story.
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The second thing is I would say that our ability to make, to create story from facts is a superpower of ours as human beings.
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And the reason it s a superpower is it allows us to manipulate and make sense of reality.
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And that s super, super powerful.
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But if we don t see the stories we re actually using,
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to make sense and then work with reality, we forget that that lens is now filtering and actively changing how we move through the world.
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So let me just give you an example, because that was very abstract.
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One of my kids has ADHD.
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And there are so many stories I can make up about the fact that he has ADHD.
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I could make up the story it s my fault.
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I can make up the story that it s some genetic issue with my husband.
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I could make up the story that my son s going to struggle in school.
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I can make up the story that he s going to require more support from me compared to like whatever an average kid would be.
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Already so many stories in that.
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I could make up the story that he s going to force teachers to be really good at their job, that he s going to demand super teaching, and that he is my greatest teacher and is bringing out the better parent in me because he s so different than I am.
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And you can sort of see that if I double down on any one of those stories, my experience of reality is really, really different.
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And so if I don t bother to slow down and ask myself, what is my story?
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And am I willing to, rather than it holding me and dictate my experience of reality, can I hold it so that then I can allow my stories to be complicated and more nuanced?
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And I give myself greater range to move through reality rather than being limited by the story.
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Yeah, I mean, it s such a powerful tool just to even think of the way that and I m not going to jump forward to being above and below the line, but the way that you can either choose to take a central fact and spin it into this positive, life-affirming, fascinating journey that you two are going to embark on versus
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My child will never succeed.
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My child will never will have a hard time.
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My child, you know, and so on and so forth.
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And we re all familiar.
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I mean, you could call it like positive versus negative mindset or whatever.
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Yeah.
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But the reality is that for any of us can go anywhere.
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on facts versus stories.
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And we do that all day.
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As you mentioned, I mean, it s the source of so much conflict, for example, between me and my husband.
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Right.
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He ll come in.
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I m distracted or laser focused on something.
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He says something I miss.
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And suddenly, like, why are you in a shitty mood?
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And what did I do?
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And I remember, you know, and I m like, whoa, whoa.
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I had my headphone.
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I m listening to an audio book or whatever it may be.
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The rapidity.
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Right.
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Through which we make meaning.
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and assign pattern and fail to be with what s present is stunning.
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Yeah, we re story making machines.
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I mean, that s what the book Sapiens is all about.
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It s our it s actually our superpower.
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Families are stories.
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Money is a story.
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Countries are stories.
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We ve accomplished so much because we can use stories to collaborate, unify, do all kinds of things with them.
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and our mind is lightning fast at them.
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That capacity is never going to go away.
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So the question then becomes, can I start recognizing when I m in story and can I use some tools to kind of neutralize the inevitable storymaking that I m going to do in any situation?
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And it starts with identifying the facts, which I think is so powerful.
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I mean, it sounds so basic.
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But even using that silly example that I just gave, instead of flying, which either my husband and I are inclined to do, to sort of like all the various ways in which we feel abandoned by each other or lonely or unheard or whatever it may be,
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A fact is something that would be recorded on videotape, right?
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Yeah.
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When I walk in the door, you don t look up or say hi.
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Would that be a fact or is that still a story?
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Well, you could say like what we would know is maybe in this moment, that s not what happened.
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But to generalize that when I walk through the door, this is what happens.
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And that s probably not a fact.
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That s probably too charged.
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There s some story in there.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I love your brain.
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But yes, exactly.
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So when I walked in tonight, I asked you how your day was and you said, uh,
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But people listening, I mean you get the point.
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It s also like as I ve started to use it more in those moments where I can feel alone or panicked or I had sort of like a cash flow issue with my business at the beginning of the year and normally that s the sort of thing that would just
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flood my husband immediately where he just goes into like, I don t want to hear this.
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He can t be present with me when I start to get anxious about money.
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But I was able to say, OK, here are some facts and these are the stories that I m telling myself.
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And can you just be present with me and we can cycle through some of the stories that I m telling?
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myself and you can help me calm myself down. 
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And he was like, this is kind of interesting.
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What are we doing here?
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I was like, we re doing facts versus stories.
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But can you explain that process?
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Yeah.
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So the idea is this concept of fact versus story.
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Okay, great.
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Now, how do I make this meaningful and actionable in my real life?
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Because that s the group work and what ZLG is all about is actually like applying this in real time.
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And so the idea is that probably 99% of what we talk about is story.
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And can I be willing to start differentiating in my language between fact and story?
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And so it feels kind of awkward at first.
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But the goal is to say, here s the facts.
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And usually, it s no more than one or two.
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you ll try to make up a bunch as a way to sort of convince yourself that you re right.
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But usually there s very, very few facts.
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And then the superpower move is to say, the story I m making up about those facts is dot, dot, dot.
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Yeah.
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And it becomes a way of being able to share your experience in a way that is what we would call unarguably true.
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Because stories can be argued with, but the fact that this is my story is true.
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And you can sort of picture, like, my husband s driving the car.
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He s really, really quiet.
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We haven t talked to each other.
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We re on the way to dinner.
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He s not saying anything.
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I say, are you mad at me?
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Or I say, hey, you re quiet.
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The story I m making up about that is you re mad at me.
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any truth to that.
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It s such a different way of saying the same thing, but it s going to be perceived really, really differently.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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It s part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.
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Join me on Wildcard wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.
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We did an exercise and without sort of breaking any confidence in terms of what was shared, you split us into pairs.
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This is a group of women, some women who know each other and most of us who don t really intimately know each other.
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And we did this, right?
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And you had us pick one fact.
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And then from that fact, the stories that we tell ourselves about that fact, right?
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So I think my fact was I m half Jewish.
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And the story I tell myself is that I belong to no faith and nowhere.
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The story I tell myself is that, you know, on and on and on.
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But it was what was stunning about that explication.
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I think you gave us a minute, two minutes.
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It s like the depth that we got with each other and with speed and so much intimacy and so many tears.
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And it s fascinating.
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I recommend everyone do this.
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You know, for some people it might be like, my father left.
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when I was nine, or my parents got divorced, or I m divorced, or, you know, whatever it may be, the speed with which you can start to see your own thinking spread out before you.
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And the person who listens, you could probably do it to a wall or to a pet, but the person who listens that just thanks you for sharing doesn t respond.
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But like, it was wild to watch and to see other people s meaning making.
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And how far they could take something.
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And there were big things typically, but how far you can take a single fact and extend it throughout your life to tell a lot of stories.
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Yeah.
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And really create a reality that is actually predicated upon the story you made up about very, very limited information.
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Yeah.
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And part of the reason we do that exercise is, from my perspective, one of the reasons we tell stories is it helps give us a sense of who we are.
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We use stories to affirm our identity.
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And that s part of the reason why we don t actually like to call them stories, because if we call them stories, and we begin to see that the self is actually rooted in construction, made up interpreted reality.
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It can be very threatening to us and to our sense of who would I be without this story.
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And so that s one of the things that I really love about this is you can begin to see that my sense of self has to change.
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If I m willing to look at my stories, what is going to happen is my sense of who I am is going to change.
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No, it s really intense.
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The fear of that, the terror of that, but also the opportunity of that.
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So I ll share that my parents are divorced, and the very, very first time I did this exercise, I said, my parents are divorced.
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The story I make up about that is I come from a family of brokenness.
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I m screwed up.
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because my parents were divorced.
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And the moment I said that out loud, I was like, oh my, whoa, that s a doozy of a story to invest in.
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And to then sort of like actually transform it into, actually that s made me appreciate the power of relationships.
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It s been a big piece of my own work and growth and evolution.
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It s made me value marriage.
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There s so many other ways I could take it.
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And just that one sort of like, holy shit, this is what I ve been up to.
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There s a big light bulb moment that can go off for people.
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Yeah.
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Well, I think that s the perfect way to segue to being above and below the line, right?
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Because your interpretation of these facts and the story making can be an above the line version and a below the line version.
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And I think it s worth noting, I m sure you ll note it, but that the instinct that everyone who s listening is going to have is to be like, I m always above the line, right?
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I don t want to ever be below the line.
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I m above the line.
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I m over this.
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And the reality is that most of us, what, spend 99% of our lives and our time below the line?
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Maybe it s not that dire, but this is OK.
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This is the journey.
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This is our life.
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This is because of fear how we function, right?
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Yeah.
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So the concept of above below the line is if you go back to content versus context, above and below the line is a shorthand way of talking about the context you re bringing to a situation.
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And the shorthand is, are you approaching the situation from a place of fear or threat?
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Or are you alternatively
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approaching it from a place of openness, possibility, presence, and growth.
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And the first thing I want to say about that is from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense to over-index on seeing fear and threat, seeing threat in any situation.
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And so this is part of the reason why we want to normalize and get real about how often we are experiencing life from below the line.
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It s because
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we can see threat and then get out ahead of it that we survived as a species.
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But one of the things that s really challenging about seeing fear or threat in situations is fear is designed to be an overwhelming physical experience.
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It s designed to force change for you to do something to get yourself to feel safe again, because it s overwhelming.
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And so when we are looking at situations from a place of fear or threat, what ends up happening is then we start gearing our stories, our feelings, and our thoughts to how can I make myself feel safe again?
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And that s a fundamental human need.
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So I want to normalize that.
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Of course, when you re feeling scared, you want to feel safe again, but that becomes the primary need that we re satisfying now.
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And when that happens, we get kind of hijacked and lose the ability to solve for other needs or opportunities or desires that actually our wiser self might be trying to optimize for.
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So for example, you know, if I m trying to like connection, purpose, play, growth, learning, all of those things become second order functions.
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once fear is in the system.
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And so above and below the line matters, and identifying when we have threat in the system matters, because once we do that and see what we re up to, we can then sort of hold the fear differently.
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And again, in the same way that like stories can either have us or we can hold them so that we have some separation and can work with them.
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It s the same thing with fear.
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Fear can have us and drive the system, drive the bus, or we can presence it and then hold it so that then we have the wherewithal
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to approach situations from a broader range of functions, values, and optimization.
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And I think this is Hale Dwoskin, right?
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But the fear that he outlines, and this feels like pretty comprehensive to me, I haven t seen a better model, is fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of safety or security,
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and fear of loss of control.
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Those are sort of the primary buckets, right?
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As you re thinking about this, it s easy to identify the general terrain that you re in when something happens.
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Yeah.
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And I m glad that you mentioned that because what we want to do in these situations, and maybe at some point we can just do a little exercise about it, is we really just want to be with ourselves in our fear.
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And we can get overly cute about getting specific about the language and, well, this is making me scared for this reason, and it s because this happened to me 15 years ago, and now I m off to the races telling you the story about what happened.
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And
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Once we do that, we ve lost the capacity to just be with, in a very simple way, the part of us who s scared.
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And so this shorthand of, am I scared of loss of security, approval, or control, really helps me just stay with my experience.
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All fears can be kind of reduced to one of those.
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Which is it here?
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And can I just see that that s what s driving me?
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Yeah.
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I think the other thing that you re mentioning there is really important because most of us sort of think about fear as like, you know, like what happens to us when the airplane is shaking or someone pulls out in front of us, like in a car, these really extreme situations when we can really feel that fear is online.
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But when you start expanding,
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Fear to not just be about security, which we can define, you know, not just physical harm, but also emotional harm and fear of loss of approval and fear of loss of control.
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We can then begin to see that the experience of fear is often much more subtle than we realize and.
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From my perspective, the hallmark of fear is really any experience of contraction and contraction in the body, which would feel like rigidity, tension, tightening, in addition to the tummy fluttering and heart fluttering that most of us typically associate with fear.
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The contraction around the heart, which really we experience as I would call like othering, creating a wall or separation between me and the person in the situation,
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or contraction in the mind, which is really all about kind of, again, this fact versus story becoming attached to my story is the truth, my story is the right way.
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And so once we begin to define and recognize that fear can just
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manifest as subtly as, I know the answer and I m not going to listen to your perspective.
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I now see that threat is here way more often than I thought.
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Yes, very present.
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And then the presence of fear is what drives us to be below the line most of the time, right, where we see the world
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acting to us where we are sort of the victims of the world and its events or rather than being above the line where we see ourselves as the author of our own experience.
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Did I say that right?
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Yeah.
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Yeah, look at you.
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Someone s been going to class.
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Sign me up.
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I m an excellent student, Courtney.
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I take a lot of notes.
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I m sure you ve noticed.
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As you were talking, one thing that occurred to me that I did want to say is for those people who ve listened to our conversation about the Enneagram that happened several months ago, this is really the place where the Enneagram and some of these foundational concepts intersect.
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Because you can think about each of the nine Enneagram types as a habitual pattern of story making in the world, about the world.
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and a particular flavor of what causes me to go below the line?
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What triggers me into fear?
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And is the fear more about approval, control or security?
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And once I feel scared, what are my habitual default patterns for making myself feel safe again?
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And if you re a six like me and Courtney, then just fear and anxiety is your daily broth.
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Well, this is, from my perspective, one of the superpowers of The Six is that we can talk about what happens in the drama triangle, and there s lots of work to do there.
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But just the willingness to presence, hey, I feel really scared.
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Look at me.
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There s a part of me that is flipping out here.
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And then I can just take a deep breath around that part of me.
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who is scared to do a podcast or still gets scared every time she does a women s group or the dozens of other times that I get scared throughout the day, I can just say, hey, look at this part of me.
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There she is.
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And then kind of take a deep breath and keep her alongside me, but keep going.
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I think the shorthand of being above or below the line for me at least is so helpful even as a way to back end to understand what is the fear and the threat.
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And I know that I am below the line when I get exercised, when I get defensive, when I get agitated.
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That s sort of a tell.
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I think probably a universal tell for all of us.
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Before we started recording, Courtney and I were catching up and thinking of good drama triangle examples to use or to coach.
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And I was saying about when this comes out, this series on my sub sack will be done.
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But I m doing this four part series was originally just supposed to be one newsletter about the presence of manholes and this idea that most of the prominent podcasts are hosted by men and these men don t interview women.
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Right?
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The stats are pretty stunning for people like Huberman and Peter Attia and Sam Harris and Tim Ferriss.
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And I did this audit last summer and was going to sort of place the piece.
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And I just was sort of talked out of it and talked myself out of it and get very below the line, to be honest, about people like Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman in a way that is so interesting to me because, like, I don t care about Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman.
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And yet I clearly do, right?
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And so as Courtney and I were talking before, I was like, oh, I get so below the line.
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And the pieces have been incredibly validating because they ve had their own sort of morality in some ways.
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And yet I still feel the threat of not wanting to offend these men or not wanting to deny myself opportunities.
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And then the grief and sadness that I don t think that they care.
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Right.
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And I m definitely below the line about this particular topic in a way that I, of course, you can hear me higher minding and being like, I don t care about Peter Atiyah.
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Well, I ve now written three newsletters about Peter.
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Yeah.
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Well, I was listening to you and I was sort of like thinking like, well, so let s just stop.
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And, you know, what is the fear that s most active in you?
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Is it a fear of loss of control, loss of approval or loss of security in this circumstance?
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loss of approval and loss of security.
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Because the loss of approval comes from, I don t want to let these guys get to me in some ways.
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And yet at the same time, I m desperate for these guys to engage with women.
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And specifically for those guys to engage with female doctors and experts on parity with the men that they engage with.
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And then for safety and security, it s like these guys dominate.
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And my next newsletter was about scarcity and how there s no corollary of women helping women in these spaces in the same way that there are men helping men.
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And so it s like a deprivation of opportunity for myself and other women who could then raise up other women, if that makes sense.
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Like it s these pervasive cycles.
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And I think the threat to me is also a little bit deeper in the sense that when I write about feminism or I think about patriarchy,
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So much of my focus, in part because there are so many other thinkers who are focused on the structures of patriarchy and the external factors, so much of my work is focused on internalized patriarchy and this idea that the calls coming from inside the house and the more that each of us can address our own ways of upholding these patriarchal systems and ideas, including the fact that listening to these podcasts and not hearing any women is completely normal to us.
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or the way in which we feel so much scarcity around helping other women, et cetera.
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That s what I care about.
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And there s something like, when I wrote the piece, I was like, well, maybe these guys don t know.
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Maybe they re along for this ride with us, and they will also be part of looking at their own internalized patriarchy.
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And like, of course they know.
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And of course they don t care.
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That s what s come back to me.
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I know they know.
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I don t know that they ve necessarily read my piece, but the feedback that I ve gotten is that this is not my original thinking here and that they ve been told.
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And so I think that there s sadness in that too.
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I don t know.
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Well, what I m really struck by is, and this is like such a real time, like beautiful example is,
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know, this idea of like being above or below the line, you know, it s not static.
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It s not like, oh, once I identify this is where I am, and now I can take a deep breath, and I m gonna like, you know, kind of shift my experience.
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And now I m done.
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You know, it s like, we re constantly going back and forth.
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And so like, I heard, you know,
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language from you, which I appreciated around, like, I can tell them below the line, I can tell that I m activated, I can tell that I have a point of view, and I m not willing to listen, I feel really contracted around it.
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And I can feel how scared I am around approval and security.
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And then I hear a shift in you of, you know, I also want to sort of take responsibility within my own
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Home metaphorically for the way the system is set up and all the ways that I ve internalized that and I am participating in that system.
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And what would be small acts of responsibility that I could take.
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Even as I want to point out that there are structural and systemic issues here at play.
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And then, you know, the flip to like back below of, you know, like these guys, like maybe they don t even care.
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And then the rise above to like, actually I just feel a lot of grief and sadness about the fact that like the story I make up that they don t care, which is ultimately a story.
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Cause we don t really know what s going on over there.
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And so I just want to point out that the work of Above Below the Line is the context for any sort of situation.
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It s dynamic and very human to be going above, below, above, below, above, below.
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Right.
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And a testament to the fact that as much as we all profess and claim to be above the line about all things all the time, we re frequently not.
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And as a reminder, like, thank you for pointing that out, because when I m below the line, I feel like the world is happening to me.
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I m a victim of the world.
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There s someone to blame outside of me.
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When I move above the line, it s like, well, what sort of future or different patterns could we create?
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The world is happening through me, by me.
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I m responsible for my own experience.
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Which is, well, it s interesting because culturally I think a lot of us would prefer to live below the line and now I guess we can move into the drama triangle.
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But it s a lot more creative and fun, I think, to be above the line.
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And before we get into that, I think we should clarify
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that we re going to talk about victims and victimhood, and there s a difference.
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So clearly, people are victims of circumstances, events.
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There are victims in our midst.
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We re not suggesting that there s not.
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Then there s victim consciousness, and that s what we re going to talk about in this context.
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So I just want to clarify that so that we don t sound crazy or heartless as we move forward.
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Okay, great.
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So one of the things that we kind of go back to like above below the line, and this idea that when fear is present in the system, if we re not consciously working with it, that it ends up driving our choices.
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One of the outcomes of that is that we will therefore see situations repeat themselves.
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because I am now showing up in a way only to make myself feel safe again, as opposed to looking at the situation, the issue that needs to be solved.
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solve the issue that needs to be learned or resolved.
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And that s not available to me anymore because I m so focused on fear.
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So one of the things I like to do when people are saying, I ve done a lot of work.
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I m above the line most of the time.
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One of the things I like to do is let s go through your life and talk about recurring situations, patterns, because those are going to be pointing to, most likely,
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places that you re below the line.
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And when we re below the line, because we re orienting from a place of fear, or as you described, I m at the effect of the world, the world is happening to me, the context
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or the consciousness or the way I m holding and making sense of what s happening is I see it through the lens of victim because I m at the effect of external circumstances.
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And so just to clarify that in content land, things do happen to people.
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I don t wanna diminish or pretend that s not real.
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But what we re talking about is the decision to hold it from a context of I m at the effect of it.
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There s this concept called the drama triangle, which Stephen Cartman originated in the 1960s.
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And when we re looking and experiencing a situation from the lens of victimhood, there are three different flavors of what we do when we feel out the effect of something.
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The first is sort of the classic victim stance,
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which is to be vocal about how you don t have any choice or power here.
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And so this would be language around like, poor me, I don t have any other choice.
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I guess I ll just sort of suck it up.
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I m so overwhelmed.
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I m the only one who s having to take this on.
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It s leaning into the fact that life is happening to me and owning, taking that perspective.
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The second stop on the drama triangle, or flavor of victimhood, is villain.
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And this is the posture of blaming either yourself or someone else for the bad thing that you re at the effect of.
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So the villain says things like, this is hurting me, and I know why.
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It s your fault.
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You did this.
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I know how to fix this.
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You should do this.
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If you would only change in this way, this never would have happened or blaming oneself.
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I m the one that screwed it up.
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I got to get my shit together.
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And then maybe I can fix this.
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So it has a anger and a judging and a blaming quality.
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It s identifying the source of the quote unquote problem and becoming attached and fixed on that way of orienting to the world and then the third flavor of victimhood is what we would call the hero perspective.
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And the hero looks like they are coming in to solve the problem but really what s happening is the hero because they re focused on.
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the discomfort of fear, what they re trying to do is they fix the feeling of fear, either in themselves or another person.
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And that becomes the responsibility they take on rather than the responsibility of what actually should change here.
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So heroes are bringing what we would call like temporary relief to the system.
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helping everyone feel safe again so that we can kind of move forward, but not structurally changing it.
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And so this might look like, you know, maybe distracting people from their discomfort or soothing them, giving some like assurances that it s okay.
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This happens to everyone.
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We ll figure it out.
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like kind of platitudes, or it can also look like someone who sort of comes in and tries to make your discomfort go away.
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Like someone maybe who comes in and says like, you know what, like in your situation, I ll put you on my podcast.
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That ll fix everything when actually maybe structurally the situation is still the same.
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And so heroes often get validated, but really what they re doing is taking responsibility for not the wrong thing, but their focus is on the fear and that s what they re solving for rather than bigger structural, deeper concerns.
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SPEAKER_00
Right.
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And we re going to workshop this and you re going to point out how the way that you coach the drama triangle in any conflict or issue, you re typically taking all three roles as you move around it.
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You can also and maybe this is a different application, but I m sure people are listening who are involved in workplace triangulation or drama.
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We all are also habituated, right, to sort of the role.
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I play the hero.
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I m always the villain.
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I always get blamed.
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So does it work on that level too?
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Or is that a different application?
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Well, I mean, again, I think this is like a foundational tool.
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So I think there s a lot of applications.
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And one of the reasons why I like it is because you can have fun with it.
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And you can start like seeing what s really going on and having like a chuckle with yourself and other people about just like,
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how ritualized in our patterns, how stuck we all get ourselves.
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For me, when I m working with corporate clients or nonprofit clients, businesses often have lore that is through the lens of the drama triangle.
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that is used to build workplace culture.
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And so you might have middle managers blaming like the C-level suite.
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And so they re in the role of victim and then they re blaming sort of the C-level suite.
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And then they re simultaneously maybe the hero and trying to like going out for drinks every Friday night to make themselves feel better only to come back on Monday and start complaining again.
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So with corporate clients I love, what are your common drama triangle stories?
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This is like the foundation, thinking about it, of modern marketing, right?
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Like there s a villain, we re the heroes, and you as the consumers have been the victims of these villains.
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But our product is going to solve and fix all of these issues for you without obviously addressing
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any systemic concerns.
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This is capitalism.
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But as you think about it, you ll start identifying and you ll start watching your friends, which is really fun because we should all therapize each other at all times.
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But you start watching your friends and you can identify, you can watch them move the triangle in the stories that they re telling, where they re identifying the villain and so on and so forth.
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It s fun.
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It is fun.
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And I like these.
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Like one of the things that s great about it is you can get your body into it and actually stand on the triangle.
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And, you know, one of the things that happens is because we re in the triangle, but we kind of realize it s like a little unprofessional or childlike to like.
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No, no, no.
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It s all your fault.
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Or, oh, poor me.
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This is terrible.
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I ll come in and take care of this for like five minutes.
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And I want you to see my greatness and see how awesome I am.
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We re kind of a little sneakier about what we re up to.
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And part of what happens when we re sneaky about it is the energy lasts a very, very, very long time.
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And we can be stuck in the triangle then for, you know,
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years in particular relationships.
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And so when we start playing with it and actually give someone space,
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Like, let s just be honest that you re playing the victim, right?
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Like you re in victim mode right now.
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And like, let me hear it.
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Let s really talk about how awful this is and how you have no choice and how there s just nothing you could do.
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Like, you are so right about that.
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I want to hear all about that as big as you can.
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And so you kind of give it the fullest expression of itself because it s kind of longing.
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You re longing to do that.
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and give people space to own.
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This is my reality for a moment.
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This is how I m seeing the world.
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And once you give someone space to live that reality in its fullest expression, then because it s had its due, you can begin to play with it.
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SPEAKER_00
Are you going to demonstrate?
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SPEAKER_00
No, but I ve watched, I ve now watched a bunch of women do this and stand on the triangle with like a victim villain and hero card and they talk through what s typically like a very pedestrian, very accessible example with their children or their workplace or their partner and watch them identify as they re talking and they re moving around as they re sort of placing blame and moving to the, it s,
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SPEAKER_00
his fault and moving to the villain spot and then moving to the hero.
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SPEAKER_00
Anyway, it s really… Yeah, let s do one.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s do it.
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SPEAKER_00
You start.
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SPEAKER_00
You start.
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SPEAKER_00
I nominate you.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay.
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SPEAKER_01
You know what I m below the line about?
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SPEAKER_01
I m a little below the line.
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SPEAKER_01
And I m going to pretend I m very below the line just for purposes of this exercise about the fact that summer is 13 weeks long.
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SPEAKER_01
All right, first of all, if you want to know who I m mad at, I m mad at the schools.
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SPEAKER_01
I m mad that like we actually give a quarter of the year off to students.
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SPEAKER_01
And by the way,
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Have you seen the statistics that like a third of what you learned the previous year, students just completely forget because summer is super, super, super long?
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SPEAKER_01
Like, is it the teacher s unions?
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SPEAKER_01
Is it just tradition?
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SPEAKER_01
Like, why do we keep living in this stupid system when we have the evidence that we shouldn t be giving kids 13 weeks off, yet we still seem to be doing it over and over and over again.
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SPEAKER_01
And now I m gonna shift into victim mode, which is like, this is just the way it is.
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This is the structure of our country.
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School s been run this way for 100 years.
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There s absolutely nothing I can do about this.
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SPEAKER_01
I have to figure out 13 weeks of summer plans every year for my three children.
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And if I don t do that, then they re going to sit around, and I m going to be trying to work all day, and they re going to be knocking at my door and bugging me.
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And I m not going to get my work done.
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And then I m going to be forced to make them get on a device.
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And then they re going to become addicted to their devices.
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And then I m going to have to deal with the fact that like.
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Now they re addicted to Fortnite or Roblox or whatever game.
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And not only is this affecting me and my ability to actually do my job, this is affecting my children.
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And so now my children are the victims also of this stupid national system we have because there s nothing that they can do.
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They have no choice but to just lull about and be on their device.
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And so now I m going to hero, and I m going to scurry and work really hard to overschedule them.
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And it s like a camp for every single week.
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I may or may not ask my husband to do it with me because this has been sort of the role that I ve played for a long time.
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And then I could get into another drama triangle about the gendered roles of who s doing what in households.
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But I m going to be the one that s up till midnight researching camps and trying to figure out what camp should be the perfect one because I can t bear the thought of our children sort of like hanging out and doing nothing because that would be terrible for them and terrible for me.
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such a relatable example.
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And it s true.
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It s such a strange system.
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I m trying to think of what I am also below the line about because that s such a good one.
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I mean, I ll just I ll just pick on Rob because for everyone who s listening, I love Rob.
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But we ll do we have two spring breaks at our school, which is kind of nice.
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And one of them is we decided to go skiing.
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So that s the context.
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And again, I m not legitimately below the line, but this is a good example.
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So
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Villain first and maybe this is a mix of villain and hero.
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You re gonna tell me and victim I m just gonna rant and then you can tell me what I was doing.
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All right, so the kids have this week off and Clearly, I m the only one who s gonna take the initiative to plan something if I don t plan something then I
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Nothing will happen.
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The time will come on too quickly.
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We ll have no place to stay.
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We ll have no flight.
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So I can t rely on Rob to research anything or book anything.
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Although he would interrupt me here and say that he did book the rental car and actually fought with the rental car company because they tried to downgrade us and we because we had
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overpaid Courtney for that.
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When I saw what he did, I was like, that is too much for that rental car, et cetera.
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But at the same time, he took the initiative to book it.
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So who am I to criticize?
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So yes, I organized everything.
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I did all the meal planning.
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I booked all of our flights.
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I organized our parking at the airport.
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I organized the ski rentals, the ski school, all the shopping.
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Hero.
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Hero.
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Hero.
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I made sure that my kids had extra ski socks.
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I packed them completely.
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And then, you know, my husband, of course, was like, where are we going?
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And what s the plan?
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And then I had to get really mad because it s in the calendar that we share.
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And why do I have to go through my email?
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I ve already sent him all of this.
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Why am I the only one who reads the directions for how to get into the condo?
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And yeah, but it ll never change.
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If I just, like, let him take care of anything, then nothing will ever happen and we ll never go anywhere.
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And my kids will also just be on Fortnite all day and or Roblox.
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And not only will they do that, but they will spend more money than we would going on a trip, buying them Robux and V-Bucks.
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Victim.
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And because all they do is they treat me like an ATM.
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That was mine.
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How did that feel?
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I mean, it feels good.
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And it s funny, but it s also this is a pattern, right?
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Like, of course, I take care of everything, because this is what I do.
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And I m so much better at it, Courtney.
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And if I don t do it, it won t get done right.
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And so nothing will ever change.
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Yeah.
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So with both of us, we could look at and the question is, like, what are we really scared of?
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Because that s the thing that was taking us below the line is the presence of fear and threat.
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And then we start using the triangle and these roles to oversimplify reality because it s all about safety.
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So what s the real fear?
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I think the fear for me is my kids will grow up and have spent their entire childhoods in a city away from nature on their devices or doing other things that are not particularly enriching.
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And I will have failed as a mother and they will have no recreational skills.
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They won t have had any interesting experiences.
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And yeah, I ll have done a terrible job.
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And it all hinges on skiing in Montana one week a summer.
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Yeah.
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So I can really resonate with that fear also in my situation.
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And then the other thing that I want to point out is one of the downsides of the drama triangle, because there s plenty of upsides.
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You know, we get to be in drama.
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It feels really fun.
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We can commiserate with people.
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It may not be comfortable but it feels pretty familiar.
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We don t actually have to take responsibility and ask the harder question of like what would be a sustainable long term solution here.
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And we don t have to risk conflict with our partner.
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So there s a lot of upside to being in the drama triangle and so that s one of the reasons we like to be there.
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One of the big downsides is once we see the world through this lens, everyone else who s in the situation has to be assigned one of these three roles.
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And so as you sort of pointed out, there are facts actually that could complicate your story that somehow don t get into the consciousness.
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And so Rob becomes this kind of caricatured bad guy when it might be more complicated than that.
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And each of us might empower our children to like, here are the rules.
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You figure out how you re going to spend spring break or two weeks of summer.
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And these are the parameters.
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But we see them as victims of these circumstances.
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And so we disempower them and kind of limit their own agency.
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And so that s one of the big consequences of the drama triangle is it really affects our relationships and actually affects people s own empowerment around us, including our own.
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Yeah.
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And I would add that the beauty of actually doing it and working is hearing yourself, right?
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And not only getting it out, but then hearing yourself and recognizing, oh, this is a pattern because, in part,
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Yes, I am more on it and more aggressively organized, I would even call myself.
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But my husband is perfectly capable of booking ski trips with his friends.
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He is perfectly capable of organizing half of this trip if I asked and delegated and facilitated that in some way, which maybe is also helpery.
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But there is part of me that clearly gets off on controlling all of it.
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And I hear that when I get on the drama triangle and start complaining.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And so what you re pointing to, I think is awesome is it really becomes an invitation then to personal responsibility, which is like, how are my stories and how are the behaviors that come from those stories of all originate in fear?
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How are those behaviors actually creating this situation that initially I thought I was at the effect of, but now as I begin to examine the role I m playing in it, I realize that I m actively the creator.
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Of this situation that I thought I had no control over and I thought was happening to me.
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And once I claim that personal responsibility, then that actually becomes the way through to any one of those actions.
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that we listed on the drama triangle, if we just flip the script and do it the opposite of what we have been doing, becomes a potential way out of shifting the experience altogether.
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And for that, we ll need a whole nother episode.
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This was so fun.
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I hope this was helpful for people.
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I had a lot of fun too.
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Come work with us in Boone, North Carolina.
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as Courtney mentioned.
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And these tools, I guess you would call them, facts versus stories, being able to recognize when you re above or below the line, and then putting yourself in the drama triangle or understanding the way that your drama triangling situations can shift the way you see your entire life.
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And I say that having participated in this women s group with Courtney and just watching her work in general and seeing
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The dawning of awareness and probably knowing that that s happening on my face, too, as I recognize the ways in which I let these stories run my life and the way that I ve become habituated to my own drama triangles.
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And it must serve me on some level, but on a bigger level, it certainly doesn t serve me at all.
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So, Courtney and I, as mentioned at the beginning, are hosting a workshop together from May 17th through 19th at the Art of Living Retreat Center.
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I ll put the link in the show notes and it s in my Instagram bio at EliseLoonan.com.
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And it s a three-day weekend retreat.
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It s called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness.
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It s sort of a mashup of some of these tools that we re discussing today and the way they intersect with honor of best behavior.
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You don t have to be a hardcore book reader to come and benefit.
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I think it ll be really fun.
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So if you can join us, we d love to see you.
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And the Substack newsletter series that I mentioned that was driving me below the line, that starts with a piece called Ending the Mantle, which is panels with men.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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or follow me on Instagram at Elise Lunen.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Cadence 13 team for producing these episodes.
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And to Valero Duval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.