12-9-15 Post: Roles we play in life

Question/Comment: I hear people talk about people in our lives being our teachers, especially the ones that we have the most conflict with. Can you address that issue?

Response: What you have written is true but not so simple and clear cut as it might seen. We each have multiple roles we play in our daily lives and over a lifetime. We also have roles within roles and meta roles. 

Our everyday lives entail roles such as mother, daughter and life mate. Within those roles we have sub roles such as cook, house cleaner, chauffeur, lover, dishwasher, teacher, guide, wage earner, business owner and so on. Over arching or under arching those roles we may have other roles such as victim, victimizer, way shower, teacher and student.

Our roles also change over a lifetime. The roles we play as a child are usually somewhat different from roles we play as teenagers, young adults, middle age adults, older adults and much older adults. Some roles stay with us for a life time such as victim, victimizer, over giver, or user (unless we make an effort to remove those roles from our drama). 

These are the roles that people say we can learn the most from. I suppose this might be true due to the intensity of pain we cause ourselves with these relationships. The pain draws our attention and with that attention we can see our patterns and learn from our experiences. We are then in position to make new decisions and change behavior.

Each of us lives our own drama. We attract others to play specific roles in our drama and if the person we attract does not exactly fit the role we have them assigned to play, we do our best to mold them into playing the role more perfectly. For example if someone has learned to play the victim and attracts a person who is not a victimizer, the victim will learn how to push and irritate the other person until s/he becomes so angry that s/he becomes a victimizer.

That is not to say the victimizer is excused from abusive behavior. We are each responsible for our behavior and choices. The one who is pushed into being abusive has “written” that role for themselves into the drama they are living. We each have our dramas we live that overlap the dramas the people in our lives are living. If a person’s drama does not include a personal role for being a victim or victimizer, they will not stay in a relationship with, a friendship or an acquaintanceship with a person who does include those roles in their personal drama.

We don’t have to have pain, conflict and uproar in our lives to learn and change. We can choose to look at our behavior, choices, relationships and note what is making us happy, what is advancing our goals and what is not helpful. We can make conscious, clear choices about what to keep the same and what to change. By the way, the changes are made to ourselves, our thinking, our beliefs, how we choose to feel and what we choose to do. When we change from within, our outer expression of our drama changes automatically.