Perpetrator, Victim or Rescuer:
Which One Are You?
A neuro-linguistic, visual and kinaesthetic exploration of the drama triangle
Dr Peter Davies - BSc., MB ChB (Leeds 1989) MRCGP
Introduction
Dr Stephen Karpmann first described the drama triangle in the field of transactional analysis in 1968. (1) It has been a great model widely used as a description of problems in many areas of life. In NLP terms it functions as a map and describes a territory. I think this territory will repay further exploration.
It is a surprisingly accurate map for many varied situations. It also works well even if the drama being studied has more than three players. And even in situations where there are less than three players the people involved still tend to generate the three roles!
The model works even when the players already know about the drama triangle. Their responses and action in a given situation are still likely to fall within one of the roles of the triangle. Effectively the triangle describes a three way process, a triple-bind if you like. This means it has a structure of its own that is also applicable to many situations. We can study this structure and see ways of building it well where it is helpful and ways of deconstructing it where it is unhelpful.
If you want examples of common triangular situations consider the following:-
Corpse, murderer and detective
Good cop, bad cop and the suspect
Criminal, victim and the court
Defence, Prosecution and Judgement
Potential, flow and resistance.
Force, movement and mass.
Producers, consumers and regulators
Management, Shop floor workers and the Trades Unions.
Teachers, children and parents.
Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Team A, Team B and the referee
Persecutor, Victim and Rescuer.
The truth, the writer and the reader.
The doctor, the patient and the illness
Surgeons, patients and nurses
Faith, belief and truth.
My truth, your truth, the real truth!
Overdose patient, the family and the doctor.
Magician, mercenary, scapegoat
Hopes, fears and expectations
Two people and any extraneous expectation!
Neuro-linguistic programming!
All of them are intrinsically three tailed situations and so can be described by the drama triangle. In each of them one person is alleged to have started things, another to have been on the receiving end of things and the third sorts out the resulting interaction.
At a more general level:
The perpetrator can be seen as the agonist for change, the attacker, the initiator, the innovator, the doer, the one who disturbs the equilibrium.
The victim can be seen as the recipient of change, the passive one, the damaged one, the one whose equilibrium is disturbed, the reactor, the antagonist to change.
The rescuer is acting as someone who tries to damp down the excesses of the perpetrator and restore the equilibrium of the triangle. The rescuer acts to take care of both victim and perpetrator.
Unfortunately the stabilising forces that the rescuer can bring to bear on the other two forces interact variably with the other forces in motion and so may or may not achieve balance. Indeed a stabilising force applied at the wrong moment can perpetrate another round of imbalance, this time with the would be rescuer being the perpetrator! Karpmann described beautifully the dramatic switches the players in the drama triangle made as they swapped between their apparently allotted roles.
However accurate description and bringing material into awareness is not necessarily therapeutic of itself. Also a swap between roles on the triangle does not necessarily change the triangle itself! As Dr David Ryland, GP educator for Calderdale, UK commented when I used it as a metaphor in a BMJ letter (2) “It’s a great description, but how do you get out of the triangle?” If you are after real change you have to break out of your current triangle.
Getting out of the triangle
How then should you get out of whatever triangle you are currently part of? If the triangle you are currently in is healthy and serving all the players well then it is worth appreciating the checks and balances such a system provides. The US constitution’s separation of lawmaking, law application and the executive is a classic three-cornered split to maintain balance and avoid misuse of power by any one part of the government over the other.
However if you are in a dysfunctional triangle you need a way out of it. First of all you need awareness that you are in it, and then enough sense of dissatisfaction that it is worthwhile riding out the stormy waters of the temporary imbalance that you will cause in your own and the other player’s lives when you decide to change things. You will be helped to make this decision if as well as feeling dissatisfied you have an attractive vision of how things will turn out and be better for you in the future as a result of making the change.
Who should change first: the persecutor, the victim or the rescuer? As far as I can see it does not matter which one of them changes. All three are so tightly bound together that change in one will inevitably have effects on the others. So I suggest that whichever one of them feels dissatisfaction first should make the first move. (And so perpetrate the act of ending the triangle!)
Why not just leave the triangle?
This is one way, but I am going to suggest not necessarily the best way, to get out of the triangle. The chances are that simply leaving will leave behind unfinished and unresolved experiences that are not integrated into part of a better context of understanding. Unfinished business (3) in one place will still affect your future life and relationships in another. As the sayings go,
“You can run, but you cannot hide”
and,
“What you decline to face by choice tends to be experienced again as fate.”
That said cutting and running may be a necessary, valid and sensible step for some people, for example a woman who is experiencing domestic abuse. However the act of escape does not of itself liberate this woman from her past although it gets her out of present danger.
Just leaving breaks many relationships very quickly, and may be un-ecological both for the person leaving and the person left behind. This can have effects later in life if these relationships cannot be reformed and so social networks become less connected. In some circumstances you may need or want to break bad relationships but eventually full resolution and forgiveness are necessary for proper healing of the psychic wound.
A powerful META-NO!
This is a powerful technique for breaking an unsatisfactory situation. The finishing schools that taught young ladies how to say NO in any language were probably the pioneers of this technique, subsequently codified by Michael Hall. (4) At its best it is powerful, assertive, definite and ecological.
However before you can fully give a Meta no you need something else to say yes to. Without this the temptation is to slip back into the old patterns of the drama triangle you were previously playing within.
Getting someone else to help you out of the triangle?
So you have realised that you are in an un-resourceful, unhealthy triple bind and you want someone to help you to get out the bind. You naturally want someone who is kind and wise and with great experience and knowledge. Someone who is empathetic and will help you.
The good news is that there are plenty of wonderful therapists out there all longing to help you with your problems. In fact some of them are so loving and caring that they’ll fall over backwards to help you! They are such good rescuers that they love helping people who have problems. They couldn’t imagine anything they’d rather do. And they know lots of wonderful effective, exciting but safe techniques just to help YOU!
Yes, anyone who wants to help you out of your problems is a certain caretaker or rescuer and if you are not careful you can soon end up playing out a drama triangle dance with them just as much as with the players in the triangle you are escaping from! Beware of the pathological caretaker who will ensnare you into the dead end of co-dependency. If you have to hang at least hang separately!
Some therapists are hyperactive trying all sorts of prescriptions, skills and techniques to try and get victims out of their predicaments. The advantage of this type of therapist is that he or she is actively dong something and if it works the client will be grateful for the relief.
However the commonest reason why any of us ends up in a drama triangle situation is that we are not fully conscious of what we are doing and why we are doing it. In this condition of living unconsciously, of not running our own brains, we are likely to try multiple dance partners in series, get something from each of them but never really integrate their message (however useful or well intentioned) into ourselves. The serial workshop attendee is a well recognised creature. The patterns behind these serial dances are worth noting in themselves and it pays therapists to be aware of this as much as the subject of therapy.
Sometimes the therapist who acts a still, silent reflective mirror can be a very powerful agent in allowing the client to recognise and realise the dysfunctional patterns they have been using that have got them into their predicament. The therapist may have spotted these patterns a long time previously, but the intervention is best made when the client has realised the patterns, not when the therapist has realised them! The fact that the therapist could do something does not of itself mean that the therapist should do anything. Choice, timing and responsibility as always.