The Drama Triangle Can Help
The Drama Triangle May Help You Understand Why You Struggle in Relationships
Conflict in relationships is both normal and inevitable. But sometimes, it can feel like a conflict is particularly frustrating, and overwhelming, never really gets resolved, or leaves a lot of hurt in its wake. And that feels even worse if it happens with the same person over and over again.
If you’re struggling to understand why your conflicts feel so hard, keep reading! The Drama Triangle is a tool that can give you some answers, and help you relate to conflict differently.
What is the Drama Triangle?
The drama triangle is a therapeutic tool, invented by Stephen Karpman in 1968, that can help us identify the unconscious patterns that we naturally tend to act out in conflict. While this certainly comes up often in romantic relationships, the drama triangle isn’t just for that. It’s also incredibly relevant to relationships between family members, friends, coworkers… any relationship we have with others.
The Drama Triangle Roles
Each point of the triangle represents one of the roles. Let’s talk through each of them!
The Persecutor: The persecutor is the blamer. In this role, the person blames the other and is more focused on winning the argument than anything else.
The Victim: The victim feels sorry for themselves. They are unwilling to take responsibility for their own life and tend to want others to fix their problems.
The Rescuer: The rescuer is the fixer. They are always jumping in to help, and tend to ignore their own issues and areas of responsibility.
How Do These Roles Affect Each Other?
The drama triangle is all about how these roles interact with and affect each other. The persecutor tends to blame the victim and criticize the rescuer. The victim feels helpless and wants the rescuer to save them. The rescuer is always saving the victim, which can make the victim codependent on the rescuer.
Taking it a little further, the roles that we move into first tend to affect the trajectory of the conflict. If you jump into the persecutor role, you can push the other person into the victim role. “I blame you” leads to a defensive response from the other person such as “Why are you blaming me? I don’t deserve this!”
If you jump into the victim role first, you can push the other person into the rescuer role. “I’m helpless” leads to a response from the other person such as “I can save you.”
If you jump into the rescuer role first, you can push the other person into the victim role. “I need someone to save” leads to a response from the other person such as “Save me, I can’t do it myself.”
We tend to have “favorite” roles that we go to most easily in conflict. How can you tell what your favorite role is? One way is by thinking of the dominant emotion you have when you think about conflict. Anger or even an enjoyment of confrontation tends to indicate a persecutor. Overwhelming helplessness tends to indicate a victim. Guilt or feeling the need to fix it tends to indicate a rescuer.
It’s also important to remember that we typically don’t stay in one role all the time. The drama triangle is highly dynamic. We can move around the triangle during the same conflict, taking on multiple roles depending on how the other person responds.
What Happens When We Get Stuck?
When we do get stuck in our “favorite” roles, it often leads to conflict with a particular person feeling like a vicious cycle.
For example, if one person gets stuck in the victim narrative, they may begin to refuse help even when it’s offered to them. This can make a typical rescuer frustrated and move from that role to that of the persecutor (“Well if you won’t accept my help, then you can just f*** off!).
Another example is when one person is stuck in the rescuer role and develops a false sense of righteousness or a savior complex (“I’m only trying to help!”), it can push the other person to frustration and move them into a persecutor role (“trying to help? You’re making it worse!”), or push the rescuer to move from that role into the victim role (“I’m just trying to help… why is this happening to me?”), which then changes the cycle and the roles again.
When we repeat these patterns over and over again, it makes it harder to ever truly resolve conflicts and tends to stir up old patterns and frustrations that cause even deeper hurt.
What Can We Do to Grow Out of the Drama Triangle?
To break free from the drama triangle, we have to grow our self-awareness of how we behave in conflicts with others. Sometimes it’s easiest to start by reflecting on and learning from conflicts after they happen.
These are a few questions you can reflect on after a conflict:
Which role did I go into first? Was there a particular trigger? Did I take on multiple roles during the conflict?
What patterns did I notice about how we affected each other throughout the conflict?
Are there still underlying frustrations or unresolved anger toward the other person?
Did I behave this way because it was genuinely and accurately what was going on? Or because it felt familiar?
Did the role I chose help? Or make things even more complicated?
As we become more aware of our patterns, we can then practice catching ourselves in the moment and recognize the roles we move into as they happen, so we can change them! Ask yourself the same questions but in real-time.
Finally, we have a reflection for you to think about, depending on what your go-to role in the drama triangle tends to be.
For the persecutor:
How would I approach this conflict differently if we both had equal responsibility?
For the victim:
How would I approach this conflict differently if I had to take responsibility, and no one would rescue me but me?
For the rescuer:
How would I approach this differently if I only took responsibility for myself, and didn’t try to fix it for others?
Next Steps
If you have recognized some of these patterns in yourself, but changing them feels like a pretty big ask, that’s completely okay and understandable. We can often live in these patterns for decades, so it makes sense that they can’t just change overnight!
One of the best ways to examine the patterns that don’t work for you anymore is by talking it out with a therapist who can help you make positive changes. If you’re looking for support in the Denver area, we’re here to help! You can read more about couples therapy and contact us to schedule an appointment.