Podcast MDM Academy Conference

Episode 168: Donna Zajonc on Victim, Creator, and Who You Want to Be

I'm a recovering rescuer.

For me this shows up as me doing things for others that they should really be doing for themselves (often my kids).   I also sometimes jump in and try to fix a problem that isn't mine, or do something I was never asked to do—like call the doctor or plan the party or give dating advice. Of course, I'd tell myself I just "wanted to help."  But honestly, that probably wasn't my true motivation. I probably thought something was broken that I needed to fix.

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AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 168: Donna Zajonc on Victim, Creator, and Who You Want to Be

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Today I have a special guest, Donna Zajonc. Her credentials are master certified coach, author, and co-founder of the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic. If you saw our David Emerald interview, that is her association here. She helped co-found that organization with David. They worked intimately together for many years until he passed away. And I had the privilege of being one of Donna’s students years ago when I took her coaching program. It gave me lots of tools, some of which we’ll talk about today. Thank you again, Donna, for being here. I’m really looking forward to this.

AUDREY: I want to give you a little bit of her credentials, because she’s done some really amazing things in her life and I want all of you to know how incredible she is. She is currently the director of coaching for the Power of TED, the Empowerment Dynamic organization. She is a very gifted teacher and coach, and her coaching program is so worth signing up for. She received the Washington State Excellence in Coaching Award in 2017. She served three terms in the Oregon legislature, and she also owned a multi-store food retail company in Oregon. Then in 2001 she really embraced her passion for coaching. Donna, you’ve been coaching pretty much full time since then?

DONNA: Yeah, 25 years now.

AUDREY: That’s amazing. And The Power of TED, one of the core books in our Mission Driven Mom Academy, level one, has sold over a quarter of a million copies.

DONNA: I’m so glad to hear that. It’s so needed.

AUDREY: And then her own book, which I own here and have all marked up, is Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic. It was published a few years ago. I love it.

Donna’s Path: Nursing, Public Service, and Coaching

AUDREY: There are so many places we could start. I think we know a little bit about you professionally. I’d love to start out with a little bit more about you personally, so our audience can feel like they know you as a woman. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

DONNA: Well, there are quite a few different segments to my life, as you alluded to. My early years of being drawn to public service through politics and being in the legislature. And being a mom.

DONNA: I was in southern Missouri and went to the University of Missouri, joined VISTA, and married right out of college. We went to Oregon to work with the Klamath Indians, where I was the health coordinator. That was in the early to mid seventies. It was through that experience that I got really interested in public policy and health care policy, and I spent some time in the legislature. I stayed in Oregon, stayed in the Northwest, even though my home base, my brother and sister and family, were sixth generation in small towns in Missouri. But I’ve been a Northwesterner: Portland, Seattle. I live on Bainbridge Island, which is a gorgeous island right off of downtown Seattle.

DONNA: That’s the résumé of person, place, and time. We can certainly get into when I met David in 2003, when we started immediately talking about the empowerment dynamic. We named that and had no idea it would become our life’s work and our business.

AUDREY: You said professional coaching since 2001, so you were already doing that when you met David.

DONNA: That’s correct. I was moving into coaching leaders, especially public leaders, because that had been a big part of many of the years earlier in my life, a real dedication to the nobility of public service. That is not how much of our public leadership is seen today, and I get really sad about that. But that’s exactly what I was doing in 2001 and 2002. We met in 2003 and were immediately drawn to our way of thinking and our desire to create a world that works for all: our desire to serve, to help people be their best, and to create systems where families, companies, and nations can really thrive.

AUDREY: Absolutely. So what led you to coaching in the first place? Why were you already in that realm when you met David?

DONNA: That’s a great question. My undergraduate degree is in nursing, and I went into public health nursing right out of college, working with the Klamath Indians and then in two different community mental health clinics in Oregon for many years. So I already had a very keen interest in human development and psychology. That’s when I heard about and discovered this idea of coaching, which in 2000 and 2001 was brand new.

DONNA: There was a friend here on Bainbridge Island who really guided me into asking, is this a good fit for you? And it felt so good. My psychiatric mental health nursing was more about healing, about addressing wounds and issues. Coaching is all about forward looking, forward thinking. That forward thinking, being at our best, being emotionally sound and secure in our values, being able to take responsibility, all of that really attracted me. So I looked into the coaching school here in Seattle. It was a perfect fit, and I never looked back.

AUDREY: They actually had a school established by then?

DONNA: They did. There were a handful of really incredible coaching programs in the year 2000, and one of the founders of the International Coach Federation created a school here. I felt that was a bit of guidance, because it was so easy for me to be able to attend school right in Seattle.

How the Empowerment Dynamic Was Born

AUDREY: That’s wonderful. So tell us a little bit more about how this connection with David organically started to grow into shared work for the two of you.

DONNA: What a beautiful question. We met in a business setting, but we very quickly realized that there was a strong love and affinity between us. Over those couple of years after meeting, he shared with me epiphanies he was having about a time in his life where he felt very much like a victim. He found out he couldn’t have children of his own, that he was biologically infertile. His dad, who he was very close to, died suddenly. And his first marriage disintegrated, for lots of reasons, but I think in part because he couldn’t have children and she very much wanted children.

DONNA: So he started telling me about his epiphanies around this victim consciousness, and about some guidance he had had to ask, well, what’s the opposite of victim? Out of that meditative reflection, he had a sense. He says, I didn’t hear words, I didn’t hear a voice, but the opposite of being a victim and having life happen to us is to be a creator. So learn to create and take responsibility for our lives.

AUDREY: And on first blush that seems like a really simple idea. It is so profound.

DONNA: It comes with an extremely profound idea about how we meet the world, how we meet challenges, how we meet ourselves and our family, moving out of “life happens to me and I’m powerless,” which is a quick summary of victim consciousness. And we are all victims at times, to accidents, to health issues. People really do abuse us. What we’re talking about is not victimization.

AUDREY: That’s right. Definitely.

DONNA: We’re talking about victimhood as an identity, that we see ourselves as not having a choice, that life happens to us. That description alone can really stop people.

AUDREY: Yes. There’s a big difference.

DONNA: So that became our conversations. We both knew about the drama triangle, me from my days in mental health, and David knew about it through being in therapy regarding the loss of his marriage and not being able to have children.

AUDREY: And that’s the main shift, isn’t it? Victim is the heart of that drama triangle.

DONNA: Dr. Karpman said that when we’re feeling like a victim, there’s always a persecutor. There’s always a problem that’s caused us to feel like we’re a victim. And the third role Dr. Karpman said is that when those two roles enter, there’s always a third one, the hero, the rescuer. So that’s a very dynamic description of the three primary ways we human beings respond to things we don’t like and don’t want.

DONNA: David’s epiphany, as you know, was, oh my gosh, there’s got to be a positive alternative to that. We firmly believe in the goodness of who we are as human beings. So what is the new triangle that rests upon that goodness, that ability to choose, that ability to create, that ability to be loved? That’s what he started sharing with me on walks. And I said, David, this is really original work. We need to write this down.

DONNA: That’s what we did for about a year and a half. And we named the new triangle. I was writing a book about my time in coaching, and my editor heard about David’s new triangle and that we had just named it the empowerment dynamic. So now we’ve got the drama triangle on one hand and the empowerment dynamic on the other. She said, okay, David, now you have named it TED. The name of your book is going to be The Power of TED. And now you need to write a story.

DONNA: David was shocked. He said, I don’t know how to write a story about some guy named Ted. But that’s what he did. We hired my editor to help him do that. And so there you go, Audrey. That’s how it was birthed. We just kept following our guidance and our epiphanies and our sense of how much value it had for us to stop and say, wait a minute, where am I on these two triangles? Being a victim, persecutor, rescuer, stuck and just going around and around. Or do I really believe in the divinity of my creator essence? Not the Creator, but a creator. Do I really believe in my ability to challenge and see the truth of who I am and to keep moving toward what I care about? And then how do I do that? How do I coach rather than be the rescuer pleaser that’s always fixing everybody else?

How Audrey Came to This Work

AUDREY: I was thinking while you were talking about my own experience with drama. I found out a long time ago that one thing I’m really good at is creating curriculum. Twenty years ago I was at a college, I saw the need for a course, I asked if I could create one, they said go ahead and try, and it turned out to be a popular course. That’s just how I think. Whenever I can see that there’s a problem in the world, my answer is usually, well, let me tell you what to read, let me build a course for you that will help you learn and change and grow.

AUDREY: Years ago I had an interaction in a women’s class. A handful of roses were handed out at random, and the women were asked to come to the front, say something good about themselves, and put the rose in a vase. I knew many of the women in the audience, and I watched them one by one come to the front and say something self-deprecating. Nobody else in the world remembers this event but me, because it was just what I needed to see and recognize at that moment in my life. I carried it with me for weeks. I thought on it, I prayed on it, and I pondered: what is happening that these women either don’t know how incredible they are or don’t have the confidence to say it? What is wrong?

AUDREY: So I decided I was going to do something about it. For about a year I went back through all the things that have helped me most and vetted them down with the help of a couple of women, and we launched level one of the Mission Driven Mom, which is all about loving God and yourself more fully.

AUDREY: I can’t remember if I had found the drama triangle before that or if we found it through my husband’s marriage and family therapy degree. But I knew about this drama triangle, and we had had so many conversations about it. Just that aspect had been helpful in our marriage, helpful in our parenting, helpful in our lives. When it came time for me to try to understand it better, I wanted to teach it, because I felt like it would be helpful. And there’s just nothing out there. Karpman never wrote a book. He never elaborated on it hardly at all. There’s basically the original thesis. Other people have written some books, and I have maybe half a dozen. Some of them had helpful things to say in delineating the drama portion, and you could look at what it was and then think about the opposite, and that could be helpful.

AUDREY: But it wasn’t until I found The Power of TED that I said, oh, this is the antidote. This is the solution. This is what I was looking for that’s going to help these women. There are three concepts we cover in the academy: self-care, self-leadership, and self-discovery, all to help them know themselves, accept themselves, and love themselves more fully. In the self-leadership section, this is what we talk about. I teach them all about drama. They buy their own copy of The Power of TED and go through it. There are other concepts around that, shame and blame and other elements that we found helpful to understanding the whole aspect of it. And I know some of the women who have come through the Mission Driven Mom have turned around and gone to your coaching program to dive deeper into it.

AUDREY: What happened for me was that I learned it, I was teaching it, women were having incredible experiences with it. And then a few years ago I saw on your email list that there was a coaching program, and I thought, maybe this will help me teach it better, maybe I can understand it better. That was a very rich experience. Just the idea of reframing that you teach was insanely helpful, and I’ve added to and elaborated on that some in the way that we teach it. We have our event this fall and we’ll dig deeper into some of these things. One of our mentors, Lindsey, was very excited about victim types. There are a lot of people out there with victim types, but she decided to work on her own list, and she’s attached Disney characters to them. That’s been a fascinating journey.

AUDREY: So that’s how I came to it. What I can attest to is over 600 women who have come through our program. There are a handful of core ideas from level one that they usually call out, and this is one of the ones they usually say is a huge paradigm shift for them, and just so helpful to their personal progress. It’s like one of my favorite quotes. I say it all the time. It’s very simple, and I’m sure you heard David say it all the time: you cannot not create.

DONNA: Yes. We had a blog about that just a few weeks ago.

AUDREY: When you really deeply know that, then you know it’s kind of like, yes, there is drama and the opposite of that is creator, and yes, there’s this empowerment dynamic. But it is also true that there’s a sense in which even in drama we’re creating, because we can’t not create. We’re just creating more of what we don’t want, more of what we don’t like. We’re so focused on those fears that they manifest more and more in our daily lives.

Naming Our Reactive Patterns

DONNA: Well, thank you for that history. You’re really mirroring much of what encouraged David to keep digging. Because the drama triangle work, people said, oh, it’s so helpful to name my reacting patterns. But then what do I do? And the response in therapy and in the few articles and writings was, well, just don’t do it. It’s very toxic. You’ll just get stuck racing around those archetypal roles. It was that awareness, just like you had, that he couldn’t find anything that pointed to the good part of us, the goodness of us, the self of who we are as human beings, as divine human beings.

AUDREY: It sounds like you and David had such similar thinking and tracking.

DONNA: We wanted to be teachers and healers of how to bring the work alive. There are so many nuances in the triangles and how they point to what we focus on. More and more, what I do with the coaching is this: okay, now I know some reactive patterns, and now I can see them. You name it. Naming is so helpful. And it can really be upsetting at first. Oh, I’m so stuck.

AUDREY: It seems like it’s the malaise of the human experience, because our brains are threat-seeking mechanisms. Our brains help keep us safe by scanning the horizon, looking for problems, threats, danger. If we’re not careful, that can be our primary neurological and thinking pattern of how we go through life. Which is great, because our ancestors survived because they did worry about threats.

DONNA: They worried about the tiger or the snake or whatever the physical threat was. But where we are in this world now is that our bodies were not made for the speed of life. The way threats come at us now at such a rapid pace, whether we want them or not, whether we’ve actually put the phone down, whether we’ve stopped watching the news, so much of what is now being talked about are social threats. The speed of life is forcing us, if we’re open to the stress, to look at ways we can create habits to transmute and transform and get out of this reacting pattern. It requires skills. It requires practices.

DONNA: And that’s what we focus on at the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic, because the default way of going through life is to be problem focused, danger focused. That’s what keeps us alive. But that pattern of our brain does not support living in this fast-paced world where we want to be our best selves, our best moms, our best spouses.

DONNA: I love that you have one right there: we cannot not create. One of your go-to slogans. So what does that do? That helps us realize, ah, now it’s my responsibility to choose what I’m going to broadcast out into the world. And that responsibility is the core behavior change from victim to creator. I start taking responsibility.

Everyone Is Vying for the Victim Role

AUDREY: I’ve read several books, so I can’t always remember exactly who taught me this particular aspect. But one of the things that has been very helpful in understanding the drama and the shift is that one of the other books I have on drama talks about the game of drama. They explain that even though there are three players, actually everybody wants the victim role. It’s a game where everyone is vying to prove that they’re the victim. And the reason they’re playing that game and trying to prove their victimhood, whether they’re doing it in a rescuing or persecuting way, is because the victim is the one who’s off the hook. When everybody is in agreement about who the victim is, then the victim has been acted upon. The victim doesn’t have responsibility for the conditions of their life or the conditions of their relationships or whatever the circumstance might be. And that is what we think we want. That’s what we are fighting for when we’re staying in drama.

DONNA: But it’s a very disempowering way of being.

AUDREY: I love that you use the empowerment dynamic in our academy. All of the self-leadership sections are titled “increasing my personal power by.” And you’re absolutely right. There are countless voices out there that explain to us that the root of change is responsibility. It’s just that simple. Until you own it, you can’t do anything about it. You are powerless. And there’s a difference between being powerless and powerful.

DONNA: You’re so right. And you’re making it sound so simple, because I get that energy from you. This has really dawned on you, and you have really taken this work, and it’s a mission for you.

These Roles Are Not Who We Are

DONNA: So we say the victim, and I really want to emphasize here, that’s not who we are. These are roles that we play. These are characters, faces, personas, types, as Jung spoke so much about. So for our listeners, let’s remember that we’re not speaking about the victimization that does occur to us. We’re talking about our choice and our sense of identity in how we respond to life’s challenges.

DONNA: I try very hard to say, when I’m in the victim role, kind of acting like a victim, when I’m in the victim mindset. Underneath all three of the roles is a victim mindset: I don’t like what’s happening right now in life. It’s not what I want. I’m anxious or upset about it. And how we respond to that anxiety, to those heavy emotions, comes out in three different patterns. We can say, okay, it’s not mine to do, and take on that victim role. I don’t have any responsibility here. The persecutor says, well, I don’t want to be the victim, so I’m going to lean in and really take charge and control. There are many faces and characters in how we do that. And then the rescuer says, oh, let me help. I’m uncomfortable with seeing you two in conflict, so let me help, let me please.

DONNA: There’s a real cost to all three of these roles. They’re different in our strategy and in the way we behave and respond to our anxiety about something. But they’re all built on focusing on what we don’t want, what we don’t like, our anxiety about it, and then our reacting behavior. We do something to keep the drama going.

AUDREY: I love that point, that they’re all racing to the bottom because they’re all based on a victim mindset. For me, I can tell that I’m probably in this problem orientation when I reflect on something that’s going on in my life and I can feel myself shut down, get negative, focus on the things I don’t like, feel really stuck and powerless, like I don’t know how to move forward. Those are all indications.

AUDREY: And what’s interesting, Donna, and I love how you said this at the beginning, is that it’s not like life is never going to be hard again, or bad things aren’t going to happen. It’s just tools in a toolbox. It’s recognizing that this habit is probably going to come back up, but I’m going to know how to snap out of it a little bit quicker, just because I can name things, I can recognize things, and I have tools.

The Commitment Behind Your Complaint

AUDREY: Maybe one of the most powerful things you taught me when I was in the coaching program was that the reason I’m disappointed or upset or frustrated or stuck about something is actually for a good reason. It’s because there’s something I truly value that’s rooted deeply inside this circumstance I’m in. For me, that turned it around. Instead of being down on myself, instead of being frustrated about what I was doing, instead of staying in that negative place, all of a sudden I was like, oh, wait a minute. It’s because I’m a good person with good values, and I just need to remember what I value. That’s one of the tools you teach for reframing that was so helpful. It helped me let go of a bunch of things I couldn’t control, and to reframe things and create a new plan. I don’t know how you and David came up with it, or if it was your idea.

DONNA: I would say my nursing background, my coaching background. David wasn’t a coach. David was a facilitator and trainer, just brilliant at making complex ideas simple. I think that’s how his mind created this positive triangle.

DONNA: So the name of my book was going to be Love Your Drama. When I first wrote my book it was 2020, and we all remember that. Like so many, we got off the road and I had some time to write. I finished the script, and I had five people who were my readers. All five of them said, Donna, I don’t like your title. Nobody’s going to get that.

DONNA: When you hear about the drama triangle, the number one question is, well, how do I stop that? How do I get out of it? And it’s the opposite. There’s something going on in our life that we’re really reacting to, and we can observe our victim behavior or our judgment. When we’re stuck in a drama triangle, it means there’s something we care about. I call it the commitment behind your complaint. You might remember that phrase. There’s a commitment that you have that’s behind your complaining. Otherwise you would just go on to the next thing on your list or the next issue in your life.

DONNA: Now, I’m not talking about chronic complaining, which is a behavior of its own, a concern one would really work with if there’s a chronic tendency to complain. I’m speaking of going through life and all of a sudden something happens in the middle of your day and you get triggered. You get upset. Wow, there’s something going on here that I care about. And that’s exactly what we do, because that’s a coaching moment. Learn to be with your clients, be with your family members and friends, and sit in the ick. I call it sitting in the ick. What’s going on here that something matters to me? To me, that’s the door to the next level of awareness and epiphany and greatness in your own life. It’s the opposite of the way most people teach it, which is just stop doing that. We also offer questions and exercises and tips to help facilitate the shift out of the drama triangle into TED. But one of the main ideas is: notice your reactivity. What’s my commitment that’s got me complaining?

AUDREY: I love that. Someone else who taught me about commitment is Ben Hardy, who talked about it as an essential component of identity, that one of the things that makes us who we are is our commitments. That perfectly aligns with understanding that something is butting up against how we see ourselves.

AUDREY: There’s a bit of identity in all of this. As we were preparing our content for this event this fall, one of the things that kept coming up for us in our problem stories was ego, in a negative sense. We realized that so often the problem story, staying in victimhood or problem orientation, was all about how we were looking to ourselves and how we were looking to other people. Which is why you teach, look at the intention. Because our intentions often weren’t right. When we find ourselves in drama, it really often goes back to: I just have the wrong intentions. I’m trying to control things I shouldn’t be trying to control, and I’m not living within the things I can control, keeping the commitments that matter to me so that I can create a life I love.

DONNA: Usually aligned with values. What is it that I really value, and do I behave and keep my commitments to be aligned with those values? Those are very powerful connections, and it goes back to the victim to creator shift. What is mine to do?

Two Questions: What Do I Want? What Is My Intention?

DONNA: What do I want? As you know, we often don’t know what we want when we get triggered. We just know what we don’t want. But to me, that’s also the doorway. It’s similar to the complaining we just talked about. Okay, I hear what you don’t want. What is it that you do want? I don’t know, I just want this. It’s okay to sit with that. Something you care about has got you really riled up. Maybe you feel invisible because of the way somebody treated you in the grocery line.

DONNA: That’s again why I love it as a coaching process. It doesn’t have to be coaching as a professional coach, but as a friend, as a family member, to help the other see what is going on in their mind and heart, where they’ve bumped up against something that isn’t aligned, somewhere they’re not fulfilling the integrity of who they say they are. So I love the “what’s my intention” question. Other than what do I want right here, what don’t I want, what’s on the other side, what’s the reframe? What if this problem were solved? What would it allow me to have or do or be?

DONNA: The second question that I love is, what’s my intention? Is my intention to look good? To be right? To get out of doing something hard? Or is my intention to listen deeply? Is my intention to build up? Is my intention to learn something? It’s a continuum, a polarity of two totally different intentions.

DONNA: And what really gets my attention, Audrey, is when I catch myself and ask myself that question and I go, yeah, I really want to be right in this moment. Now I am faced with taking responsibility. Am I going to add to the fire of this friction and drama that’s going on right now between whoever is in the room? And am I upset because this situation is forcing me to look at myself and the world in a different way? It’s forcing me to be different. It’s forcing me to go out and do things I’ve been avoiding doing.

AUDREY: It’s one of the reasons that I sometimes ruminate and stay, because it’s painful, but sometimes it can feel more comfortable to just stay there complaining about it than to actually do something about it.

Why This Lands with Mothers

AUDREY: I was thinking while you were talking: what are the reasons these principles and tools hit home so much with our audience at the Mission Driven Mom? I think it’s a couple of reasons. The most important one is that so many women, and I don’t know if this was your experience, but it was definitely mine, we want to be moms, and that sounds fun. Our initial impressions of motherhood are the loving, the nurturing, the playing, all the beautiful things that are going to happen when this baby comes into our lives. Often those first few years can feel a lot like that, albeit with two-year-old tantrums and whatnot.

AUDREY: And then they get a little older. We have quite a few moms come into our program whose kids are just getting a little bit older, maybe starting to enter the teenage phase. Now they realize that they aren’t sure what they want as a mom anymore. They weren’t equipped with the tools and the questions and the principles to build a family culture that they love and want. They did go into motherhood with intention, but now they’re at this new phase that requires a new level of attention and intention and creation, to decide: this is who we are, this is what we’re going to be, this is how our relationships look, this is how we work together with each other.

AUDREY: They also can have a bit of their identity being lost in that. They feel this friction, this ongoing struggle between what they need and want and what their family needs and wants. They tend to be conscientious, good women who set their own desires aside, but then that feels yucky, and then putting themselves first feels yucky too. They don’t know how to find the balance.

AUDREY: And we’ve also had women, to your point, where some of our moms have been homeschoolers, and many homeschooling families are driven by what they don’t want. They exit the school systems because they don’t want that, and they don’t know what they want instead. So then it becomes turmoil and friction in their homes. When they start to become acquainted with these principles and tools, a really big transformation happens in the way that they think and show up for themselves and their families in their homes.

The Empowerment Dynamic: Creator, Challenger, Coach

AUDREY: We’ve talked quite a bit about the drama and the players and the roles in drama. Give us an overview of the empowerment dynamic. What is the inverse of that? We’ve said the word creator, but talk us through that inverse triangle.

DONNA: Perfect. We’ve spent a lot of time on Dr. Karpman, and David and I went down to see Dr. Karpman.

AUDREY: I saw a video on YouTube of you with him, actually. It was on his back porch.

DONNA: He’s still alive. He’s in his early nineties, I believe. At lunch we asked him, what have you found most successful to help people move out of the drama triangle? And he said, oh, you all have done a lot more than we ever have. I just described it. David and I both remembered that. So the first thing is naming.

DONNA: We human beings live on an earth plane of polarities: up, down, hard, soft, in and out, future and past. And so it’s the same thing with these two triangles, this continuum. We have a reactive pattern that arises out of us. The reason I think it’s so familiar, as you said, that people get it so fast, is because Dr. Karpman named universal reactive patterns. The victim: woe is me. The persecutor: I better take control, nobody else will. And the rescuer: oh, let me help.

DONNA: So the positive side on that continuum, on that polarity, is the victim to creator shift, which we’ve talked most about. As the victim leans out, and again, the victim role is not who we are, the creator leans in and says, what’s my responsibility? What do I care about? What do I want to do?

DONNA: So now, what’s the opposite of the persecutor? The persecutor at its heart is controlling, sometimes not overtly but very behind the scenes, manipulative. It has a fiery energy to it, that persecutor energy. So what is the opposite of that? David named it the challenger. We can challenge ourselves to step up, to grow, to expand. And we can be a challenger to others.

AUDREY: I call that the truth teller.

DONNA: Oh, I love that. The challenger has the capacity, and we all have had challengers in our life. It may have been a grandmother. It may have been a college professor. My hunch is you’re a challenger to a lot of women in your network. When we’re in the challenger, we have the ability to speak the truth, to be courageous, to be authentic. Maybe no one else in the room has that, but you speak to it. And you do it without blame or put-down.

AUDREY: That’s why I love this truth teller description.

DONNA: So that’s the opposite of persecutor. And the last one is the rescuer. The rescuer steps in and says, oh, let me do it for you, unknowingly disempowering others by doing for them what is theirs to do. So the opposite is the coach, not necessarily the professional coach at all, but the coach in us that is the good friend who takes a walk and asks inquiring, open-ended questions that help the other clarify what it is they do want. Oh, I hear that you don’t want this, but what do you want? The rescuer is a supportive role. Cares a lot, thank goodness we care. But the coach leaves the power with the other, to make decisions for themselves.

DONNA: That is a really tough one when we’re helpers and we want to fix and make things better. To leave the power with others is a huge part of what that coach role is, and it distinguishes the rescuer from the coach. So those are the three roles that we call the empowerment dynamic. And we have a TED tools kit to help get out of that drama and into the empowerment. It’s a continuum, as we said. We’ll always get triggered. We want to move our center of gravity more out of living in the reactive world and into living more and more into the empowerment dynamic world, updating our operating system. So there you have it. That’s the brief.

AUDREY: Thank you. So simple, and it’s really not easy, is it?

Seeing Your Problems as Challengers

AUDREY: I’ll give you two takeaways for me that have really helped me with this framework. Seeing the challenger, like you’re saying, we can show up for someone else as a truth teller and a challenger. We can push back on them when they’re complaining and all of that kind of stuff. But for me, a huge shift happened when I realized that I could also decide, at any moment in my own life, with the things that I’m facing and the problem stories I tend to fall into, that I could choose to see them as challengers.

AUDREY: That reframed it for me. Whenever I remember that, then I’m asking a lot better questions. I’m asking myself, what is the truth about this? What does this circumstance have to teach me? What is life asking of me? Why am I bumping up against reality in such a painful way? When I frame the difficulty and the problem as a challenger, I can even keep myself from going down a rabbit hole. Because otherwise I probably will.

DONNA: The relationship between how these roles get so interfaced is that when you can stop and pause and breathe. There’s a reason the adage “count to ten” has been with us since who knows when, but a long time, because it really does allow our neurology, our heart and our prefrontal cortex, to come back online so we can be smarter. You go, wow, what just happened? How am I being asked to learn? What is the gift here?

DONNA: If we’re really hijacked and triggered, it’s very challenging to ask those questions. It may take a couple of hours. It may take a couple of days to be able to look back and deconstruct what happened. But keep asking, Audrey. I love that. Keep asking, what has shown up here in my life to teach me right now? And that’s how we see other things that we would previously have labeled as persecutors. We now can see them as challengers.

AUDREY: And that takes a very emotionally grounded person to be able to ask those questions and to sit in the ick.

DONNA: I recently have been facing the decision, after 25 years, of whether or not to sell the family home. I’ve been in a six or eight week process making that, and boy, sitting in the ick of all the variables of a big decision. In my twenties and thirties I wanted to buy a house. We wanted a big family home. That’s not what I want anymore. The reason I’m saying that is that our lives go through so many stages, and we need a capacity to update how we’re making sense of the new information. The moms you referred to who now have teenagers, it requires them to get clear about values, get clear about a whole different situation. That ability to keep asking the same questions: what is there here for me to learn now? What do I care most about? What are my values? They change over life.

The Rescuer and the Coach

AUDREY: I love the challenger part of the empowerment dynamic, to ask us to step up, take responsibility. Just like we can play all three roles in our own heads in drama, we can be the persecutor and the victim and the rescuer, we can also, I’ve learned, play those three roles for ourselves when we want to move out of drama. We can coach ourselves and challenge ourselves and keep striving to create. Obviously lean on a friend, teach people around you, bring them on the journey with you. But also, in those moments, we can do that for ourselves.

AUDREY: My other takeaway is about the coach. I tell people often that I’m a recovering rescuer. That’s definitely my go-to role, especially in parenting and friendships. I want to rescue, which usually shows up as doing something for you that you should be doing for yourself, or doing something for you that you didn’t ask me to do, but I see that you need it. And learning and realizing that that actually makes you feel broken, because I’m assuming you can’t do it for yourself.

AUDREY: So the coaching piece I’ve had to drill really deep into, because I’ve had to use coaching skills to change the way I parent, especially in parenting my adult children, because that has not come as naturally or as easily for me as it did to parent younger children. I remember one time I just got out a piece of paper and imagined a soccer coach, and I wrote down all the traits of that soccer coach. I was trying to identify for myself what a coach can do and what a coach can’t do, to help me reframe the difference between the coach and the rescuer.

AUDREY: The coach is not allowed to step onto the field and take the ball and run the play. There are so many boundaries there that you might want to cross over as a mother, but you wouldn’t even be able to in a true coaching circumstance. What can you do? You can teach them how to play, but you can’t practice for them. You can’t force them to get better. You can’t force them to come to practice. You can’t force them to give their all. There are so many parameters. Once I had that list in front of me, it helped me say, okay, well then what power do I actually have in coaching anyone? In a real life circumstance, what are the boundaries around that? What are the limitations I need to honor, to honor myself and to honor them, to be a coach and not slip into the other thing?

DONNA: There are real costs. It hurts the relationship a lot. It can really hurt, and it exhausts you.

How Do I See the Other?

DONNA: May I offer another question to put on your list? How do I see the other? Do I see them as a victim that’s not capable of handling this themselves? Or do I see them as a creator? Do I see them as learning, and as having the capacity, as a divine being, to take charge of their own life?

DONNA: How we answer that question can be a remarkable insight into what you do next, because it’s broken my heart more than once when I get honest and I go, wow, with my adult daughters, I am judging them as not capable. Is that the way I want to relate to my adult daughters? It’s sometimes shocking, just like when I ask, what’s my intention? Well, I want to look good and I want to be right. Okay. I think I’ve been. How do I see the other? Do I really see them as not capable? That’s not how I want to relate to others.

DONNA: The reason we rescue, we think, is because we want to help. And it’s not. I’m talking about serial rescuing. You and I know what I mean, that our only go-to way of working with life’s challenges is just to step in and fix and help. The cost is very high to do that. It’s disempowering to others. And you likely will never know, but it’s likely that others are going to see you as a persecutor.

AUDREY: And that’s the last thing we rescuers want. We’re just trying to help, and we’re seen as a persecutor.

DONNA: Are you resonating with that?

AUDREY: One hundred percent. Because I would only step in if I didn’t think they could do it. I mean, what other conclusion can they draw?

DONNA: Well, part of it is because we want to be seen as kind, wonderful, loving people. It’s an identity issue for many of us. That’s how we’ve gone through life, that we’ll get accolades and love if we help and fix other people. That’s usually learned behavior in the family, learned behavior in some cultures and religions. There are different ways we pick up those ingrained patterns.

AUDREY: One of the reasons I realized that I do it is because I don’t want the people around me to fail, because it will be painful for all of us. It’s a pain avoidance mechanism. If I step in and rescue and help you get there and make up the difference between where you are and where you want to be, if I can just fill in that gap, then we won’t have to suffer that you failed, because I’ll suffer with you. I’m your mom and you’re part of me and we’re intimately linked, and that’s going to be painful and I don’t want to go through that pain. So let’s just make this thing happen.

DONNA: Okay, so there’s a justification going on here.

AUDREY: Exactly. So that’s what I’ve had to remind myself. No, failure is a tool. The law of the harvest is God’s way. They must butt up against life themselves, or they’ll be crippled, they’ll be weaker. That’s where I coach myself and remind myself of those good laws and principles. That’s not what any of us want. My intention really truly is for them to thrive on their own, for them to be proud of who they are, and for us to have a thriving relationship. That’s what I actually really want. And so I have to behave that way.

DONNA: You want them to learn and grow. There’s another part of us that is the controlling part, that we rescuers often don’t like to admit, which is that we just want to get it done. Come on. Can’t you all see how quickly this could be if we just did this and this? So the rescuer has a huge controlling element. So what is it we’re trying to control? Well, the situation, fixing it. But what we’re really trying to manage is our anxiety about a situation we don’t think should be that way.

DONNA: One of the first things I encourage when I coach people who have a fault of rescuing mode is to learn to pause and learn to hold silence. Bite your tongue if you have to.

AUDREY: And I’ve said that. I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to say anything. And I’ve got to leave the room so that I don’t say anything, because it’s just going to hurt for me to say something.

Outcomes and Goals: The Garden

AUDREY: I was taught a really good lesson by a mentor years ago. She told me the story of one time when she and her husband decided they were going to have a family garden. They got the seeds or the plants or whatever it was, and they went out one Saturday morning to do this gardening with their children. The children were young and they didn’t really know what they were doing. So the husband kept taking it out of their hands and doing it for them, getting frustrated with them, pushing things along so that the garden could be planted.

AUDREY: When it was all over, she and her husband had this debrief, and she said, well, how did you feel about that? And he said, oh, it was so frustrating, the kids just didn’t know what they were doing, they were going so slow, we weren’t getting anything done. And she said, oh, you thought this was about us actually having a garden.

AUDREY: It’s actually not what this is about. It’s actually about us enriching our relationships and teaching our children. If we get plants out of it, great, but that’s not actually why we’re here. I think about that often.

DONNA: It’s a great story. And it’s what I speak about in the coaching program about being outcome oriented, the difference between an outcome and a goal. Goals are usually, I mean, we need goals to get things done in our life, sure. But as a coach, I work less with goals and more with outcomes. So the goal in that case might be, hey, let’s plant the garden. And how would we know if we accomplished that? Well, the seeds got planted, we watered it, the plants start coming up.

DONNA: But what is it we really want? This is the power of it. I want connection in this case. I want an experience of being with the children. We are a family that experiences life together with fun and creativity. That could be the outcome statement. If that husband and wife could have clarified that out loud, I think it would have allowed that father to say, oh, here’s the outcome. It’s not about the goal. And to enjoy the experience. Then they would have accomplished that outcome. It’s a much different way of going through life. What do I want? Clarify outcomes first and then goals second.

AUDREY: Thank you, Donna. I think that’s like the first chapter in my book. Really, really clear about what’s my focus here, what’s the outcome I want.

The Title, and Facing Your Fears

AUDREY: This is on page 118 of your book. You say: “Tara asked me to accept and nourish all the different parts of myself. If I resist doing that, she says, the fearful parts will grow stronger and gain even more power and authority over me than they have now. Awakening my inner observer, facing those fearful parts and listening to their voices, will get me out of the grip of the DDT and into self empowerment.” Then you paused and looked over what she had written and added, “honoring my ongoing struggles inside and out is the doorway to freedom and choice.”

AUDREY: So as we finish up, you can share anything else that’s on your heart and mind. But the last question I would ask you is this. In the front of my book I wrote, if you embrace your fears, you’ll have a whole new relationship with them. What would your advice be to mothers around this idea, that if you face your fears you’ll have a new relationship with them, in terms of everything we’ve talked about today?

DONNA: What a brilliant question. Let me answer that by first starting with how I took the feedback from my readers before the book was published, the ones who said, oh, we don’t like your title of Love Your Drama. It was my daughter who sent back the binder with the printed book, and she had circled with a big red circle where I had said, right at the end of the book, that TED said to Sophia, you know, this is really about who do you want to be on the way to what you want. My daughter circled that phrase. She said, mom, this is pure gold. This is your title. So that’s how my title came from my daughter giving me the feedback. She’s a psychotherapist, a brilliant, highly conscious mom.

DONNA: So what advice would I offer in facing my fears? First of all, what does facing it even mean? I would say the first thing is just noticing the speed of life. Sometimes we’re going so fast that we’re not allowing our body to tell us, to guide us, that there’s something we’re scared about, something we don’t like, some heavy emotion. Fear is kind of a catch-all phrase for those heavy emotions. So slow down, so that you can recognize when your body is like a tuning fork and is saying, hey, pay attention here.

DONNA: And then have a practice where you’re learning to be with whatever is rising that you’re naming. But name it lightly. Here’s what I mean by this. When we name something like, oh, I feel really scared about my mother-in-law because she does this and that, that’s the event, and we can actually name it and explode it like it’s a feature film. Instead, lightly notice it and describe it, and pay more attention to the feelings that you have about the situation than to the story about the situation.

DONNA: In the book, I call it the phase of three stories, because you really don’t know often what’s going on. You can make up three stories, and that broadens your perspective. Maybe you really don’t know what’s going on, so have fun with all those stories that could be going on. That alone will help you soften the worry that you have created about a situation.

DONNA: And then have a practice. Journaling for me is very helpful, and journaling might be three or four paragraphs to help me move the angst that I’m feeling out of my system onto a piece of paper. I write a fair amount, so that’s a practice for me. For others it’s a walk, or some breathing. Have your practice that you actually really practice.

DONNA: So first, allow yourself to notice. That’s the first step. Name it lightly, just notice it and describe it, rather than get into an extensive story, because that actually can dig the fear deeper into your neurology. You want to be able to have a relationship with it rather than be that fear. And then a practice to help you allow it to flow and let go of it.

DONNA: And then finally, your beautiful question about what is it I’m ready to learn now. What has this showed up for me as a gift so I can learn?

Life Is Difficult, and That Is the Structure of Reality

AUDREY: That’s beautiful. It’s such a big question. And that’s who we are as human beings. We are learning machines. We love to grow and become, but any type of growth involves pain. That’s the structure of reality. So if we can emotionally accept that. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, the first sentence is, life is difficult. That was a really big paradigm shift for me when I first internalized it. He says this is a great truth, maybe one of the greatest truths, because once we accept it, we can transcend it.

DONNA: You brought that up. Or the Buddhist idea, you know, life is full of suffering. I had such an easy life for much of my mid years, and part of it is a bit of positive toxicity, because I was such an optimist. I didn’t see any of it. And yet now I look back and I go, life is challenging, and not in a way to say, oh, woe is me, I’m a victim to life. It is through living with challenges, through me, as me, for me, that I’m able to see the challenges as blessings. Because if life wasn’t difficult, it would lose its meaning. If everyone could get to the summit, the summit wouldn’t mean anything.

AUDREY: And so the fact that we have to put our shoulder to the rock and push and become stronger through the process, to accept that yin and yang, that we are creators but the creation will have difficult aspects to it. That makes it even more worth doing, because of the accomplishment and the gratification and the development on the other side of it. The joy.

DONNA: Yes. Well, you are certainly a learner and a leader and a visionary. It’s not easy to have a vision of seeing a problem, women putting the rose in and mostly complaining and being self-critical. You took that problem and saw the opportunity of how to be of service. And you took action and followed through. That’s not always what we do, especially as a busy mom.

AUDREY: Well, thank you. And thank you for your work.

Closing Thoughts and Invitation

AUDREY: Is there anything else, any other advice you would give to our audience, or anything else you’d like to share before we close this out?

DONNA: Not so much advice, I guess, but to say I’ve written a blog every Friday for over 12 years. Writing is definitely a big way for me, and it helps me to think through these distinctions and the nuances. You can go follow that. Go to empowermentdynamic.com. You’ll see a very robust website. If you want to get that free Friday newsletter, you can sign up for that. Most Fridays we have the essay, and then we have different programs and activities and classes that people could take to learn more.

AUDREY: And books. I don’t know if I own all of them, but I own several of yours and David’s, all worth buying. Of course, we encourage our moms to buy them and utilize them. And I’ve encouraged women to go and do your coaching program, which I can’t speak highly enough about. We’ll put the links below this conversation for them, so they can consume all the beautiful truths that you teach and all the support that you offer.

AUDREY: I feel so indebted to you and David for the work that you’ve done. It has transformed my life. It has made me feel so much more capable of living closer to the kind of person I’d like to be. I just feel like I owe you a great debt of gratitude in that regard. And the joy of watching your work bless so many lives is also beautiful. And the privilege of speaking about some of it this fall at our event is also going to be incredible. For those listening who want to come, the link will be below for that as well. But again, please go follow Donna. Those blog posts are really enlightening. They come into my inbox and I read them often. Thank you again for being here.

DONNA: Oh, you’re welcome. I was just going to say, I know that you met David and were very close to him in one way and in the work, and he died very suddenly, a year ago in April. So I have now, as the sole remaining co-founder of the work, taken on new partners, and we’re in a whole new generation of work, very dedicated to expanding the framework with more tools and more great things coming. So I’m very excited about the future of expanding what David always said he wanted to live on for seven generations.

AUDREY: It’s incredible. I think it will. I pray it will. Thank you. Thank you for being here, Donna.