If You Want Psychological Freedom, Exit the Drama Triangle
Are you colluding with a Bad Daddy?
Society trained you to become an adult in a practical sense.
You learned to drive, water plants, boil potatoes, and request time off from work.
But you may remain psychologically child-like your entire life.
Why? From the beginning, you received programming, from your family, from the education system, and from the media, to view the world in terms of the Drama Triangle: in every situation, you see a Victim, a Persecutor, and a Rescuer.
The Vortex that Will Lock You in a Child-like State Until You Hit the Grave
The Drama Triangle is a model of dysfunctional interactions used in psychotherapy, particularly transactional analysis (TA). Psychiatrist and TA developer Eric Berne first wrote about it in his book, Games People Play, and Stephen Karpman synthesized it in the 1960s.
Drama triangle dynamics can occur internally (as inner conversations) and externally (through interactions with others).
The Triangulation.
Victim: Identifies as powerless and incapable against what they perceive as aggressive or immutable circumstances. To use TA terminology, the Victim adopts an “You’re okay, I’m not okay” orientation to the world.
Persecutor: An aggressive, blaming, authoritarian position with the orientation of “I’m okay, you’re not okay.”
Rescuer: Operating from the perspective of “You’re not okay, let’s see if I can help you,” the Rescuer implicitly encourages the Victim’s disempowerment by doing things for them they could do for themselves. The Rescuer often disconnects from and disguises their own anxieties as concern for the Victim.
The problem with operating within the drama triangle is that it reflects a lack of emotional autonomy: people adopt these roles to get their needs met in hidden, unconscious ways.
They typically cycle from one place in the triangle to another, since the Victim role is buried within and motivates the behavior of all three positions.
‘Rescue Games’: The Looming Imprint that Begins in the Family
Drama triangle dynamics lurk everywhere because they’re initially modeled in the nuclear family. In his book, Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts, psychologist Claude Steiner suggests the family is the training ground for powerlessness.
He describes this dynamic as a Rescue Game, referring to parents’ unconscious tendency to play Rescuer to their children, who are then subtly taught to occupy the Victim role.
As Steiner explains, in many homes, parents get their kids out of bed, cook for them, clean for them, clip their fingernails, etc., well beyond the ages at which they need this help. Most kids can handle these tasks by ages six or seven, yet this treatment continues into their late teens.
In many cases, these rescue games become a type of psychological witchcraft, a covert, yet pervasive veil that colors a person’s relationships and worldview. Powerlessness becomes such an entrenched mode of behaving and perceiving that most people don’t even recognize it.
The problem, of course, is that messages we receive unconsciously usually hold the greatest power to direct our behavior.
When Powerlessness Reverberates onto the Public Stage
Powerlessness training can be extremely subtle, which is why people usually view their parents’ Rescue games as signs of love or even basic kindness.
This makes it even more understandable why they transfer Rescue games from their personal Mommy and Daddy to their institutional Mommy and Daddy.
This dynamic may be active if you base your life decisions primarily on the need for safety and protection. For instance, do you make career choices based on whether you receive “benefits”?
If so, you might be in the drama triangle, seeing yourself as the Victim, the big, bad, dangerous world as the Persecutor, and your employer as your Rescuer.
Similarly, when facing disturbing sensations, most people hand over their bodies (their very connection to life) to a medical staff, telling themselves, “Well I’m no expert, what do I know?” This convenient story helps you distance yourself from the terrifying possibility of being your own source of guidance.
As holistic doctor Kelly Brogan has stated, often when you believe you need to “kill germs” or “fight disease” to stay healthy, you’re assuming the role of the Victim, the kindly medical staff functions as your Rescuers, and guess who becomes the Persecutor? Your body!
I’m not saying there’s never a place for guidance or risk minimization. But your orientation toward life determines your power to influence it.
And crucially, the point of life isn’t simply to survive. If staying safe and secure is more important to you than anything else, you’re operating from a child-like state that makes you very easy to manipulate. Even more than that, you overlook the very aspects of life that make it worth living.
Are You Colluding with a Bad Daddy to Perpetuate Your Struggle?
“When a person is being overpowered or oppressed by another person or situation, the Victim colludes with the oppressor when she doesn’t use all her own power to overcome her one-down position.” Claude Steiner
Drama triangle dynamics intensify when you become so intent on securing your supply of protection that you collude with the entity or situation causing the problem.
An example is the employee intent on feeling secure, so they remain in a job that causes stress and anxiety their entire life. They’re so blinded by the need for an abstract sense of security they don’t see how their choices are causing the very problem they’re trying to avoid.
In their stressful yet “secure” job, they experience cortisol surges every day. Over the years, these lovely stress hormones change the structure and function of their brain. They experience depression, brain fog, cognitive dysfunction, and more, but hey! They have great insurance!
The recent abortion scare was an example of a collective drama triangle dynamic. The media painted all women as Victims, legislators as Persecutors, and those “fighting” for reproductive rights as Rescuers.
This is an example of colluding with the oppressor, though, because the medical system perpetuates the root cause of the problem. It’s common for people to be encouraged to take a reactive or passive approach to their health. For instance, some (whether subtly or overtly) frame birth control or similar tools as the only responsible way to avoid pregnancy.
For this reason, many people rely on medication their entire lives, even though pregnancy is only really possible 36 hours per month. Might this lack of orientation be the reason unexpected pregnancies are so common?
A root-cause-centric solution might focus on normalizing fertility awareness methods, that is, both men and women learn about how the body signals fertility. But interestingly, in classic drama triangle fashion, I know the likely response to that claim would be, Hey, privileged much? Some people are far too helpless, far too busy, and far too oppressed to learn about their bodies.
So, when one medical intervention fails, the medical Rescuers save the day with another one, making sure the focus is on reactive, control-based methods, rather than connection with one’s own body (as if it were a part of them).
Befriend Death to End the Cycle
People get into parent-child dynamics with all sorts of systems, whether it’s an employer, the government, or even their past experiences.
Our collective love for the drama triangle originates in a complex that haunts the Western collective unconscious: our lack of a cohesive, meaning-based narrative around death and suffering.
Since birth, we’re taught to “manage” painful experiences rather than embrace their transformative qualities.
Befriending death may be a lifelong process, but I’d invite you to think of every day as an opportunity to give death a nod. Every time you stub your toe, get a parking ticket, or suffer in any other way, say, “Hey, death, there you are. It’s nice to feel you again.”
It may seem grim, but this is a method of surrendering to your experience rather than simply managing it. This encourages you to look upon your suffering as an inevitability you can form a conscious relationship with.
When you develop a conscious, even playful relationship with suffering, you become a lot less fear-prone, a lot less brain washable, and a lot less susceptible to entering the child-parent war zone where you’re helpless in the face of problems seemingly outside yourself.
Death haunts most people in the form of the Grim Reaper, but lately, I’ve been experimenting with seeing death as a Trickster figure.
Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a “boundary-crosser”.[1] The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules.
Tricksters ‘violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.’”
Drama triangle dynamics send people into a fear-centric state. They get so ensnared in survival concerns they stop thinking and surrender to whatever authority they trust.
But if you adopt an inviting attitude to death/suffering, seeing it as a tricky, yet playful disruptor of your family and societal programming, you’ll stop living in fear.
You instead operate from an emotionally autonomous space. You connect with your power to meet your needs directly, rather than through attempts to keep your life neat, secure, and controllable at all costs.
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