What Karpman's Drama triangle teaches us about Black Consciousness_11.1

Divorce is a bitch. A bastard. An idea soaked in prejudice, pain and conflict almost as bad as the words I chose to describe it. It hurts and creates violent reactions mostly against people we loved or once loved. So we fight. And then torture each other in one of our culture's most twisted games.

But like any conflict, there is always room to grow.

My divorce took me to Karpman’s drama triangle. He describes the seductive dance below that takes on the tempo of a drug-infused rave when stimulated by divorce. Someone becomes the bad guy. Someone becomes the helpless victim and others rush over to their defense to look and feel like heroes.

But before you get on any high horse most of us do this on most days several times. We become a victim when we get something wrong and don’t take responsibility (it is easier than you think). We become rescuers when we take responsibility for other people's pain or problems and we’re the bad guy even when we believe that delicious lie that it is ‘unloving’ to be in disagreement or conflict.

The real problem with Karpman’s triangle is not the game. It can be a mildly functional way to do family, school, work or teams. It works, ish. The real problem with Karpman’s triangle is to play the game you have to give up the right to believe humans are equally powerful and that is a mother F&*^king disaster (swearing intentional, it’s that bad).

Rescuers only play that role if they think they are better (aka: more powerful).

Victims give up their individual power for the right to be weak and therefore saved (aka: the powerless). Note this is Eeeeesaassssy to do. So easy. Especially when we are genuinely the victim of abuse or hurt and have been legitimately wrong (but still, it’s sadly a silly lie to swallow. Without power and autonomy to keep control over our inner world, what are we really?).

And the bad-guy? Sometimes we can be legitimate Hitlers. The abusers. Miss-user of power. The yucky one. But other times we can also just find ourselves in the cross-hairs of someone else trying to shift blame (victim) and so dragged by our tenders involuntarily into their game screaming as we go because it genuinely hurts.

South Africa (and the world) has been playing in Karpmans drama triangle for years. Colonises legitimately took away power and we’re the bad guy (really, really, really, really not ok, horrible, twisted, disgusting etc etc). But in response, some of us started to believe we were and are the victims (powerless) and therefore need rescuing (by the powerful). Personally white supremacy feels burned into my brain. Everyday, in a hundred interactions I am confronted with my very firm and disgusting belief in my own superior power.

Conversely in Cato Manor I indirectly touch five thousand disenfranchised humans every week. Society has kicked them in the balls like no other place on earth so it almost seems acceptable that the dominant voice in most of my interactions is from legitimate victims looking for help.

Under the guise of love I’ve played along with that game for years. The powerful guy who hands out stuff to the powerless (aka: the rescuer). But thankfully that dream was destroyed (mostly). Ripped down and stripped away branch by branch until only a tiny stump was left with some roots plummeting deep into unknown love that was left behind. And that is a good thing. Unequal power dynamics in society are always a shit show … (this is the part you should be thinking about pure communism and socialism) and that’s when I realised a simple truth: black consciousness is the answer to all our problems.

Why? Because it most clearly says we are equally powerful. It alone pushes us to take responsibility. To see our identity rightly as being created equal by a loving God who sees no hierarchy or order. Yes, it pushes us to push others and then ourselves up towards only our own power. It dissolves the insidious lie that we’ve sown over and over for generations of patronizing ‘service’ and ‘love’ that ‘I can’ and therefore ‘you can't.

Instead, it drives us to real love.

The parent kind. The coach kind. The verb kind. The messy kind that does not fix problems but cries along with our loved ones in the mess of their circumstance willing and supporting them to become all they were made and destined to be. Love. Active in the long road. Prepared to stick around for twenty or thirty years all the way form bullet-to-your-brain-crying and filthy nappies and horrendous teenage years all the while sowing seeds of independence and preparedness so human we love knows beyond a shadow of a doubt they are loved but powerful and therefore responsible for their selves and their future.

Could it be that what South Africa (and possibly the world) needs now more than anything is a revival. A Biko inspired revolution of responsibly? The truth that only accepting our individual power can change our collective reality?