Our love of drama goes back millennia
As I go about observing my responses to things, seeing where I flip into potential harmfulness … OK, attack mode … I see that I cannot observe a vow to be harmless and yet engage in drama. The two are irreconcilable. They cannot both exist in the same space.
A number of games in Eric Berne’s Games People Play were about drama. One I remember is “Let’s You and Him Fight.” “Kitchen Sink” (or was it “Vesuvius”?) is another. Come to think of it, most of his games were about drama.
Drama is the outcome of exaggerating one’s description of someone or one’s account of some event for the purpose of:
- eliciting attention
- putting someone down
- raising oneself up
- slowing events down, or
- stopping an action altogether.
We may rehearse our story until we have a version of events which best serves our purposes.
Then we sell that version of events to others, as if it were the truth, often through gossip and innuendo.
Dramatic people may spice their accounts with the odd bit of good news to throw others off the track. How do I know? These are all things I did.
Drama involves a pre-meditated departure from the truth … OK, OK, a lie … which remains a lie even if both parties accept it as “fair game”or a necessity for some reason.
The TV show I Love Lucy was based on the plot of the heroine telling a little white lie which inevitably grew into mammoth proportions. Here Lucy and Ethel deceive their boss about how well they’re handling packaging the chocolates coming down a fast conveyer belt. The lie just grows and grows.
Lucy illustrates the fate of the deceiver in a totally-disarming way.
When drama is engaged in to raise one person’s profile by lowering another’s, harm invariably results. Inevitably it’s justified as the truth. Somebody seems to win; somebody definitely loses from this way of conducting relationships.
Drama befuddles and prevents balanced and honest evaluation, prior to action. It “muddies the water,” so to speak.
It commits people to untruths and so gets them deeper and deeper into a world that doesn’t actually exist. The world has no truthful foundation and no truthful elements.
All fronts are “false fronts,” but a front built on drama seems fated for eventual fall and abandonment. Under new management. There’s no future for the drama that so characterized the third dimension and formed the plot of so much television and film fare, even today. Especially today.
It encourages a world of deception and strategy for some, actual criminal activity for others, and a feeling of being out-of-integrity for the casual visitor and infrequent user. For those dealing with such a person, it’s an energy drain, a continuing unpleasantness, an obstacle to be avoided, etc.
Michael once called drama “this cancer, the largest human addiction.” (1)
So taking a vow of harmlessness entails of necessity taking a vow to let go of drama.
Gee, what a sigh of relief I breathe.
Again: Just stop it without putting anything in its place. All that needs to happen is that drama needs to go. Where drama is not, truth has the space to be.
Again this falls under the heading of “reparenting” myself. I’m dropping unwholesome patterns of behavior without putting anything in their place. And I’m binding myself to wholesome courses of actions, as far and as fast as I judge it to be healthy for me.
(Concluded in Part 2, below.)
Footnotes
(1) My task as an awareness writer, he said, was to help illustrate “how to let go of drama ― this cancer, the largest human addiction. ” (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, April 25, 2013.)