ALLURE MEDICAL - all•u Magazine all·u Magazine Spring 2017 | страница 16

FEATURE STORY
About TED:
A TALE OF
EMPOWERMENT
DAVID EMERALD, AUTHOR
IT WAS time to make the call this writer
had been dreading. Not because my
friend wasn’t knowledgeable about the
topic at hand—the preferred destination
of my daughter’s college trip abroad—
but because she was so good at playing
the victim. And after so many years of
playing the rescuer, the friendship had
become difficult to sustain. Let’s call my
friend Vicki, as in Vicki-the-Victim.
“Hi Vicki,” I started. “How are things
going?” I asked innocently enough. “Just
trying to survive,” she responded wearily.
It was the same old story about the same
old difficulties. Vicki had immigrated to
the United States in her early twenties,
leaving behind the country soon to be
the destination of my daughter’s trip.
For years—decades really—Vicki had
claimed to be unable to get a job because
of her foreign accent and inability to
speak English fluently, and, as a result,
she was living in near poverty and
struggling. Vicki began her tale of woe
once again, and I listened patiently and
volunteered my well-worn advice—take
an English class, move to a less expensive
home, accept a position she thought
was beneath her—before finally asking
Vicki which city she’d recommend for
my daughter’s stay in her home country.
Perhaps we all have a Vicki in our lives
or have acted as one ourselves, but
there are proven ways to escape a life
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SPRING 2017
devoid of the optimism and joy that every
person deserves. For those who want to
commit to change, or suggest change to
a friend, reading The Power of TED by
David Emerald is a great place to start.
Unrelated to the popular TED Talks (but
coined long before them), Emerald’s TED
is an acronym for The Empowerment
Dynamic, a self-empowerment model
that describes how to build a better
life by escaping the victimhood
mentality and converting to a more
productive “creator” way of thinking.
THE CREATION OF TED
Emerald—whose real name is David
Emerald Womeldorff—developed
his TED model to resurrect his own
spirit following a series of personal
setbacks, including the loss of his
father, the discovery of his infertility,
and the dissolution of his first marriage.
He even applied TED to his crusade
against the destructive potential of
his diabetes, which he chronicles
in his book TED for Diabetes, co-
written with Scott Conard, MD.
While wallowing in despair one morning
during his period of reflection, or “quiet
time,” Emerald pointedly made the
decision to relinquish his victimhood
in return for becoming a “creator.” It
was an “utterly unexpected personal
epiphany,” he says, that would transform
his mission in life from that point forward
to help himself and others participate in
life from a vantage point of strength.
Based on research developed by the
psychotherapist Stephen Karpman,
MD, in the 1960s, Emerald’s TED
describes how the destructive roles of
Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer can be
reconstructed into the more dynamic
roles of Creator, Challenger, and
Coach (Figure 1). Karpman’s research
described the “drama triangle” (referred
to in Emerald’s book as the ‘Dreaded
Drama Triangle’ [DDT]), which “models
the connection between personal
responsibility and power in conflicts,
and the destructive and shifting roles
people play.” These were the ideas
that Emerald sought to challenge.
In his own example of despair, Emerald
was able to realize that he had been
living his life through the eyes of a
victim, wondering why everything bad
had happened to him. As he explains
in his book, the Victim feels as though
other people or situations are acting
upon the Victim who feels powerless
to change them. The Persecutor is the
cause of the Victim’s woes, while the
Rescuer intervenes to save the Victim.
Victims, according to Emerald, operate
from a position of fear or weakness,
reacting to difficult situations by learning