Empowerment

By John Talbut

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7th Mary 2020

Rescuing and Not Rescuing

What is rescuing?

Rescuing is a useful concept from Transactional Analysis (TA). The idea is that three people can form what they call a “rescue triangle”. One person is a persecutor, one a victim and one a rescuer. What happens is that the rescuer notices how the victim is being persecuted and steps in and “rescues” them. The problem is that the rescuer takes over and starts to control the victim thereby becoming a persecutor themselves.

In practice I find that there can be two kinds of victim, the other kind being a rebel. The point is that both of them respond compulsively to persecution. Someone who is being a victim will tend to do whatever a persecutor wants while someone being a rebel will tend to do the opposite or anything but what the persecutor wants. In effect they both are being, to a greater or lesser extent, controlled by the persecutor. In fact a skilled persecutor, if they recognise rebel behaviour, can put on an appearance of wanting the rebel to do the opposite of what they actually want them to do.

Something that is not widely enough recognised is that persecutory behaviour is also a form of victim behaviour. An persecutor is compulsively acting out behaviours that they have unconsciously learned will tend to force someone else to do what the persecutor wants. Generally someone who is experienced as being a persecutor in one set of circumstances will be found to be acting as a victim in other circumstances. Typically, for example, a manager who tends to bully their subordinates will themselves be being bullied by their superiors.

Terminology

I am using the terms “victim”, “persecutor”, “rescuer” and “rebel” to refer to the behaviours described above. These words are used elsewhere to mean other things and I am not using them in those ways in this article.

It is important to realise that these are not personality types, they are sets of patterns of behaviour with lots of variability. Most people will tend to behave in all of these ways at different times or in different circumstances.

Two other terms that I use in a particular way are “feelings” and “emotions”. I use the word “feeling” or “feelings” to mean anything that can follow on from “I feel”. It could be feelings like “tired”, “cold” or “energised” as in “I feel tired”. It includes things that follow “I feel like” as in “I feel like going for a walk”. It also includes all emotions as in “I feel afraid” or angry or sad and all the many variations of these.

From my experience over many years and in a range of roles I have come to believe that feelings trump everything else in explaining how we behave – we only ever do what we feel like doing. We only behave logically when we feel logical. And far more often than not we are completely unaware of the feeling that motivate us to do things.

Moving on

Following on from this is that it is possible, sometimes fairly easily, sometimes with great difficulty, to change. In my experience the sorts of change that seem to work involve personal empowerment in other words people learning to be, to feel, more in touch with their own personal power, being more aware of their options and being able to choose for themselves what to do. The more personally empowered someone is the less they will behave in victim ways. They will, for example, be more able to say what they want without feeling that they need to avoid getting a “no” or feeling that they have to force anyone to do anything.

There is a danger, though, of being drawn into “victim blaming”, suggesting that someone who is the target of aggressive behaviour is somehow reponsible for the other person’s behaviour. I am responsible for whatever I do, I am not responsible for what anyone else does. So if, for example, I say something to someone, even if I have past experience of how they might react to it, I am only responsible for what I said. I am not responsible for their reaction. I did not “make them do it”.

An example of victim blaming was the incident that led to the SlutWalk movement. In January 2011 a police constable, addressing the issue of campus rape at a York University, Toronto, safety forum said: "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.", thereby suggesting that if a woman dressed in a particular way it is her fault if she is attacked. It is not. If someone attacks another person it is the attacker who is responsible. A woman should be able to go around dressed however she pleases and not be in danger of being attacked.

However, we do then get into difficult territory. It is the case that if a woman goes out dressed provocatively (whatever that means in a particular situation) she is more likely to be attacked. That is not her fault, it is the way things are. To what extent, though, is she acting in her own power, recognising the risks and choosing for herself what to do? Is she dressing in this way because she feels she has to, because she experiences peer pressure, she feels that she must conform or that no one will want her unless she dresses this way? In which case she is to some extent acting powerlessly. It is quite likely that there will be other aspects of her manner and behaviour that will convey that she might be a suitable person to attack.

On the other hand she may be well aware of the risks and of the number of things that she can do to be safer. She could have various sorts of bodyguard including being with other women similarly aware and prepared. She could be, or train to be more, assertive including displaying confident body language. She could be good at martial arts. She could choose to cover up when she is not with people she trusts. And so on. This is being powerful or being in her own power, being aware of risks and options and choosing how to manage the risks.

Not rescuing.

Essentially not rescuing means not doing for someone else what they can do for themselves. It involves knowing the difference between fishing someone out when they have fallen overboard in the Atlantic Ocean and saying to someone who has fallen into a canal (in the UK anyway where most canals are not deep) “try standing up”.

I become aware that someone has a problem and I choose to help them. From the start and throughout I need to not jump to a solution, to “know” what the person needs to do.

Problem solving can be broken down into three stages:

It is in the first stage, problem analysis, that people are most likely to fall into rescuing behaviour.

Problem analysis

Exploration of a problem can help everyone to understand it better. Do I understand enough about the problem? And does the other person? It may be that as we explore the situation I will have some ideas about what is going on that are different from the other person. How can I check my ideas? Can I let any of them go if the information does not support them?

Next, can I see a range of ways of approaching the problem? If not, I have some work to do as there is always a range of possibilities for approaching any problem. What are the ways that might seem to me to be possible for the other person? What seems to be getting in the way of them acting in any of these ways?

I may see the problem differently from the other person. For instance it may seem to me that there are ways in which the person behaves that are unhelpful for them. Often it may be unacceptable or unhelpful to the other person for me to point this out. This awareness may, though, help me to help the other person more effectively.

Empowerment

My next task is to do what I can to help the other person become aware of more possibilities. This can be fairly easy, just listening to someone for a while. On the other hand it can range from being difficult to impossible. There are many ways of helping, below are a few of them.

It may be that they just need some more information, but why they have not got the information? It may just be chance, or it may be that they feel helpless and unable to research their options. In the latter case it may be better if I point them in the direction of how to find out.

It may be that some possibilities are deeply felt to be impossible to the extent that a person keeps them totally out of awareness. Even if the possibility is pointed out to them they may feel it to be totally unrealistic and put it back out of awareness. So for some people the idea that they could say “no” to their boss just cannot exist. Quite likely this goes back to early childhood where they came to believe that saying “no” to anyone in authority could lead to abandonment, punishment or, ultimately, death. Helping someone to overcome such feelings can be very difficult.

Problem analysis may be the most important and the most difficult part of helping someone. It may sometimes involve trying a few approaches to the problem with the intention of learning from doing so. An important part of this process is not to become attached to any particular approach. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” If something is not working, either because it is not a viable approach or because the other person is not able to put into practice successfully, then drop it.

A number of approaches should evolve and once there seem to be enough to work with it becomes a matter of considering them and considering which ones seem to be potentially successful. This may still not be easy or short term. For example, getting someone from realising that it would make sense to say “no” to their boss to actually feeling able to say it may not be easy. This difficulty, in fact, may be a manifestation of a deeper and, perhaps, more important problem.

In summary

It can feel very frustrating not to rescue. It may seem obvious to me what this person needs to do and I just need to get them to do it but then I would just become another persecutor. I need to help them find ways that they, if they were fully enlightened or in their own power, would say they need to do next.