This month, I’d like to share with you The Drama Triangle, a psychological model that offers valuable insights into different relationship roles and dynamics, especially when conflict arises.
The Drama Triangle model not only illuminates potentially destructive relationship dynamics but also provides us with the tools need to break away from negative patterns and foster healthier relationships.
Learning about the Drama Triangle model has numerous benefits. It can help you improve your self-awareness, conflict management, social awareness (empathy), communication, boundary-setting, relationship management, and resilience.
And as a leader, whether in your workplace, community, or within your family, incorporating the Drama Triangle model into your toolkit can be a valuable asset for navigating conflicts more effectively. Moreover, this model empowers leaders to offer coaching and support to individuals who may be struggling with relationship challenges, ultimately contributing to the cultivation of a healthier organizational culture, as opposed to perpetuating cycles of drama and dysfunction.
What is The Drama Triangle Model?
This model sheds light on a normal human dynamic where we engage (triangulate) among three different mindsets or roles: the victim, persecutor, or rescuer. These roles represent patterns of communication and behavior that can be unhelpful and stem from fear–driven efforts to meet our needs, regain a sense of control and avoid feelings of uncertainty, vulnerability, and powerlessness.
While we may typically lean toward a preferred role or evoke certain roles in others, we are also capable of shifting among these three mindsets.
The Drama Triangle is a valuable model for understanding, taking ownership of, and reducing negative drama in our lives. It does so by helping us recognize the role we (and others) might be stuck in and offering guidance on how to break free from it.
Note1 – This model is based on Stephen Karpman’s drama model and the book Radical Responsibility by Fleet Maull, Ph.D. It reflects normal adult human behavior and is not relevant for children or someone who is truly victimized.
The Three Mindsets: Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer
VICTIM
- Description: In the Victim role, a person may find themselves dissatisfied with the course of their life and may attribute their dissatisfaction to external factors, which can include other individuals or challenging circumstances.
- Belief: They tend to believe their happiness depends on changes in circumstances beyond their control. For example, they might think, “I will be happy when person X, over whom I have no control, changes their behavior. “
- Mindset: This role often reflects a mindset characterized by perceived limitations, a sense of powerlessness, and moments of helplessness. Individuals in this role may employ this mindset to assert control or manipulate others.
- Context: It is often associated with a “Poor me” attitude.
- Actions: Behaviors associated with the Victim role can include complaining, blaming, seeking attention, throwing tantrums, and manipulating.
- Orientation: Typically, individuals in this role tend to focus on problems and complaints.
- Mode: Tends to be reactive and engages in blaming.
- Feelings: Those who embody the Victim role often experience feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, anxiety, fear, hurt, afraid, and depression.
PERSECUTOR
- Description: Similar to the Victim, the Persecutor tends to attribute the cause of their feelings to external circumstances.
- Belief: This role is often activated by a fear–based strategy in which the person, feeling powerless and out of control, takes charge to regain a sense of control.
- Context: It is often associated with an “I’m right” attitude.
- Actions: Behaviors associated with the Persecutor role can include criticizing, judging, blaming, controlling, dominating, attacking, and abusing.
- Orientation: Typically, individuals in this role, tend to focus on problems and complaints.
- Mode: Tends to be reactive and inclined toward attacking behavior.
- Feelings: Those who embody the Persecutor role often experience anxiety, fear, anger, feelings of superiority, righteousness, and defensiveness.
- Underlying position: Victim.
RESCUER
- Description: The rescuer role involves the person playing the expert, hero, and fixer, frequently intervening to save people from themselves, even when it might not be needed. The Rescuer often seeks out individuals who play the Victim role.
- Belief: This behavior is not necessarily driven by a genuine desire to help but rather about fulfilling the rescuer’s own ego needs to feel needed or powerful. Rescuers may treat others as childlike and unable to take care of themselves.
- Context: It is often associated with an “I know” attitude.
- Actions: Behaviors associated with the Rescuer role can include helping, saving, fixing, enabling, colluding, and disempowering others.
- Orientation: Typically, individuals in this role, tend to focus on identifying problems and offering fixes/solutions, occasionally adopting a savior or martyr mentality.
- Mode: Tend to be reactive and centered around fixing.
- Feelings: Those who embody the Rescuer role often experience smugness, superiority, self–righteousness, heroism, unappreciation, and overwhelm.
- Underlying position: Victim.
How do I get out of or off the Drama Triangle?
- Step One: Recognize that you are in a drama triangle. Recognize the physiological signs of drama activation, become mindful of your emotional reactions and triggers, and identify what role you could become or are already caught in. For the victim role, warning signs include upset emotions (hurt, anxiety, anger, etc.), physical sensations (shallow breathing, constricted chest, sweaty palms, tension in the neck and shoulders), and thought patterns (involving narratives of powerlessness, injustice, etc.). For persecutor and rescuer roles, signs of drama activation may manifest in language, tone of voice, posture, and actions directed at others.
- Step Two: Stop. Don’t Act When Triggered. Your primary job is to self-regulate, stay calm, and not make the situation any worse. Make a personal commitment to not act when you’re triggered. Keep in mind the phrase, “When the blood has left your brain, it’s not the best time to make a decision!”
- Step Three: Take Space and Shift Your State. The next step involves state-shifting and engaging in a self–management strategy to intentionally release yourself from the trigger (fight, flight, or freeze response). This enables you to gain access to the rational decision–making capacity of your brain’s executive function. Self-management strategies encompass techniques such as taking ten deep breaths, straw breathing, practicing meditation, going for a walk or run, listening to soothing music, doing yoga or other movement exercises, speaking with a friend, getting out in nature, or journaling.
- Step Four: Own Your Feelings. This means getting in touch with your own emotional state and, instead of using blaming or projective language choosing “I” statements. For example, say, “I’m angry, hurt, or sad,” rather than “You’re always doing this to me.”
- Step Five: Identify Your Needs and Communicate Them Clearly (When Appropriate). Take some time to reflect on what underlying needs you perceive aren’t being met and if it’s appropriate, communicate them to the other person as information or as a request, but not a demand. Some examples of needs include love, respect, trusting relationship, autonomy, self–worth, creative expression, security, sense of purpose, and a connection to something larger than self. Make sure that you stick up for yourself by saying something like this and pausing as you say it, “I’m uncomfortable, can we take a break and come back when it’s more productive?”
- Step Six: Make A Boundary When Necessary. By establishing proper boundaries, we reduce chaos and suffering for ourselves and those around us. Boundaries involve knowing when to say yes and when to say no, both in our interactions with others and in our personal choices. These boundaries cultivate a sense of presence and protective energy. When you have well-defined, clear boundaries, people sense it, and individuals looking to stir up drama will typically avoid you and seek drama elsewhere.