Escaping the Triangle of Drama

What is the drama triangle? What can it tell us about conflict and dysfunctional relationships?  In this episode we explore the roles of Persecutor, Rescuer and Victim -  what they mean, and how they enable toxic relationships. We also explore the healthier, more sustainable alternatives.

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant General Adult Psychiatrist who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

Intro Excerpt from: Liar, Liar (1997)

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Transcript

You have found the Thinking Mind podcast. 3s Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today we're going to be talking about the drama triangle, what it means for your relationships and how you can get out of it. 11s One of the most maddening things about conflict is trying to make sense of what's happening. Who's to blame? Who's at fault? Who's being mistreated? What can be done to help? How do you get out of the conflict? How do you step out of dysfunctional dynamics and move forward? 1s This applies to conflicts on all sorts of levels between individuals, between organisations, and even between countries. Of course, we're seeing this on an enormous and tragic scale in the Middle East right now between Israelis and Palestinians and everyone else that's been affected by this conflict. It seems THAtrillionIGHT. Now many people are asking more or less the same question. If conflict begets more conflict, how do you escape? In today's podcast, I'll be discussing the concept of the drama triangle, where it came from, and how you can use it to recognize and step out of dysfunctional dynamics in your life. For this podcast, I'd like to give a shout out to my friend Rob, who introduced me to this idea some 5 or 6 years ago. In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named Eric Byrne introduced transactional analysis or to to the world. To was conceived as a way to understand the personality. To examine human interactions as well as a kind of psychotherapy. 1s Within to burn introduced the notion of ego states that people can occupy different states of mind, each state of mind having its own perceptions, behaviors, motivations, mannerisms, speech patterns, and so on. Later on, Steven Copeman, a student of Eric Ben, extended the concept of transactional analysis to better understand the dynamics of conflict and dysfunction in relationships. He identified what he saw as the three roles of the drama triangle, and those roles are victim, persecutor and rescuer, and described how these roles often emerge in conflict situations. Coppins initial work on this topic was published in 1968, in a paper called Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis. This paper and these ideas were sufficiently influential in the world of psychotherapy, and then subsequently in popular culture, that it's become common to say someone is, quote, playing a victim or quote being too much of a rescuer. So with this idea, Cartman is telling us that in dysfunctional conflicts as opposed to healthy conflicts, we tend to occupy one of three roles either being a victim, persecutor, or a rescuer. But what does it really mean to be any of those things? Firstly, being a victim in this context, being a victim means abdicating power, abdicating responsibility, and self efficacy. 1s The victim makes the claim that they've been mistreated either by the world, a specific persecutor, or maybe a set of persecutors, or some combination of those. To be a victim means to blame others or external circumstances for your suffering. At first glance, it's not obvious why anyone would choose to take this role, whether it be consciously or unconsciously, until one realizes, of course, that occupying this role means relieving yourself of the burden of having to exert the will, the time, the focus, the energy that it would require for you to change your circumstances. And guess what it is you claim to want. Being a victim outsources the capacity to do good to the rescuer, and the capacity to do harm to the persecutor. 1s And therefore the victim puts themselves at the mercy of the rescuer or the persecutor. Frequently, people in a victim mindset put the success of others down to luck, accident of birth, or cheating the system. Not that these factors can't play a role, of course, but for a victim to acknowledge the role of willpower, hard work and determination and success would be to put a mirror up to their own failings in extreme situations. Some individuals get stuck chronically in a victim mindset for a large part of their lives, and these people tend to divide people they interact with into rescuers or persecutors. If you engage with someone like this, they will typically treat you like a rescuer when you do what they want, idealizing you, putting you on a pedestal. And when you fail to do what it is they want, they will treat you like a persecutor. Being a victim sounds like, why does this always happen to me? The world is out to get me. Or if only I didn't have to deal with this, then I could change. 2s Secondly being a persecutor. The persecutor is someone who is perceived as the aggressor, oppressor, or the antagonist in the situation. They may blame, criticize, or attack the victim, and they are often seen as causing the victim suffering. And the persecutor generally sees the victim as the cause of the problem and the rescuer as naive. Being a persecutor as a means of seeking power and control in a situation. It involves trying to improve a situation by getting someone else to change. Being a persecutor can be desirable because it protects you from having to deal with your own vulnerabilities and insecurities. For many people, anger is often an easier emotion to feel than sadness or fear. 1s Occupying the persecutor position provides a sense of self-righteousness and moral justification for your actions. Being a persecutor sounds like you need to get your act together. You always get things wrong or I just can't rely on you. Persecutors frequently bring up past mistakes, use name calling, and use insults. And lastly, we have being a rescuer. To be a rescuer is to sacrifice yourself and your own well-being for someone as normally the victim. It often means putting yourself in opposition to a persecutor, and both the self-sacrifice and the putting yourself in opposition to a persecutor allows the rescuer to feel like they've attained the moral high ground. Rescuers often feel uncomfortable unless they are in a helping situation. Often they have low self-worth and high self criticism, and helping is a strategy that they employ to feel like they are valuable. Rescuers are often referred to as having, quote, martyr syndrome, and rescuing behavior is very common in healthcare professions without necessarily being aware of it. Rescuers are subtly putting themselves in a position of superiority, and they can have a paternalistic relationship with victims. Although ostensibly helping victims, they are generally enabling them to persist in their victimhood. Because rather than challenging them to change, they tend to approach victims with just compassion and no provocation. And while compassion is important, it's not necessarily enough to catalyze change in another individual. Rescuers then subtly rob victims of their agency. Being a rescuer can be exhausting, and rescuers often burn out, either becoming so stressed they turn into persecutors or collapsing into the victim role. Being a rescuer sounds like, don't worry, I'll handle everything or I'm the only one that cares about you. Rescuers tend to be those people that provide unsolicited advice. Jump into problem solving without asking permission or guilt. Trip people when they feel their rescuing is underappreciated. 1s Before going further, it's important to note that each state doesn't necessarily correspond to one specific person, but rather that people can rapidly switch between roles even within the same interaction. Anyone can be, and likely has been a rescuer, victim, or persecutor at some point, but often a person may be predisposed to occupying one role more over the other two. To understand these ideas in more depth, let's look at an example. 1s Imagine a domineering wife and a submissive husband. The wife exerts control over her husband. Husband talks frequently about wanting to do more things by himself, such as find more friends, take up a hobby, or start a side business. His wife, consciously or unconsciously, feels threatened by any sign of her husband wanting to have more independence. And she responds by punishing him emotionally every time he expresses a desire to do something independently of her. 1s The wife is occupying a persecutor role to mask her immense fears of abandonment. The wife can label her husband's expressed desire for independence as a sign of his lack of love for her or his faults as a husband, and she can persecute him for it. She can avoid her fears of being left because all the focus is being put on her husband's and her husband's supposed faults. In the meantime, the husband is using his wife's persecution as an excuse not to exert healthy boundaries and exercise his autonomy. You can make the claim. If only it weren't for my wife, then I could fill in the blank, make more friends, take up a hobby, start up a side business. His dominating wife is the perfect device. He needs to excuse himself from the efforts required to live a richer, more fulfilling life. For the wife, persecution is the tool that's necessary to keep her husband's independence at a minimum, and manage her fears of being left. They can and will change roles within their interactions, which can be given away by how they express themselves. From time to time, the husband may lose his patience and say things like, you're being way too controlling, you need to change and let me do what I want. In these moments, he switched to the persecutor. This can evoke his wife's victim role, which could sound like I can't believe I was unlucky enough to end up in a marriage with someone like you. If this switch persisted, then maybe something might change. The husband might actually go for his independent pursuits and the wife might actually accept them. And then through a series of negotiated conflicts, they would go from a victim persecutor dynamic to a more healthy adult to adult dynamic. But without any serious will to change, things remain the same, and the husband, facing the reality of what it would require for him to live a richer life, retreats back into the victim role while his wife again regains the persecutor role. This dynamic can keep them locked in for years, with neither party able to grow psychologically or change the external situation. There may be rescuers involved. The wife may complain to her sister, who unendingly agrees with her and supports her. The husband may complain to his friend who does the same. Husband and wife are now victims to sister and friend who are playing rescuers. 1s Sister and friend may have good intentions, but they're not able to make any meaningful challenges to their victims, and this keeps the situation stagnant. Their unending support of the rescuers, while on the surface virtuous, may be saving their own psychological needs to feel unconditionally needed, to feel like they're on the right side of things. The rescuers, too, may feel threatened on some subtle level by any attempts for husband and wife to make a change, as this might threaten their role as the shoulder to cry on and challenge their sense of self-worth. The reason these dynamics are so dysfunctional is because they don't have a clear endpoint. They shield all the parties involved from self awareness and from growth. They lead to mental suffering such as anxiety and resentment, because everyone involved is rejecting some important part of themselves. The wife is rejecting her vulnerability. The husband is rejecting their power and autonomy. The rescuers are rejecting their objectivity and their self-worth. So what is the way out of all this? All three roles we've described so far are an extreme of a healthier position, which is more desirable to occupy. 1s This can be conceptualized by another idea the winner's triangle. The concept of the winner's triangle was introduced by AC Choi, who is also a practitioner of transactional analysis in his book by the same name, which was originally published in 2010. The winner's triangle is the positive alternative to the drama triangle, where the victim becomes vulnerable, the persecutor becomes assertive, and the rescuer becomes caring. The three roles described are as follows. Firstly, the coach. The coach is similar to the rescuer, but with a more empowering and constructive approach. A coach offers support and guidance and assisted when needed and asked for, but they encourage the other person to take responsibility and to make their own decisions. The emphasis is on helping the other person to grow and to develop their skills, their ability and their agency. The persecutor becomes the challenger. Challenges provide constructive feedback. They also challenge others to take responsibility for their actions and their decisions. They do so without being blaming, without being overly critical, with the goal of promoting the personal growth and the accountability of the other person involved. The victim can become the creator in the creator role. Individuals take ownership of their feelings and circumstances. They acknowledge that bad things have happened to them, but they also acknowledge their power to make choices and to create positive changes in their lives. Instead of being helpless, creators become active participants in forming their own reality. So hopefully we've got an idea of the drama triangle and how it works and some of the healthier alternatives. What are some caveats to this discussion? First caveat. In particular situations, it can make perfect sense to be a victim or a persecutor or a rescuer. There are times when people are victimized and sometimes they need rescuing. People can also do heinous things and evil things, and they need punishment and persecution. Sometimes that's necessary, even if only to keep them from repeating their actions again in the future. But the problem occurs when these rows move from an acute situation where it can be helpful to a chronic situation. When you become stuck in this victim, persecutor, or rescuer mode, or when one or more of these states takes over someone's entire identity and becomes not just a temporary mode, but a state of being and the way they see and relate to other people. The second caveat is, even if people are stuck in these modes chronically, there are often very good reasons why this has happened. These are reasons including trauma, abuse, garden variety, bad parenting, as well as just the general low level psychological dysfunction which tends to permeate our culture. So if you're dealing with someone who might be stuck in one or more of these modes, it's important to be mindful that there are probably very good reasons for this and have compassion for that. And the last caveat is that even though these ideas are really useful and can bring a lot of insight into relationship dynamics, don't get too carried away. Labeling people as victims or persecutors or rescuers. People are very complicated, as with any set of ideas in psychology. Use with caution and moderation. So to conclude, occupying these roles of rescuer victim persecutor is a mostly unconscious strategy to avoid coming face to face with our wholeness and the wholeness of others. And that includes our virtues, our strengths, our flaws, and our weaknesses. How we act towards someone influences the reaction we evoke. If we act like a persecutor, they may respond like a victim. If we act like a victim, will likely bring out someone else's rescuer or their persecutor. The more we can act towards others from a healthier adult position, the more likely it is we can cultivate that position in the people that we interact with on an everyday basis. 1s We can challenge someone without attacking them. We can offer care and compassion and support without sacrificing ourselves or robbing someone of their autonomy. We can ask for help and explore our vulnerabilities without putting ourselves down and without putting other people down. 1s What do you think? Can you think of any recent situations where you think these ideas apply? Do you agree or disagree with what we've discussed today? If you have any feedback, you can email us at Thinking Mind Podcast at gmail.com. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychology and self-development. If you like the podcast, there are many ways you can support it. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. Give us a rating, share with a friend or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening.