Friday, August 19, 2011

Control dramas and how to deal with them

There are 4 control dramas people use to get energy from others, 2 aggressive and 2 passive:

Interrogator - asks questions, probing into your life to find something wrong and criticize you for it

Intimidator - threatens you verbally and/or physically to get your energy

Aloof - plays coy and keeps away from people thus forcing them to struggle for your attention

Poor me - telling guilt-inducing stories, blaming others for your problems


The dramas are interconnected in the following way:

Interrogator == Aloof
Intimidator == Poor me

So interrogator creates aloof or another interrogator, and vice versa, and intimidator creates poor me or another intimidator.

For instance someone threatens you and you get scared and try to protect yourself by playing poor me, trying to get the intimidator to feel sorry for you or to feel guilty. obviously, playing aloof will not work when your safety is threatened with brute force. If guilting the intimidator does not work either, you are forced to reply with the same brute force as was brought against you, thus turning into intimidator yourself.

We develop our control dramas unconsciously, based on what we learned from our parents: interrogator parents produce aloof children, and aloof parents - interrogator children.

For example a friend of mine is interrogator - her parents are too busy with their lives and prefer not to communicate much with their daughter, being very aloof. So she had nothing left to do but interrogate them by asking questions and then finding something wrong with their replies to get some attention and energy from them. I, on the other hand am very aloof, I can spend hours in a room full of people without saying a word to anyone. My aloofness resulted from growing up with interrogator mother - she constantly asked me questions about my life and found strange pleasure in finding something wrong. So the only way for me not to get upset was not giving her any details and so the habit was formed. I started believing that the less people know about me, the less they can annoy me.

All four control dramas are harmful to us, as well as those around us. People surrounding us suffer when we steal their energy, and we, ourselves suffer because our control dramas do not allow us to stay connected to the source and follow our path.

Take for instance aloof drama - the aloof person will always keep missing important information by not letting people get near. So if you are aloof and someone on your path carries important message for you, you will shut them out and so they won't be able to deliver the message to you.

The only way to not be affected by control dramas is to learn to recognize them and bring them to consciousness. So if you are dealing with someone with a control drama who is trying to use it to steal your energy you need to recognize what type of drama they are using, then send them energy willingly, thus elliminating the need for them to compete for energy with you, and then bring their drama to consciousness y pointing it out to them. For example if someone telling you about bad things that happened to them and implies that it is your fault those things happened, you know you are dealing with poor me, and in order not to get pulled into their game by becoming intimidator or another poor me, you can say something like "Am I supposed to feel guilty?" or "I can't help feeling that you think I should be feeling guilty?", thus bringing their control drama to consciousness. Remember that control dramas are unconscious and the person guilting you can be completely unaware what they are doing to you. All they know they feel energized when doing what they are doing and they want to keep feeling good so they continue doing the same thing.

Now be prepared that the reaction of the person can be very unexpected and most likely they will not like you bringing their drama to consciousness.