The Web
address of this article is
http://sfhelp.org/relate/triangles.htm
Clicking links below will open a full window or an informational popup, so
please turn off your brow-ser's
popup blocker or allow popups from this nonprofit Web site.
This is one of a series of articles on Lesson 4 - choose and evolve
nourishing relationships. These articles build on Lessons 1 - 3, and prepare
you for Lesson 5 (evolve and enjoy a nourishing fam-ily) and Lesson 6 (learn
to practice effective parenting).
This article...
-
describes
a widespread relationship stressor - "PVR triangles,"
-
introduces the idea of
internal (personality subself)
triangles
-
summarizes why triangles cause significant personal and social problems,,
and.
-
suggests how to avoid and resolve them
effectively in the context of families..
These ideas apply to any human
group, not just families.
The article assumes
you're familiar with:
-
the intro
this nonprofit Web site, and the premises
underlying it
-
self-study
-
this overview
of three common relationship stressors
-
an example of the stressors troubling
a real stepfamily.
|
What Is "Triangling"?
This common
dynamic involves three people and three
roles, like parts in a
play. One person un-consciously chooses the role of the
Persecutor
("P"). S/He blames, disrespects, attacks, ignores, and/or criticizes the
Victim
("V") for something, causing the
Rescuer ("R") to
defend the Victim. That may quickly shift so that the Persecutor becomes a
Victim, and the former Victim may become a Res-cuer.
Note that these three labels refer
to roles (behaviors and attitudes), not the person
in the role.
Each role may be played by an adult or a child. Each person can switch back and forth between these roles with different
situations and different people. Few people are aware they're doing this.
If
they are, they don't know how to not do it
Triangling Looks and Sounds Like
This...
The Persecutor
P (say a parent) scowls and says sarcastically to
Victim
(e.g. a child) "Boy, you have the brains of a doorknob. How many times do I have
to tell you to pick up your toys, so people don't fall over them or step on and wreck them? You're completely
hopeless!"
V may whimper and cower, glare, or
talk back defiantly. Either way, s/he feels guilty, ashamed, and anxious - and maybe mad.
S/He may
whine and glance
pitifully at...
The
Rescuer (often another caregiver), who observes this interaction and feels empathic and
protective of the Victim. So Rescuer may glower at
P and say something to
V like "Honey, I'll help you pick up your toys now. Let me get you a snack."
The
Persecutor-role person may resent that R
seems to side with V, rather than supporting him/her ["You know, Hon, (P)'s right -
you should be more careful and considerate."] This is specially true if
it happens often, and Rescuer denies or defends it, or seems indifferent.
Triangles can form in a flash over almost any behavior or interaction. They
may occur once, occa-sionally, randomly or predictably, and repeat cyclically
for months or years until someone leaves or re-fuses their role. Several
triangles can exist simultaneously, and can affect each other - e.g. a Persecutor
in one triangle can be the Victim in another triangle with other
people.
Triangles
and Subselves
A core premise in this Web site is that normal people develop an "inner family" of
talented subse-lves which comprise their
If you're skeptical or
curious about this, read this letter to you,
and then try this safe, interesting exercise
after finishing this article.
People's
dominant
may predispose them to "accept" one role more than the others.
For example, a wounded person governed by angery, critical, aggressive
subselves may unconsciously choose the Persecutor role in their
family and other groups. A
adult or child may instinct-ively adopt the Victim role by not knowing
and asserting their rights as a worthy person.
PVR triangles occur among
personality subselves all the time. For example, if an
and
harshly judge the host person, a hypersensitive
and/or
can acti-vate ("Victims"), causing several Guardian subselves
(like the
or
to activate and comfort (Rescue)
the unhappy young subselves.
Remembering past
"triangle" experiences may reproduce their emotional impacts at full strength.
If a
subself remembers the
(Persecutor's) biting sarcasm three weeks later, Victim can
experience a new wave of guilt, shame, anxiety, pain, anger, and confusion. Thus one
triangle incident may count the same as 20!
Internal and
outer triangles cause or result from concurrent family
and
conflicts, which are
common in new and/or low-nurturance
stepfamilies. So family
adults do best if they develop effective strategies to spot and resolve
all three of these stressors.
If clergy, lawyers, mediators,
coaches, teachers, clinicians,
case workers, and doctors aren't
aware of triangles, they
may unintentionally amplify them in
their clients and patients - and/or cause new ones.
They will often unconsciously take (or accept) the Rescuer role for the
needy people they serve.
People don't have to be physically present
to take a triangle role. An unmourned dead person, a child
asleep upstairs, or a relative across town or a thousand miles away, can animate
relationship triang-les through memories, anniversaries, mementos, holiday associations,
e-mails, phone calls, and silen-ces. A dead
or living fetus or infant can be a full triangle role-holder -
usually the Victim. The two other role holders (or more
accurately, some of their inner-family members) will feel and act for the fetus
or in-fant.
Sometimes
a group can fill one of
more of the three triangle roles - usually the Persecutor. For instance "Your
whole family (or 'everyone at church') disapproves of my nose ring." can set off
Victim -Rescuer fireworks.
|
The good news - if you accept
the reality of personality subselves, you can use
to keep your Self
in most situations, and train your other subselves to avoid
triangling. That will significantly help reduce your getting
hooked in triangles with other people.
See
|
Does what you read make sense to you? Can you think of any recent or current triangles among your family members? Who chose which
role, and what was the outcome - i.e. who got their
met well enough and who didn't?
What's Wrong with Triangles?
Each person or subself in a triangle role can feel disrespected and hurt by
one of the other role-players. Because mutual respect is essential for
effective communication and healthy relationships, triangles hinder both
those prizes.
Triangles
may cause various mixes of anxiety, hurt,
resentment, distrust,
disrespect, competition, frustration, guilt, shame, blame, avoidances, and
arguing among the three role-takers.
These promote expectations of
between the three people. Habitual
triangling and ineffective communication in
a family will corrode its
That promotes psychological wounding in developing kids
So what can you do about these inevitable stressors?
Options
Encourage your family adults to...
Do Lesson 1 together, and accept the idea
of having a dynamic
of
personality subsel-ves.
Develop your own terms and language, if that helps. This empowers you all to become aware of, and reduce, your
inner triangles.
They cause the outer triangles!
your
in
- specially in times of change and conflict. Triangles and related stressors
flourish when false selves have taken over. See
for options; and to...
Understand and
accept triangles as normal dynamics in any
social group, and.none
of the three role-takers are "bad" or "wrong;" and....
Evolve and agree on your
family's own role-labels and "triangle vocabulary." For example, you might prefer calling the Persecutor "the Blamer,"
"Critic," or
"Aggressor." Learn to acknowledge (name) current or
recent triangles, as in "Hey gang, we had (or have) a triangle going."
Also agree on a term for dissolving, unhooking, or mastering your
triangles; and...
Get clear together on what you want instead of triangles - e.g.
-
genuine, stable
self-respect and mutual-respect
attitudes, and...
-
everyone being clear on
their respective personal rights; and...
-
cooperatively
each person's current
and...
-
doing win-win
as teammates, vs. these
More de-triangling options...
Help each
other agree on who is choosing what role, and talk non-critically about
that as team-mates. e.g. "Noriko, are you feeling like I'm the Persecutor
and you're in the Victim role here?" Noticing
Make
a high priority
in your family's homes.
In particular, help each other learn to use hearing checks, awareness
"bubbles," E(motion)-levels, respectful assertion and I-messages, and
win-win problem-solving.
Note that
people
often have major trouble holding attitudes of genuine mutual respect - specially in
and/or
conflicts.
Use the skills and language of
and
to begin to talk
as partners about inner and outer triangles as they happen.
Model this for your kids, and encourage them to learn how, too. Option
- experiment with rotating
the new family role of Triangle Hunter or Scout.
Becoming
aware
of triangles and their relationship impacts is ~80% of the solution.
Teach and show your
kids the three triangling roles, and agree on what to call each of
them. Help
younger kids understand the difference between roles and the people
in
the roles. Neither the roles nor the people in them are "bad, " but the
results
of triangling can hurt self-esteems and family harmony, trust,
bonding, and teamwork.
Adults
give high family priority to
learning how to spot and resolve values
and loyalty conflicts in and between your
homes. Help each other (a) develop a common language to describe
and discuss each of these, and (b) be alert for these stressors any time
you spot a triangle - they usually occur together.
These
Options in Action
If
the adults in the example
above had invested time and effort at these
options together, they would have
spotted the triangle and problem-solved instead, or avoided it in the first place.
Triangle spotted: The biomom (original
"Rescuer") experiences her mate's impulsive 1-down sar-castic message to her
child. Intentionally avoiding her own inner triangle (blocking her Mama-Lion
per-sonality part), Biomom says something calmly like "Whoa! We've got a triangle
here, people. Let's back up, OK?"
Stepdad ("Persecutor") would trust from discussion and experience that his
partner wasn't critici-zing (disrespecting) him, but just alerting all three to their shared risk of a
newly hatched triangle. That alerts him to his inner triangling without undue
guilt, so he says something like "Mm, yeah, your right. Sorry, Toby..."
He
then shifts intentionally to win-win problem-solving, rather than blaming
and complain-ing. That might sound like...
Triangle
avoided: Stepdad becomes
aware of feeling frustrated and irritated (and ignored - again) when he sees
stepdaughter Toby's toys strewn carelessly on the living room floor again.
He takes a mo-ment to check his (false-self's) impulse to bark
sarcastically at Toby. Then he thinks "What do I need now?"
Taking a few more moments, he decides "I need to ...
-
avoid inner triangles by keeping
my Self
of my inner crew, and affirming my other sub-selves who are upset;
and I also need...
-
to let Toby know with a respectful, clear
(assertion) how her actions affect me, and what I need; and...
-
to keep working patiently at building her
awareness and cooperation. I also...
-
want to model effective
and
for her again.
And ...
-
I need Nell's (former Rescuer, above)
true Self to stay in charge, and give me empathy, coop-eration in doing
win-win problems-solving, rather than taking sides in a loyalty conflict
and triangle."
Lots of scenarios could develop from this beginning. One
might sound like this respectful
"I"-message:
"Toby, when you forget my request to
pick up your toys, I feel really frustrated and mad! I get worried you or someone
else is going to trip and get hurt, or someone'll step on your game and break it. Then
you'll feel bad, and we'll all get into am uproar about you earning enough allowance to
buying a new game. I don't want those things to happen. How can we solve this problem?"
Notice where your thoughts are now. Anything like "Ah, who talks like that in the real world?
We could never sound like
that." If you have thoughts like those, it's probably your Inner
trying to protect you from trying something new and risky.
Reality:
Anyone
can learn to think and talk like this example if they (you) want to!
Recap
The universal
social dynamic called
relationship triangles
significantly stresses adults and kids. Tri-angling occurs
when three people - or three personality subselves - unconsciously adopt the
situational or chronic roles of Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer.
Triangles are symptoms of
dominance
(wounds),
and adults' and kids'
unawareness of
inner families + triangle dynamics + effective communication skills. All of
these can be improved!
This article describes triangles and why they're harmful; and illustrates their
dynamics among peo-ple and subselves, The article provides specific suggestions on
avoiding or dissolving triangles, and gives a brief example.
Helping each other form effective strategies to manage
triangles, values conflicts, and loyalty (priori-ty) conflicts will
benefit any relationship and family. See this article
for more
perspective and options.
Note that effective strategies depend on
family adults (a) usually being
by their
and (b) helping each other to intentionally learn and use the seven
effective communication
in Lesson 2.
Are your people doing those yet?
Pause, breathe, and reflect - why did you read this article? Did you
get what you needed? If not, what
you need? Who's
these questions - your
true Self
or
Prior page /
Lesson-4 links /
Print page
