The Drama Triangle and our Experience of Trauma

The Drama Triangle and our Experience of Trauma

I first came across the Drama Triangle in the 1990’s when I was studying Transactional Analyses and I have been teaching it in the charity sector ever since.  Karpman’s Drama Triangle, to give it its full name is a great model for understanding and recognising what is going when we are relating to other people.  I love its simplicity.

There are 3 positions, they are all unhelpful places to be, and they are all involve discounting the abilities or value of yourself or another.  The key to using the Drama Triangle is to recognise that you are on it, and then to get out of it or off it.

The three positions are:

The Persecutor – who discounts the value of others and believes they are right, in the right.

The Rescuer – who discounts the abilities of others and believes they are good. “I can help”.

The Victim – who discounts their own abilities and believes they are blameless, ‘This is not my fault’.

Everyone can occupy any of the three positions, but people usually have a favoured position.  If another person is on the Drama Triangle, they will unconsciously invite you onto it.  If you can step out of the Drama Triangle, the other person might also move out of it.

In my years in Citizens Advice, I trained and supported hundreds of Advisers, all good people who wanted to help others and make a difference.  None the less, the best of us can find ourselves on the Drama Triangle and the anecdotal evidence is that Rescuers are over-represented in the helping professions.

You can spot an adviser who has stepped into the Rescuer position because they will be assuming they know best for the client, doing for them rather than enabling them, feeling responsible for them, keen to go the extra mile, possibly even fretting about the client out of office hours or having issues with boundaries with clients. The key to stepping out of Rescuer is to be responsive and caring whilst keeping sight of the client’s own abilities, resources and agency.

A scenario in which this played out could involve the adviser in Rescuer role, discounting the client’s abilities to act for themselves. They might do a lot for them, over promise and could end up feeling overstretched and exhausted.  At some point in the Drama the client and adviser will switch positions.  The client may feel dissatisfied with the progress on their issue, or that things have not been followed through and suddenly they are in Persecutor role, criticising the adviser for not doing enough, or not making everything better.  The adviser now in Victim role might be heard saying they have done their best, their workload is heavy, the job is difficult, and this can then shift to the Persecutor role where the client is ‘difficult; did not follow advice etc.

This is a very painful experience, and you might recognise yourself in this pattern. You have been trying your best to help your friend, spouse, child, colleague and suddenly you are left feeling like you got it wrong, and you are thinking how ungrateful they are.

Learning to spot yourself on the Drama Triangle and then learning to step of it can be a real game changer.  How to step off the Triangle will depend on which position you are in.  More on that another time.

Today I want to share something exciting and eye opening that I learned at a Trauma Awareness Training that I recently attended.   Awareness of trauma and its impact on individuals is thank fully increasing hugely and practitioners like me are now more aware of the different types of trauma and how to recognise and respond to a trauma response.

The exciting and interesting twist to this recent training was the links it made between a person’s favoured position on the Drama Triangle with the trauma response in their body.  This was eye opening and gave me whole new perspective.

It looked something like this;

• Persecutors – fight position – the state of arousal somewhere in the middle of the Vagal ladder.
• Victim – in a hypno or collapsed state.
• Rescuer – in a fawning but still a dominating position. Something uncomfortable is happening, and I have to fix it.

I find learning new models of looking at the world so interesting and engaging and I just loved how an old familiar model, the Drama Triangle suddenly has a new dimension as it is mapped onto the key trauma response models.

You can read more about the Drama Triangle here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

Thank you to Sara Bhavani who delivered the Trauma Awareness Training.