Throwing Water on a Grease Fire: How Not to Handle Drama in an Online Course

 I was lured into the drama triangle by an online student yesterday, and I realized that I’m eager to dive into drama despite my many claims to the contrary. I’m a drama-seeker.

 

The drama triangle is an invention by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman to illustrate the mechanics of human conflict. Think of middle school, where hormone-riddled pre-teens create dramas that last entire lifetimes. Let’s say that East and West have an argument and both wind up feeling hurt by the other. Each views themselves as Victim and the other as Persecutor. It is because of this dissonance that the drama endures. But then they draw others into it. East goes to North and explains what happened. Careful to avoid becoming a Persecutor themselves, North makes East feel better by saying, “West is bad and you, East, are good.” Victims need Persecutors in order to remain Victims, so they turn everybody into potential Persecutors. But who wants to be a bad guy? In order to avoid becoming the persecutors, everyone must leap in and become Rescuers.

 

As you can see, victims have tremendous power. But it only works if they’re surrounded by people, like me, who are eager to participate in the unfolding drama. The three-pointed figure is simple, but the solution it gives for avoiding conflict is simpler still: all you need to do to avoid drama is recognize that you’re complicit. 

Drama Triangle

Another and perhaps simpler way of describing what happened is to use Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle.

 

Stephen Karpman's Drama Triangle, Designed here by Me

 

Here’s what happened: this week my graduate students had to submit their first assignment in a quantitative research course. It was as simple as statistics can get—mean, mode, range, etc., and I told them this. Assignments were going to get much harder as the semester progressed. A student submitted their assignment with a note that read, “This was the opposite of easy. It took me days to complete.” And so on. They made like they were a fragile bird with broken wing, hopping around helplessly, and how my promise of it being easy had contributed to their pain.

 

To exit the drama, I could have ignored the helpless plea. After all, they weren’t explicitly asking for my help or identifying any problem from the assignment. They were just complaining. I could also have acknowledged the difficulty and then shifted the interaction to an Adult-Adult exchange, where they could explore their responsibilities as a student. E.g., “Yeah, developing new skills is difficult and often frustrating. Is there something specifically you’d like help learning how to do?”

 

But that’s not what I did. I imagined that this student felt insulted by my suggestion that the assignment was easy when, for them, it was rather difficult, and I became hot with anger—a common response for drama-loving types. In essence, I wanted to scream, “I’M NOT THE BAD GUY HERE!” 

 

I hope I didn’t make things worse, because my heart was still racing when I responded. I acknowledged the difficulty they experienced and suggested they meet with me if they were frustrated about the class or with my role in it. A few hours later I was feeling better and realized that it was a drama exchange, and I let myself be lured into it. In retrospect, I probably should have let the comment fall. My response was okay, but there was no reason for me to get all irritated.