so i wanted to put together a video to help people re-explore and re-examine their family relationships if you're drawn to these videos if you're drawn to exploring childhood trauma or if you were raised by a narcissist or there was just general dysfunction in the family going back and re-looking at who you were and who they said you were versus what the reality of what was going down at the time in childhood is a huge chunk of doing childhood trauma and recovery work is really going back even if it's painful and look back about what these relationships meant
so in this video we're going to be covering things like shame scapegoating being gaslit and we're going to be using something called the cartman drama triangle to help us take a new look at what those relationships were like and how we were affected in those relationships so here we go
in this video we're going to explore the toxic family and cheap intimacy by cheap intimacy i mean relationships that are not mutually empowered or authentic and we're going to look at those relationships through cartman's drama triangle we'll be looking at the cheap bonds between family members who scapegoat others
stephen cartman is a psychiatrist who and came up with the drama triangle in 1968 it consists of a victim someone who was hurt a rescuer someone who will help most likely the victim and the persecutor who is someone who is bad the drama triangle is a tool to figure out what is the reality underneath the relational drama at hand it also looks at how dysfunctional intimacy can exhibit poor personal responsibility destructive shifting roles and drama
if you're familiar with the tv show the office we can see a cartman drama triangle present itself between these three characters in fact it's all over the show we have michael who exhibits himself as a victim at the hands of his own shenanigans we have dwight who rescues michael in and out of that shenanigans or contributes to them and the character jim tends to persecute the two of these other characters in their shenanigans
the character michael scott tends to exhibit some pretty narcissistic behaviors and white exhibits a level of toxic loyalty to michael you can even think about that relationship as codependent and jim provokes and pranks seeing their codependency from afar remember that term from earlier about poor personal responsibility
so here's what i mean by poor personal responsibility let's just say that you actually worked at the office and these three guys were actually your co-workers and over the years you see them just completely be themselves in that poor personal responsibility means that you would probably want michael scott to stop being such a mess and grow up to have a better filter to not make everything about himself that would be his personal responsibility
let's take dwight when you look at dwight you would probably want dwight to be less intense you would probably want him to stop rescuing michael or be so codependent or kind of brown nosy with michael and jim is interesting i think that jim's personal responsibility is when i look at jim i want jim to get a new job i want jim to sort of get a life and stop being so invested into these two other characters and essentially with clients is i sort of want them to be like jim to be he's a little bit above the drama but he's still engaged in it and i sort of want uh i want them to leave hopefully that makes sense but that's what i think cartman means when it comes to poor personal responsibility
let's look at the triangle in the dysfunctional family system and in context of childhood trauma the victim tends to be helpless victimized is a martyr and has an attitude of poor me the persecutor tends to oppress others and is seen as selfish the rescuer tends to enable the victim steps in for the victim and soldiers for the victim cartman's theory is that these roles can shift destructive roles that can shift which is true if you grew up the way that i grew up someone was always in the dog house someone was always victimized someone was rescuing but what i find in the dysfunctional family system that children often play the role as the persecutor when they're often scapegoated in that role what that does is that strengthens the bond between the victim and the rescuer
this is a very common dynamic that happens in the drama triangle when we think about drama this is very important is drama essentially in terms of child development is children do not have the abstract thinking and ability to know the difference between drama and reality that is a scary concept because growing up whatever the parents reality is that is what the children's reality is if they say you're bad you're bad and you don't have defense or insight against that
so let's look at that persecutor scapegoat problem child versus the two against one thing with the victim and the rescuer in the cheap intimacy that happens it'll play itself out when a parent and a sibling gang up against a persecutor perhaps the parent is has a golden child and then a bad child it could be parent and parent against a persecuted kid where let's just say the marriage isn't great but they come together at that child's expense and it can also be sibling plus sibling against you as the third sibling and you are persecuted within that
in a victim and rescuer standpoint what that means is that you are usually scapegoated and that these two people have a bond and connection and an intimacy about the scapegoated person
here are some examples of the family drama at hand if you identify as a scapegoated kid you would recognize these
how could you do that to your mother a statement said by a rescuer after everything they've done for you another statement made by a rescuer your sister isn't hard on me like you are that is a victim statement you know how much i have to put up with another victim statement incidentally you can be both the persecutor and the rescuer for the victim
because you don't have it hard like your sister does another rescuer statement and lastly something like come on you know your father loves you you should be nicer to him another rescuer statement
let's plug one of those in let's just say a child says to their mother dad missed my game because he was drunk again and the mother responds with come on you know your father loves you you should be nicer what that does is it puts the child in the role of the persecutor the father as the victim and the mother as a rescuer
underneath the mother's stance is i'm not going to get real about my husband's alcoholism this keeps me emotionally comfortable the father's stance is i'm enabled my poor vibe works there are no consequences to my drinking or my neglect as a parent you can see these two people's poor personal responsibility to themselves and each other to their family you can see that there's a cheap intimate connection between the two of them because of that and also they create a narrative around their child
but coming back to that drama piece is that as children we have to accept that narrative and we are essentially gaslit scapegoated and we experience deep shame about ourselves for something that was actually we were in the right
let's plug another one in this is a daughter a mother and a second daughter the first daughter is saying but i need a mom too why does she maybe she gets the love the attention or the resources the mother responds with because you don't have it hard like your sister does what that does in the triangle it creates the first daughter as a persecutor the mother is the rescuer and the second daughter is the victim in the whole thing
but the reality under that is that the mother's stance is i get my self-worth from helping my special daughter whom i overly identify with while i shame my selfish daughter and the victim's stance is essentially i'm enabled at the expense of my sister and i don't challenge my mother about it we can see the poor personal responsibility of the drama triangle on these two we can see that they have a cheap intimacy between the two of them at somebody else's expense and we can also see the narrative that they have about the first daughter
what that does as you guys know is it experiences shame the person is gaslit and they walk away feeling bad about themselves for something that they were in the right of
you know i want to pause for a minute and make a side note about these two daughters i know it's a hypothetical but this is an often a presentation that i see in my work with clients is if my client was scapegoated they will often have a sister or a brother who is seen as the golden child and that relationship is it's sad because that relationship is lost and becomes very compromised
why is i want you guys if that's your scenario it's hard to not be upset with our siblings for that stuff and in many ways a lot of that is fair but we have to also consider that those relationships where siblings were sort of destroyed and split because of a parent the parent had an mo to split siblings in that way and that's just an added layer of perspective for this
well i often say that in a toxic family or dysfunctional family it may seem like there are winners and losers but everybody loses that's different because i feel like when we leave our family system or that we're struggling with stuff is we feel like we were the losers in it and some of them were the winners if that's applicable to you
so why is the intimacy cheap why do i keep referring it to that way well let's take a deeper look at the bond between the victim and the rescuer first is victims and rescuers feed off each other codependently they are not mutually empowered people or in an authentic real relationship second is their relationship seems bonded seems being the operative word there but they take advantage of each other via dishonesty or enabling third is the drama is highly highly convincing that these people put a lot of energy into their drama and they play up a really good game
lastly is children are highly vulnerable to shame and it's easy to convince them that they're the bad one this damages their natural intuition in life and their perception of self and others that's why we need to recover from this stuff but what i find is really dangerous about the whole thing is that it's cheap intimacy because they connect at the expense of another which is really an icky thing to do and it leaves the recipient brokenhearted
here are some takeaways in childhood trauma work i'm trying to get people to be empowered and to recognize drama for what it is and not engage if you identify with that scapegoated kid i'm consistently asking my clients what's the truth what's the truth about what happened to us growing up what's the truth about those situations that our parents would interpret in a totally different way and maybe so would our siblings
i also want people to recognize cheap intimacy for what it is we are often the excluded person in our family but there is some growth to be looking at these relationships are they really bonded are they really healthy are they really close or do they betray each other in some way too
i also want people to be challenging their own core beliefs are they right about you being selfish or bad now or in childhood this is the beginning of dismantling toxic shame that happens in the emotional abuse in our family systems
well i hope the video was helpful to you and i want to leave you with some final thoughts let's say if you identify with these two kids in the hypothetical scenario that i kind of came up with in the video if those kids had grown up into adulthood and they were my clients i want to convey that most likely they would struggle with specific triggers trauma stuff is highly predictable and i see a lot of this and what i'm trying to say is if you identify with those kids and you had similar scenarios happen to you in your present life you might struggle around certain types of triggers
one being when people don't stand up for you another trigger is being excluded from social situations or friends or whatever those may be hot button issues for you and you're most likely going to get triggered around shame where you perceive that you may always sort of be in the wrong and not quite understand that you're sort of in the right um hopefully that kind of makes sense but i find that a lot of this stuff is predictable
we'll see you next time if you found this video helpful please hit like and subscribe and all that jazz and i will see you guys next time take care
