Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: Drama Triangle

12-20-2025 Do You Hear What I Hear

It’s still dark as I lie in my bed with words coming through my head. These words have to do with Bonnie Makepeace, singer songwriter, and beloved friend. I’ve written about her music before. Today John and I are driving 150 miles to the home of Norm and Rochelle Morris, in San Antonio, Florida. They authored the book Jingles Promise I have also written about. The book is their story of the loss of their adult son.

Bonnie shares their loss of an adult son.

As does the Mother of Jesus.

Today we are attending a by-invitation-only launch of music by Bonnie and Rochelle. Music that has been birthed within this past year. The admission is a donation of non-perishable foods for the local food pantry. In my heart, it is so significant that Bonnie is bringing this new music through. It’s music I’m savoring, and I think it’s music the world is hungry for — even those who don’t know they are.

You see, the lyrics Bonnie is receiving as downloads are revealing to the world the Christ, not just the man Jesus that is alone worthy of love, but to The Christ, the energy that is the bedrock of what is good in every religion, and in all of life.

Words of religion can end up working as swords, causing an unintentional gap built of labels. These “new” gospel songs create a bridge among all peoples of this world. This music is built on the pillars of love, peace, and clarity. This music is truly transrational. (See Drama Triangle)

This has been a blessed week of music.

We were at a jam on Tuesday night with lots of Christmas songs. Thursday evening, we attended the Christmas concert at Sacred Heart Catholic Church here in Punta Gorda, Florida. We went with Jim and Mary, our landowners of Blue House, where we lived for the last two winters. We love them and we loved the concert last year and this year did not disappoint. The sanctuary seats 1500 people, and Father Jerry herded a dozen or more who were standing in the back of the room up onto the chancel, saying, “These are the best seats in the house.”

I have heard several Christmas songs for the first time. You see, I don’t think Bonnie Makepeace is alone. And, yes, that is her actual (married) name. I think Bonnie is among others writing what is coming through their hearts onto this planet, bringing more love and more light into the world with words we’ve been able to speak (or sing) before. It’s funny how your words change when your heart is truly open. The kindness, the awareness, the love pours forth in words that don’t come from your head. These words come directly from your heart.

I don’t think it’s an accident that today’s concert is happening on December 20th and tomorrow is December 21st. Here we are, poised between the darkest day and the coming of the light. Collectively, humanity is also poised between the darkest day and the coming of the light.

I’m really not looking forward to the drive in Florida’s notorious high season traffic, but I am sooooo looking forward to the music.

I’m looking forward to experiencing it with others that we love: Ed Bennett and Teresa Palmer and her beloved Patrick. We are praying that Ed’s wife, Dee, will be physically well enough to be able to attend today. I know she’ll be there with us in our hearts, along with the sons of Rochelle and Bonnie and Mary….

Obviously we don’t know what the traffic will be like until we have made the trip, and we don’t know what our world is going to encounter as we travel on down the road of these last days of 2025 and into the year 2026 and beyond. We know that these are very chaotic and volatile times (like the traffic in Florida in high season), but, oh, Dear Friends, the trip is worth it.

I’ll be taking all of you with me in my heart today. I hope you love the music. I hope it touches your heart. Do you hear what I hear?

Note* Here are a few of the “new-to-me” Christmas songs from the Sacred Heart concert:

Francesca Battistelli: “Be Born In Me (MARY)”

MercyMe – Joseph’s Lullaby

Amy Grant – Breath Of Heaven (Mary’s Song)

December 20, 2025
Take Another Look
Below is a Yellow Brick Road from October 28, 2020. The theme is floating back through my consciousness and might be helpful for others at this time again as well.
Need to Do

You must cherish one another.
You must work —
we all must work —
to make this world
worthy of its children.

~ Pablo Casals

Is this opening quotation, as it is written, true? Less and less I am concerned with being a doer, as more and more I am aware of the importance of how I am being. Listening to Rupert Spira speak about there being no doer, however, I also recognize the stages of learning we are experiencing around all of this. Spira says the belief and feeling “I am a person” is the same belief and feeling of “I am a doer.”

In mindfulness, this thought “I am a person” could be seen as operating from ego.

New Years Eve 2000 — twenty years ago — our meditation focus was a powerful writing titled “The Recovering Hero Proclamation.” Here is the last stanza:

I allow things to unfold naturally, and I trust the flow.
I joyfully accept and experience my humanity.
I need nothing.
All already is.
Blessed be.

~Aaliyah LivingWell
aka Gina Dawn Gavaris
GeneratingLove@aol.com
www.GeneratingSolutions.org

It is important to realize that this does not mean all action ceases. As Spira says, “No…. Cars continue to be driven, meals continue to be cooked, inquiring into the nature of experience continues to be undertaken.” Everything continues, but it doesn’t imply that there’s a doer.

I found this note in my journal: I forgive myself for believing it is my job to be the hero in any situation or save anyone else from having the experience they are creating.

Wow.

Those familiar with the SCS/NLP materials recognize fully we are moving off the Drama Triangle and experiencing life from the transrational perspective.

If we are able to drive, cook, and inquire into the nature of things without identifying ourselves as a doer, notice how much more can be done through the expanded awareness.

Recently a friend who hosts two of the Florida Zoom groups I participate in sent a message saying she has reached her stress limit and is going off the grid. We are still able to use her Zoom account, but she is not meeting with us.

William Wordsworth’s opening line in, “The World Is Too Much With Us”: The world is too much with us; late and soon.

Spira invites us to imagine a pink elephant under the chair. Both the statement, “There is something for the pink elephant under the chair to do,” and the statement, “There is nothing for the pink elephant under the chair to do,” are equally absurd.

Is there something we need to do? Today’s Daily Word:
Of course we do things. Until the mind jumps in after the activity and claims, “I did this, I did that” there is only a sense of the raw experience. A baby probably does not draw from the mother’s breast and think, “I just ate.” The nourishment and the nurturing and the satiating of hunger are the raw experience. No commentary is necessary.
Note* Is it significant that the “About Debra” page I am working on for launch of DebraBasham.com opens with a quotation that might appear to be in conflict with my own words?

She wanted to be able to look back over her own life
when she was much older and say,
“Yes I did that.
And that.
And that, too.”
~ The Gazebo, a novel by Emily Grayson, (p. 288)

John sings a duet of “When Did I Get Old” with his music friend, John Smith. The lyrics are by Derrick Clinton Dove & music is by Derrick Dove and The Peacekeepers. Don’t you love those names?

As the two John’s sing, “When did I get old, when did everything change? I don’t recognize this world, I don’t remember this pain. Did time speed up or did I slow down? When did I get old, it’s all behind me now. When did I get old, it’s almost over now,” I realize today is a good day for me to take another look at this blog post. Likely it is related to the timing of my older sister nearing her transition. Of course, it is not only old people who transition and even when it’s over it’s not really over.

Ah, there is time to take another look, and another look, and another look….
January 30, 2025
Drama Triangle Revisited Again and Again

Lately, almost EVERYTHING I read or see or hear or feel reminds me of The Drama Triangle Revisited, one of the more infamous SCS/NLP offerings.

A key awareness of Healing with Language is built on the Drama Triangle, developed by Steve Karpman. The main roles of the Drama Triangle—Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer—are well-known, but not everyone is familiar with either the Cognitive Triangle or the Transrational Pyramid.

For more information, see “The Drama Triangle Revisited” (a free download in PDF format).

It will help you identify the various roles and allow you and your friends, family, and clients to move away from the drama of life and gain a sense of awareness, clarity, and harmony available from the Transrational Pyramid (Healing with Language, 2008, Bowman and Basham).

For example, on Sunday, the blessing of Darshan with The Mother was clearly related to John’s medical process: You can hold your own aspirations and choices with love and offer them out for him to receive, but the highest aspiration always needs to be for that which is for the highest good for him and for yourself. Because you are straining yourself trying to carry him. And you cannot carry him. I will not help you carry him, but I will help you hold a field of love around him, around each other.

At Tuesday’s Evening with Aaron, we were encouraged to move beyond any old fix-it habit energies. While Aaron did not use the term Drama Triangle, the message was clear: Fix-it energy helps to hold in place those two roles of victim and victimizer. What if you step out of that idea, holding space for both of them, seeing how they’re constantly pushing at each other. You can instead say, “I will not play with this whole cycle anymore. I step back out of it. You are responsible for finding the power in yourself to cease being the victim or victimizing others. And I will support your doing that in wholesome ways.”

That is precisely what The Mother had told me about John! “I will not help you carry him….”

Aaron went on to explain that the role of the fixer assumes there is something broken, and if something is broken, then something needs to be fixed. It is a never-ending cycle — until you stop being victimized by it. And you can. ONLY you can. Only YOU can. Only again and again.

I have been invited as guest pastor at St. John United Church of Christ on June 19, which is Father’s Day. The theme of our time together will be observing your masculine teacher (for most of us our father). I am excited about the music for the day: Father’s Eyes by Amy Grant, and Father I Adore You, and Our Father (The Lord’s Prayer). I was looking for a wonderful piece of work from The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guidebook on a flash drive holding the remnants of my previous PC that crossed the rainbow bridge.

While searching for that, I came upon some old notes from a self-retreat at Still Waters. The notes were from a book by SARK. Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, check out her amazing work. I am sorry that I do not know what book this saying is from, but I know the page number is 217.

I am willing to live by this saying, “I don’t know why this has happened, but since it has, I must have helped cause it.” ~ SARK

SARK made an important distinction: this is different from belief that an experience is happening to me because I need to develop such and such a characteristic. This is awareness we are co-creators.

John and I are certainly experiencing awareness through all of this. A dear friend wrote today, “I continue to admire your wisdom, insights, courage and perseverance as I read your blog posts. It sounds like a long difficult passage, but with many blessings along the way.”

I responded,”Like birth! And incarnation!!!!”

While Joel P. Bowman and I were developing the body of materials we called SCS/NLP, he was triggered by a reference I made to a shared office space as”my office.” My comment, or perhaps more clearly his response to my comment, set of a chain-reaction and weeks of stress. Working together for over twenty years, we came to say we had fights so fierce we named them. This one was named: my office.

During the “my office” drama, John and I were in the car on our way to Grand Rapids to have dinner with a friend. I was again and again hashing over the event when John asked simply, “What are you and Joel working on right now?”

“The Drama Triangle,” I responded before continuing, “Why do you ask?”

“Because you are always living the material,” was John’s wise reply.

Joel and I recognized the third “triangle” in the human psyche is actually not a triangle at all. It is a pyramid. The Transrational Pyramid is centered in the heart chakra, and it is transrational in the sense we are able to be with our experiences beyond our personality. We live in a meta state throughout which Awareness is aware of the conditions or context; aware of our personal issues, and aware of the thoughts and feelings of the others affected.

Aaron is fond of saying there is nothing needing to be fixed. From transrational awareness, we simply bring loving attention to what ever needs it. Transrational Awareness combines with Clarity and Peace to produce a sense of Harmony within self, with the other, and with the universe as a whole.

Ah…. Transrational awareness. One of the many blessings along the way of this long difficult passage called life….

May 19, 2022
New Hope Retreat
I am back in the tiny house. It was such a gift going on retreat. Being in Carol’s Cozy Cottage felt so much like Still Waters, where my soul has been nurtured for decades.

While on retreat, a dharma sister shared a powerful poem she saw in a post by a Chicago Cognitive Behavior Therapy practice. Here are a few lines from “The Felt-Sense Prayer” from a podcast by Tara Brach:
Solitude, contemplation, meditation…. to many people these sound like torture. To those of us who are on this path, solitude is the place where our soul can breathe deeply.

Saturday morning was brisk, but the sky was clear so I bundled up and went for a walk. Carol’s husband, Steve, has been on a mission of planting trees. LOTS of trees….

The early morning frost had created an enchanted forest.

Before leaving on retreat, I received word about a friend seriously ill with the coronavirus. Another friend is in the hospital. One of the women at the retreat was going to be with her mom, and might not be back to the retreat. Her mom passed that night. Buddhism is no stranger to impermanence. Quite the opposite. And just as I was so moved by the beauty of the ice crystals , I was also inspired by the brevity of its existence.

A Haiku by Debra Basham
@ Carol’s Cozy Cottage
November 14, 2020
I had some internet instability so much of the time I was only able to call in and listen to the dharma talks. Not being seen or heard was a sort of solitude in and of itself.

Some amazing insights came during my yoga practice Saturday morning when I noticed my shoulders were trying to support the low core. I began hearing, “Trust the low core to do it’s work. You can trust it. It is safe.”

The SCS/NLP material on the drama triangle came into my awareness and I realized the way all three roles on the drama triangle work together is perfect: playing all the roles balances karma!

We have been studying a Mahāyāna Buddhism concept of the three bodies, or modes of being: the dharmakaya; the sambhogakaya; and the nirmanakaya. For this post, suffice it to say that I could see how the drama triangle corresponds to the nirmanakaya.

These sorts of insights often get stifled by the busyness and distractions of every day life. A doctor who expressed concern seeing a lot of severe burnout among his colleagues closed the retreat with a comment about the pandemic also bringing a gift to slow things down.

And when I opened email after I got home, I saw this message from Matt Kahn, author of Whatever Arises, Love That: Personal growth is only a means of improvement when seeing how miraculously you are able to grow when improving the way you care, treat, and speak to yourself. From this space, personal growth is a choice that only love can embrace.

It seems New Hope was the perfect way to describe this retreat…. Namaste’
November 15, 2020
Need to Do
You must cherish one another.
You must work —
we all must work —
to make this world
worthy of its children.

~ Pablo Casals

Is this opening quotation, as it is written, true? Less and less I am concerned with being a doer, as more and more I am aware of the importance of how I am being. Listening to Rupert Spira speak about there being no doer, however, I also recognize the stages of learning we are experiencing around all of this. Spira says the belief and feeling “I am a person” is the same belief and feeling of “I am a doer.”

In mindfulness, this thought “I am a person” could be seen as operating from ego.

New Years Eve 2000 — twenty years ago — our meditation focus was a powerful writing titled “The Recovering Hero Proclamation.” Here is the last stanza:
It is important to realize that this does not mean all action ceases. As Spira says, “No…. Cars continue to be driven, meals continue to be cooked, inquiring into the nature of experience continues to be undertaken.” Everything continues, but it doesn’t imply that there’s a doer.

I found this note in my journal: I forgive myself for believing it is my job to be the hero in any situation or save anyone else from having the experience they are creating.

Wow.

Those familiar with the SCS/NLP materials recognize fully we are moving off the Drama Triangle and experiencing life from the transrational perspective.

If we are able to drive, cook, and inquire into the nature of things without identifying ourselves as a doer, notice how much more can be done through the expanded awareness.

Recently a friend who hosts two of the Florida Zoom groups I participate in sent a message saying she has reached her stress limit and is going off the grid. We are still able to use her Zoom account, but she is not meeting with us.

William Wordsworth’s opening line in, “The World Is Too Much With Us”: The world is too much with us; late and soon.

Spira invites us to imagine a pink elephant under the chair. Both the statement, “There is something for the pink elephant under the chair to do,” and the statement, “There is nothing for the pink elephant under the chair to do,” are equally absurd.

Is there something we need to do? Today’s Daily Word:

Guidance
I am divinely guided from within.

There are times I find myself wondering which way to turn. Rather than feeling stressed or pressured into making quick decisions, I know these instances are perfect opportunities to calm myself and check my internal compass for divine direction.

The source guidance I receive allows me to perceive possible paths and shows me the way if I veer off course. All I need to do is become quiet and feel aware of my connection with God by pausing, breathing deeply, releasing, and relaxing into my intuitive knowing.

From this place, I instinctively know which way to turn and what to do. In faith, I follow the guidance of my inner wisdom and know everything I will need for the journey ahead is already mine.

Though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong, for the Lord holds us by the hand.—Psalm 37:24

Of course we do things. Until the mind jumps in after the activity and claims, “I did this, I did that” there is only a sense of the raw experience. A baby probably does not draw from the mother’s breast and think, “I just ate.” The nourishment and the nurturing and the satiating of hunger are the raw experience. No commentary is necessary.
October 28, 2020
For You First

I am not sure who the spiritual teacher was that first told me whatever message you receive for another, realize the message is for you first. That message or lesson or truth also applies to the other, but it is for YOU. Perhaps it was something learned in Ryan Elliott’s L-O-N-G intake form for hypnotherapy. I do recall hearing it from Angel Gail Konz. This morning I had opportunity to remember it again!

“Don’t we all want to be needed?” It was a rhetorical question via text. A follow-up to a our earlier conversation.

“Maybe not,” I wrote back. I could instantly see it related to Sunday’s sermon coming up. I recall how clear I was that this week’s talk was to be new: I was not to give the one I had recently shared in another church. “Let’s talk after dinner,” I responded before sending her this:

The Recovering Hero Proclamation

I have no need to save others.
I have no need to rescue others.
I have no need to outshine anyone.
I have no need to out-think, out-perform,
out-produce anyone – including myself.
I do not need to know anything.
I do not need to be an expert.
I do not need to fix anyone, or any change anything.
I do not need to dazzle, impress, or inspire anyone.
I do not need to be the hero of my own story.
In truth, I am organic, evolving, and fallible.
I allow things to unfold naturally, and I trust the flow.
I joyfully accept and experience my humanity.
I need nothing.
All already is.
Blessed be.

~Aaliyah LivingWell
aka Gina Dawn Gavaris
GeneratingLove@aol.com
www.GeneratingSolutions.org

I kept working on the sermon, adding this teaching from Aaron:

A more wholesome attitude might be rather that an initial ego intention, ‘I’m going to save the world,’ we start with the loving intention to see how we can dance with others and with the Earth and with spirit to co-create deeper peace and well-being for all sentient beings. We invite ourselves to be open and listen, to be guided, rather than having the ego dictate, ‘No, it should be this way.’ When you do this you find there truly are no limitations.

I looked again at the original writings on the Drama Triangle and added this to the sermon notes:

In 1968 Stephen Karmpan wrote an article about the Drama Triangle. On this triangle are three interconnected roles: Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor.

A Rescuer often gains great satisfaction by identifying with their care-taking role. They are generally proud of what “helpers” and “fixers” they are. Often they are socially acclaimed, even rewarded, for what can be seen as “selfless acts” of caring. They believe in their goodness as chief caretakers and see themselves as heroes.

Behind it all is a magical belief that, said out loud, might sound like, “If I take care of them long enough, then, sooner or later, they will take care of me too.” But, as we’ve already learned, this rarely happens. When we rescue the needy, we can’t expect anything back. They can’t even take care of themselves – much less be there for us!

This morning, an extended time in meditation allowed me to bring to mind the opening line I had keyed in for the sermon: People want to be helpful, to be useful. We have ways of being helpful and useful that are more wholesome than others.

F!A$#

Something clicked and I could see how hard I had been pushing her to experience something other than what she was experiencing. I had been doing the same thing I was trying to get her to stop doing.

Forgive me, Dear One.

When others seem to me to be in internal conflict or when conditions are difficult or “others” are caught in effort rather than trust, I am being lovingly invited to totally trust God in all of life. As I remember that grace moves through all of our days I am able to relax and breathe and let go.

October 27, 2017