105 - The Triangle and Addiction
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FREE RESOURCE: Relinquishing Your Defenses
Ultimately, every person who becomes addicted to any substance or behavioral process is running from knowing how to or being willing to contend with four realities and four promises (from episode #104), which requires that we know what to do with our feelings and needs.
We must become “response-able” to contend with life on life’s terms. While life is wonderful, it is also very painful. Even love, which is what we most desire, is very painful.
We are emotional and spiritual creatures, and we are created to live fully. We are created to find fulfillment in relationship with ourselves, others and God.
If we run from feelings and needs and the responsibility, we have to deal with them as emotional and spiritual creatures, we cannot fulfil our desire to live fully and love deeply.
On my website, chipdodd.com, you will find a FREE RESOURCE called, Relinquishing Your Defenses. This resource uses a triangle diagram to show the trap we can get caught in if we run from feelings and needs.
We can become trapped in a never-ending cycle of avoidance and projection, “mind-reading,” and judgmental conclusions about everyone (Codependency Episodes, 32-44, Season 4).
People can get trapped in the victim-martyr-persecutor roles that become a person’s reaction to any forms of vulnerability that produce emotional arousal.
Anxiety fuels the defensive roles.
Judgmentalism creates a repetition of behaviors that a person uses to block or defend themselves from perceived threat.
The Victim - The victim role is not about being immature or weak.
It is about life experiences in which a child “discovers” that their feeling responses to life are ignored or negated in some other form.
The experience creates a sense of helplessness, which means “no help is coming.”
To prevent the experience of helplessness, the child suppresses or denies the emotional responses as a form of self-protection.
The outer world of relationship begins to be seen as threatening, no matter how competent in the world’s eyes the person may become.
The Martyr - The martyr role is not about being self-pitying or arrogant.
The martyr role develops as a form of self-protection.
The person believes they must care for others, do for others, or be used by others to have love or value to others.
They are desperate for love, but they will not let anyone close enough emotionally to receive the love they want.
A person in relationship with someone in a martyr role always has a sense that they “aren’t doing enough” for the martyr, or has a sense that they have disappointed the martyr somehow.
The reason is that the martyr is giving to receive love, but they cannot allow anyone to give to them.
The Persecutor - The persecutor role is not about meanness as much as it is about fear.
Each role is about the fear that is driven by toxic shame.
In the persecutor role, a person has been threatened with normal human interactions that are a part of all genuine relationship—feelings, needs, desire, longings and hope, along with mistakes, limits, problems, and reality.
They defend themselves with rejecting comments, threats, manipulation, and all the forms that are associated with “gaslighting.”
At this point in the cycle, the persecutor makes a victim of another person, as they themselves are “working” to become the victim.
And with that outcome the cycle begins again, as the persecutor finds some form of not being responsible for their own behavior, and takes the victim role.
The fear of abandonment that is fueled by toxic shame controls the dynamics of these relationships.
Paradoxically, each person is continuously making adjustments to avoid the actual solution to the trap.
Relinquishing the Defenses
To step out of the triangle requires three steps:
The victim must dare to declare their own feelings. They must be able to say, “I feel,” and name what the feelings are. This action is a declaration of identity—no longer as a victim.
The martyr must acknowledge and state their needs. They must dare to live in relationship as an equal. They do not always have to give in order to receive.
The persecutor must recognize the freedom and strength that comes from being “response-able” by their ability to take ownership of their own feelings and needs. This ownership is true responsibility for one’s own behavior, choices, and values.
As a person gives up their defenses, they become available for genuine connection. They no longer attempt to manage the world by controlling others and hiding their internal makeup from others.
We must escape the triangle because we are created to find fulfillment through relationship with ourselves, others, and God.
Just as all addiction is a form of avoiding feelings, the triangle can become an addictive form of attempting to find fulfillment without having to be vulnerable.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center