...from the Field Project
There was a Field training student who scheduled a Facilitating session to address why things always seemed so difficult for her. She had realized various successes, but always in the proverbial eleventh hour and only after considerable struggle. At one point during the session, as she was describing how she had met all these challenges bravely, she stated with a sense of pride, “I’m a survivor.”
Such identity claims often present the Facilitator with the key to the session. This woman had identified with being a “survivor”—consequently life had no choice but to continue providing her with situations to survive. This idea of the complementarity of identity and reality explains many things, especially when we remember that we may make these identifications unwittingly, and indeed often do.
The transactional analysis (T.A.) psychologist Stephen Karpman devised what became known famously as the “Karpman Triangle” to explain the social and psychological roles that are commonly adopted in various situations, viz. the Persecutor, the Victim, and the Rescuer. The Persecutor is the individual in a given scenario who pressures, blames, or coerces the Victim, who in turn accepts the role of the underdog, someone who’s being abused or otherwise treated unfairly, while the Recuer intervenes in the Victim’s behalf, ostensibly to help the situation or at least come to his or her aid. In the same way that our identity choices may be unwitting, the roles Karpman described are often ulterior. Furthermore, a person playing this “game,” as T.A. calls it, may and often will switch roles—so, as the situation develops, the Victim may turn on the Rescuer, the Persecutor may become the Victim, and so on.
Each of the Karpman roles has a payoff—that is, each role is adopted in an attempt to win justification, but at the expense of others; thus the roles are considered to be “dysfunctional” and ultimately destructive. Now, one can look at the commitment to one or the other roles as a kind of authorship. The Persecutor, for example, attempts to write the scene in a way that conforms to and legitimizes the stance he’s taken, and those in the other roles are doing the same with respect to their stance. Each then, is a protagonist who attempts to direct the story to his or her private ends, and so lives in the reality of that story until it plays out in one of the many ways it can, e.g., with someone “wins” for the time being, someone quits the game, or the exchange escalates and becomes tragic.
In Field training terms, “I am a survivor” is an intention statement. As one gives oneself to this identity claim, one leaves the Field no option but to keep creating situations that prove the claim. It is the same with any intention. “I am a victim” represents an ontological commitment that will demonstrate itself with conspiratorial efficiency. And so on with countless other roles. Life obliges. Therefore, it is well worth our while to be mindful about what we agree to be.
Each of us is an author, writing a story in which the identity we have taken on is the protagonist. Each of us is living in a story of our own invention, a story that flows not from what we want but from the stance we have taken about who we are. A great deal can be gained from noting one’s experiences, especially those troublesome experiences that seem to follow one like a shadow, and asking ourselves, “What role corresponds to these experiences?” Or we could ask, “Who have I agreed to be such that these kinds of experiences would be required?”
The woman in the Facilitating session was startled when I pointed out to her that her survivor identity required situations to survive. Seen in that light, “I am a survivor” seemed to her less a point of pride than an agreement to continue struggling, suffering, and beating the odds at the last minute in an endless replay of exhausting vindications. She saw for the first time the high price of continuing to identify with the that longtime role, just as those who examine the various Karpman roles they have favored can suddenly awaken from what Field training calls “immersion” and see the “dysfunction” (we call it “contradiction” or “counter-intention” and regard it as highly functional) for the first time, which opens the way to a new and better choice.
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