Why (good) coaches don't tell people what to do (#347)

You know how it is with Confirmation Bias: you get a hammer and every problem is miraculously a nail. In similar fashion, I mentioned the Karpman Drama Triangle to someone, and suddenly I'm applying it everywhere...

The idea is elegant and persuasive. Stephen Karpman was a student of Eric Berne, the originator of Transactional Analysis and author of the fascinating, if grim, book Games People Play. Karpman identified three roles that people adopt in the types of games that Berne described (and these games are far from benign....). These roles are Perscutor, Victim and Rescuer. 

As with the famous Parent, Adult, Child model of TA, the idea is that someone adopting one role invites someone else to step into a role, too. Thus if I act as a Victim, you might be tempted to Rescue me - or indeed to Persecute me. Drama ensues (and that is the point: the hypothesis is that all participants get some satisfaction from the emotional pay-off of the drama.)

What Karpman pointed out, that makes this particularly interesting, is that there is often then a switch in role. Thus if I start as Victim, and you seek to Rescue me, I may switch to Persecutor and push you into the Victim role.  The dramatic possibilities are thus greatly enhanced.

So when one of my friends told me that she was seeking to support another friend through a crisis, and added, 'But of course, she's a bit of a drama queen...' the alarm bells started ringing, and I pointed out the risk of my friend playing the role of Rescuer and where that might lead. 

And of course it is the same for coaches. If a person seeking coaching positions themselves as a Victim - of fate, of their employer, of a bully at work - then it can be tempting for the coach to play the Rescuer role, and tell the poor Victim what to do to protect himself, achieve redress or whatever.

But if the coach succumbs to that temptation, the best outcome is that the Victim stays in Victim mode, relying on others to rescue him,  and that's not good.  Victims attract Persecutors. But the other likelihood is that the Victim moves into Persecutor mode, attacking the coach and blaming her for the advice given and its (inevitable) disastrous consequences. The coach then finds herself in Victim mode, defending herself, her good intentions and so on.  And neither party learns. 

So what is a coach (or a friend, come to that) to do. According to TA theory, it is to resist the call to move into Rescuer (or any other game-playing role) and remain in Adult - inviting the other person into Adult too: by resisting the temptation to take any responsibility for the situation, but supporting the person whose problem it is to generate and enact solutions that he believes will be effective.  

I think this is particularly pertinent now, as we seem to have created a culture in which many rush to claim victimhood as it bestows many advantages. But teaching people to be Victims is not in their best interests, nor anyone else's.

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Image courtesy of AI (Grok)