Risk & Business Magazine Sterling Insurance Spring 2017 | Page 17

FEATURE STORY
I
t 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 a
daughter’s college trip abroad—but because
she was so good at playing the victim. And after
so many years of playing the rescuer, I knew 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,
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 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 series (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 full 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
personal crusade against the destructive potential
of his diabetes diagnosis, which he chronicles in
his book TED for Diabetes, cowritten with Scott
Cona rd, 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
(See Figure 1 on page 19). Karpman’s research
described the “drama triangle,” 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 to fight, flee, or freeze. The
Victim may become pessimistic in life, always
expecting another disappointment to emerge
right around the corner. The Persecutor, on the
other hand, has the mentality that he or she must
win rather than risk stumbling and becoming a
Victim. Meanwhile, the Rescuer is determined
to assist others lest becoming unneeded and also
falling into the role of Victim.
CHOOSING POSITIVITY
From this dysfunctional model, Emerald drew up
a new model that he called The Empowerment
Dynamic, which allows all three points of the
“drama triangle” to experience growth and
maturity in overcoming adverse situations. Under
the TED * paradigm, the Victim transitions into
the role of Creator, seeking to choose a future
of hope and resiliency rather than one that is
trapped in misfortune and does not allow for
change. The Persecutor evolves from a mindset
of domination to one of self-awareness and
empowerment (the Challenger). And the Rescuer
no longer must save others, but as a Coach, can
simply encourage them and provide positive >
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