Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

In conflict, I take on one of three roles: Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor. In Victim mode, I fixate on the injustice, the wrongdoing, the trigger; pointing my finger at the persecutor, avoiding responsibility for the emotional state that my own fixation is creating. In Rescuer mode, I step in to  help, overstepping my boundaries, and taking on responsibility for feelings that aren't mine, trying to fix. In Persecutor mode, I shift into anger; blaming, raging, powering up; heaping shame and contempt upon the Victim. As the drama unfolds, I dance from role to role, and as I dance the conflict grows, the pain that I'm attempting to avoid grows, and the elephant in my room shits all over the floor. All of it, every role, all the pain, all the drama are products of my own perceptions. They don't exist in an objective reality. They are purely constructs of my own mind. As long as I'm in the drama, there is no relief. Like the old movie War Games, where the hacker and the comp...

A couple of months ago I took my aging Dad to the DMV office to get a new state ID. He uses a walker now, and I'd gone to the door to hold it open for him. He was still quite a way from the door, and another man was coming up the walk at the same time. I motioned for the fellow to come on in since Dad was moving slowly. So the man went ahead and went to the desk where you get your number before going to the waiting area. He received his number and sat down. Dad made it to the number station, and I went to find a couple of seats, knowing that he usually wants to sit close to the counter. I found two seats together at the end of a back row of seats directly in front of him. The row was too narrow for the walker to fit through, but Dad started to push his way through, shoving chairs aside as he went. I had pointed out to him that since this was the back row, there was plenty of space behind the chairs to walk without obstacles, but he insisted on pushing through the narrow aisle. ...