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Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
If you would like to build healthy relationships based on trust and mutual exchange, we invite you to the transformational course “The Triangle of Power”! The course reveals the secrets of dependence and co-dependence and the main magnets for manipulation hidden in the human psyche. It also helps you turn your life strategies from negative ones into effective ones!
Relationships between people are built on the masks and roles we have.
Jung introduced the concept of the “Persona”. The Persona is the Archetype that describes the part of the psyche that helps us adapt to the outside world, to the community or group we live in. From early childhood, through contact with the people around them, children take on patterns of behaviour that in time turn into roles. The Persona is something like the clothes we put on when we go out.
And here you may make a great many interesting observations if you ask yourself a few questions:
- do you think about what to wear?
- does your choice of outfit depend on where you are going?
- do you set out to shape how others see you through your clothes?
- does having to dress “specially” for a meeting stir up unpleasant feelings in you?
- how do you feel about corporate dress codes, about having to wear a uniform?
Honest answers to these questions let you see the full picture of the patterns in your social relationships that govern you. And with some knowledge of psychology, you will be able to find out what causes, what hidden inner conflicts lie behind your answers. One way or another, whenever you meet someone new, at that moment you are under the influence of the Persona Archetype.
We talk about the Persona, masks and roles on our “Practical Psychology” course and in our depth psychology programmes.
If you want to object and think that wearing masks is a bad thing, observe yourself and you will be very surprised. A human being is a social creature and needs contact with others in order to grow, to be happy and to find satisfaction in life. That is why there is a familiar pattern that makes us choose the kind of self-presentation that will help us be liked by someone else.
Think of how common this behaviour is around people we like. Men who are usually the life of the party suddenly become completely different: the charisma and ease vanish. Thoughts get tangled, knees go weak, words disappear somewhere. In the end, instead of approaching, a man often increases the distance even more, which confuses the woman and makes her doubt her own feelings. Or a woman, meeting a man she is interested in, suddenly loses the power of speech and turns into a child who starts fantasising and reading things in, becomes sensitive and capricious, loses her peace and her sleep.
Nobody teaches us communication or how to relate to others, so very often all our scripts and roles are behaviours taken over from the people around us, and amplified.
Observe yourself and you will notice that you often behave like your mother or react to events like your father.
Social roles are the “invisible” clothing of our personality, which we use to position ourselves in relationships. And if you don’t like the way people treat you, try to understand what role you are playing in that relationship right now.
Eric Berne also offered us roles in relationships, together with his popular model from transactional analysis. These are the roles “Parent — Adult — Child”. Berne believed that this triangle of roles exists in every person’s psyche and that its figures stand in particular relationships to one another.
Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s description of the psyche and making parallels, we can see that there is always a conflict between the figure of the Parent and the figure of the Child.
That is why our conflicts in relationships are nothing other than a projection of unconscious inner figures onto another person, a partner, and an attempt to satisfy our own needs within the relationship at the other’s expense.
There is nothing wrong with needs, just as there is nothing wrong with roles. Things go in a negative direction when inner conflicts remain unconscious and there are many fixed patterns of behaviour and reaction. When a person clings to a single role (usually the most comfortable one for them, but often long since ineffective), the other person in the relationship is assigned a strictly fixed place and behaviour. It is like wearing a uniform all the time. For close relationships this is destructive, because the capacity for contact, exchange, growth and development is lost.
The negative side of this triangle of roles, with a detailed description of the roles, conflicts and consequences, was given to us by Stephen Karpman. The widespread model of relationships named after him describes the negative poles of three roles: the victim, the tyrant and the rescuer. If you know psychology, it is not hard to see behind these roles such figures as “the child”, “the man” and “the woman”.
Exploring the Karpman triangle in practice opens up the possibility of change in how we relate to others, of better relationships, of truly nourishing bonds built on trust and mutual exchange.
This is exactly what we are going to do on the transformational course “The Triangle of Power”, which starts on 5 March and consists of 4 modules, in each of which you will discover the different sides of all three roles.
Would you like healthy relationships full of trust and love?
Sign up for the course!
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