The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

People stuck in the victim role always have targets of blame, people they see as persecutors. They often turn to others for help and support. These are their rescuers, who play the final role in the drama triangle.

David Emerald did just that after he studied Karpman’s work. He developed a kind of anti-triangle, which he called the “empowerment dynamic.”

Listen: the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you. Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth. They didn’t come from your own natural inclinations. They came from the two forces that drive us all off our true paths: trauma and socialization.

Here it is: your thoughts, even thoughts you absolutely believe, may not always be true.

You see, attacks cause emotional suffering only if a part of us believes them. When a challenger really bothers us, it’s because that person believes things about us that aren’t true—but shards of those same beliefs are still inside our own self-concept, hanging out in our blind spots.

(climbing Mount Delectable), you may manage to get what you want, but you probably won’t get what you yearn for.

Throughout history, people who feel attacked by “others” ignore the perspective of their opponents, rev up their righteous minds, and set out to cause harm. This can trigger similar righteous-mind destructiveness in others, who stop acting creatively and fight back in their own righteous rage, which makes the other side even angrier, and so on. The

if you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong. The folks you meet along the way either genuinely love these things, or they’re faking it as hard as you are. Either way, your connection with them will be artif

They found that persistent self-contemplation and inquiry turns a temporary brain state of unity and love into a permanent, structural brain trait.