“Victim mentality” is a common buzzword in personal development….but did you know it’s just one piece of a larger, often dysfunctional dynamic?

And that it rarely exists in isolation?

That’s right ladies and gents: You better ask your bestie to hold on to your earrings and cufflinks, because the “Drama Triangle” has entered the chat!

What Is the Drama Triangle?

Ever feel stuck in unproductive dynamics—at work, in friendships, or relationships?

The Drama Triangle, a concept by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman, details how we fall into predictable roles during conflict, & how they’re all connected.

Understanding these roles (and the dynamics between them) can help us transcend the patterns and break the cycle.

Here’s what the drama triangle looks like:

This triangle has 3 sides, which each contribute equally to keeping the triangle alive:

1. The victim
2. The rescuer
3. The persecutor

You may notice that in the middle, I’ve put a 4th figure called the “perpetrator”. This is not part of Karpman’s original triangle but a role I’ve added myself, which we’ll talk about later.

It’s important to note that the roles in the Drama Triangle are about the experience & attitude of the person taking them on, not about factual reality.

For example: You can be in the victim role without being victimized, and you can be objectively victimized without playing the role in the triangle. They are distinct things.

(If you’ve read my article about separating “facts” from “stories”, you could look at it this way:

Being victimized, rescued or persecuted are “facts”. But in the drama triangle, assuming the role of the victim, rescuer or persecutor is a “story”. The facts and the stories may coincide. But they are not the same.)

With that said, let’s have a look at each role in the triangle and what their function is:

The Victim Role

The victim believes they can’t change their perceived situation.

They feel powerless & hopeless, avoiding real change or confronting painful feelings.

However, when someone’s in the victim role, they likely don’t notice they’re doing any avoiding. Because a person in this role lacks a sense of agency.

Sometimes the victim may feel unjustly persecuted or seek help from the others—but this only perpetuates their sense of helplessness.

The victim often leverages shame against themselves (to reinforce the role), and seeks pity as a way of reinforcing other people’s roles.

If you’ve read my article about “giving your power away“, you can look at the victim role this way:

The victim role uses their power to conceal all power they have (from themselves or others) as a way to absolve themselves from any accountability in the triangle’s dynamic.

By saying “everything you see is the consequence of things that were done to me (by life or other people)”, the victim is saying: “anything that could be done to improve this situation has to be done by everyone else, not me”, and creating a compelling case to move others to serve their agenda.

Because its power is concealed, the victim is one of the most powerful positions to occupy in the triangle, but the tragic cost it pays for that, is that it can’t exercise that power without other people to enlist.

(I sense that here might be a good moment to re-emphasize that we’re talking about the victim as a role, not “victim” as referring to a person who was victimized. Remember, they are distinct things which may or may not coincide.)

The Rescuer

The rescuer energetically says: “Let me help/save you.”

By saving the victim, the rescuer gets to perceive their own power and feels their self-worth and status increase.

The rescuer role can also be a way to cope with their own (previous) sense of victimhood, saving others who were in the same position.

The rescuer feel frustrated when their efforts fail (or aren’t welcomed by the victim).

Part of the rescuer’s power is that the role appears to be inherently benevolent. It looks heroic. So if the rescuer makes a move, it can generally count on public support.

But this benevolence is misleading. Because like the victum, the rescuer merely uses the other roles to serve its own agenda.

It uses victim’s problems too distract from their own, to feel better about themselves or avoid its own discomfort with other people’s pain.

It needs the victim to stay disempowered. Because if the victim were to save themselves, that would be the death of the rescuer role. And just like people, roles have an identity which doesn’t want to die.

And of course, it uses the persecutor to find people which it can “rescue from persecution”.

The Persecutor

In a sense you can see the persecutor as a sort of rescuer, except that it cares more about punishing whomever “victimized the victim” than saving the victim itself.

The persecutor is always on the offense. It confuses responsibility with blame, and accountability with judgment.

This role seeks power through force or controls others through aggression, often using the existence of the victim to justify its actions. Without a victim, the persecutor would just be a villain.

And just like the rescuer, the persecutor needs an “enemy” to continue existing.

This is problematic, because it means that, if we were somehow able to fix every problem that’s causing drama, the persecutor would always find a new problem or transgression to accuse people of.

The persecutor does not want the rescuer to save the victim, or the victim to stop being victimized.

All it wants is to persecute, because the only way the persecutor feels its own power is by attacking someone (or something).

(Side note: You can see this played out frequently on the level of ideology:

If an ideology’s essence is about being against something, then for the thing to disappear would mean the death of the ideology.

And like all organisms, an ideology wants to survive. So it will make sure to re-affirm the existence of its nemesis wherever it can.

This is why it’s generally better to take a stand for something than against its opposite:

• Better to be for freedom than against constraints.
• Better to be about feeding the world than about combating hunger.
• Better to be about keeping pizza traditional than about terminating every trace of pineapple.)

When Three Become One

What I learned working with drama triangles is that all roles are one. There are no separate “sides”, there’s only a triangle which is viewed from different sides:

• Victims become persecutors
• Villains get victimized
• We project our victim identity on others & become rescuers
• Rescuers feel like victims when they fail

They roles endlessly interweave inside & between us.

There are countless ways the roles of the drama triangle blur and blend. To review some:

• The victim uses the villain to manipulate the rescuer into “working for them”
• The victim uses the persecutor to punish people without having to take personal accountability
• The persecutor uses the victim to justify its own desire to attack & destroy
• The rescuer uses the persecutor to point at new victims it can rescue

As long as we identify with these roles, the cycle never ends. And the drama triangle disempowers everyone in it:

• The rescuer burns out
• The victim stays dependent
• The persecutor pushes others away (and never gets to feel their own inherent power, because it’s dependent on an enemy)

The Fourth Role: The Perpetrator

Now what about that mysterious fourth figure I added?

In my experience, the core of the drama triangle is the “shadow role of the perpetrator”.

The perpetrator isn’t openly expressed on any side of the triangle, but it gets summoned into being by the other three roles:

• The persecutor needs one to persecute
• The victim needs one to be victimized by
• The rescuer needs one to rescue to the victim from

As with the other roles, the perpetrator doesn’t necessarily refer to someone committing an act of harm (it could), but to someone we experience as evil or committing harm.

Just like the line between the other three roles is blurry, the perpetrator is partially embodied by each of them:

• The persecutor attacks, which perpetrates against whomever they view as perpetrator
• The rescuer places themselves “above” the victim and needs the victim to stay victimized, which means it robs them of the possibility to experience the consequences of their actions and grow
• The victim wields power through manipulation, so it perpetrates against the rescuer and the persecutor (which it enlists in its schemes), and it may indirectly perpetrate against others by framing them as the perpetrator

The perpetrator is both the “cause” of the triangle and “caused by it”. It’s a chicken or egg thing. Every role is an equal part of the triangle. And the 3 roles on the outside are “responses” to the perpetrator, but they are also the ones creating the “perpetrator” role.

This is why I see the drama triangle more as one coherent energy field than consisting of separate roles. The “flavor” of this energy field is guilt. And every role inside it is invoking, cultivating and spreading the energy of guilt.

Sometimes, when I bring up this theory (that each of the roles embodies the perpetrator), people get quite triggered.

“It’s an outrage! Preposterous! Surely the victim can’t be similar to the perpetrator at all?!”

That’s true when we’re referring to victimization as an event. Being victimized is indeed a very different thing from perpetrating against someone.

But when we’re referring to the victim and perpetrator as roles in the drama triangle, I urge you to keep an open mind and consider how similar each role is as an expressions of this “field of guilt”.

For example, here’s a quote which was posted on a social media count indended to empower people out of the victim role:

“Manipulation is when they blame you for your reaction to their toxic behaviour, yet never discuss their disrespect that triggered you.”

This quote is not “wrong”.

Indeed someone might tell you that you have no right to be angry, wile your anger is a valid response to something they did to you. That’s manipulation by someone in the perpetrator role (though they might identify as victim in that moment).

Now, re-read the same quote as if it was spoken by a perpetrator. (For example: Someone who just beat someone up a person response to a disagreement.)

No matter who speaks it (victim, rescuer, persecutor, perpetrator), this quote fits every role perfectly.

Because the roles are not separate. They form one coherent triangle. A field of guilt, which speaks through them.

How to Break Free from Drama Triangle Dynamics

The first step in breaking a drama triangle is recognizing the distinction between the person and their role in the dynamic.

If we see them as the role, our mind dehumanizes them, which immediately puts us in the triangle again.

In Authentic Relating, we call this “undamning”:

1. Slow down
2. Recognize your experience, thoughts and feelings as your own
3. Forget what you know about the person in front of you
4. Drop (your relationship) to the reole you’ve assigned to them
5. Get curius about them
6. Attempt to find out: What do we both care so much about that we’re willing to damn, dehumanize and antagonize each other in defense of it?
7. Inside that care, is where the love and the intimacy hides.

Therapist Acey Choy beautifully identified that the core of each real in the drama triangle is a positive quality we can embrace:

• The victim holds the potential for vulnerability
• The rescuer holds the potential for deep care
• The persecutor holds the potential for assertiveness

(Side note: One way to look at this is that each role in the drama triangle is a form of posture or collapse, and that by moving into equanimity, we gain access to their positive qualities. If that sounds like Chinese to you, here is a post which explains those concepts.)

But it gets better than just recognizing the positive quality hiding in these roles!

David Emerald brilliantly flipped the Drama Triangle on its head and turned it into the “Empowerment Triangle”:

Let’s look at the 3 roles of this “flipped triangle” and how to access them:

1) The Victim can pivot to the empowered Creator role by asking:

• “What’s one thing I can control?”
• “What’s one small step I can take?”

2) The Rescuer can pivot to the Coach role by asking:

• “How can I inspire them to help themselves?”
• “How can I support without stepping in or taking over?”
• “How can I offer help while respecting boundaries and checking for the creator’s consent?”

3) The Persecutor can pivot to the healthy Challenger role by asking:

• “How can I push for growth, not blame?”
• “How can I challenge without criticizing?”
• “How can I encourage responsibility and accountability?”

The Forgiven

Remember how the drama triangle consists of a field of guild with the shadow of the perpetrator at the center?

If you you look at the empowerment triangle, I placed a figure called “(the forgiven)” at the center.

This is the empowered version of the perpetrator.

A perpetrator who has been forgiven (and has forgiven those who persecuted them), has the chance to start anew.

The role is no longer at the core of the triangle. Because the others do not direct any energy at it, nor do they receive impact from it.

For the victim, rescuer or persecutor to empower themselves, means they essentially forgive the role of the perpetrator and claim their power back.

Each role in the drama triangle is both a result of the perpetrator being forgiven, and an agent promoting its forgiveness.

Just as with the drama triangle, every other role in the empowerment triangle partially embodies the role of the forgiven:

• The victim is no longer shame(d)
• The persecutor has been relieved of their duty to wage war
• The rescuer is allowed to feel good about themselves, without having to prove their worth or mingle in others affairs’

This gives the empowerment triangle a field with the flavor of forgiveness, the positive polar opposite of guilt (and what enables this forgiveness is courage).

How to Break the Cycle of Drama

Here are some steps you might take, when you find yourself in a drama triangle and want out:

1. Notice your role
2. Ask yourself: “Am I playing Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor?”
3. Feel your body and the ground beneath you. This can help you get in touch with your dignity and humility.
4. Get in touch with the roles core positive quality (refer to this article if needed)
5. Use one of the questions that shift from drama to empowerment.

You can also exploriment with getting a visceral sense of what each of the roles and triangles feel like to you.

In my experience, each role seems to have its own unique configuration of tensed and relaxed muscles in my body.

For example:

I can recognize I’m in the persecutor role when most of my muscles are tense and my vision is narrow. Inviting in more vision from the peripheries helps me let go of the role.

I can recognize I’m in the victim role when all my muscles are hanging loose like a bag of potatoes and none are holding me up (like “lacking a spine”). Doing some kind of core workout shifts me out of the role.

I’ve spent a lot of time in all three of these roles, and I notice that the greater intensity with which I embody one, the greater the intensity I embody the others (while often in denial of it).

The more I feel like a victim, the more I act like a perpetrator or hero too.

So knowing what it feels like to be in these roles helps me spot the dynamic quickly, allowing me to move out.

But there’s another way we can transcend the triangle:

Tapping Into the Field of Forgiveness

Since the drama triangle is essentialy a “field of guilt” and the empowerment triangle is a “field of forgiveness”, that means cultivating forgiveness in ourselves is a shortcut to align ourselves with the latter.

It’s important to note here that “forgiving someone” is distinct from “letting someone off the hook”.

For example:

Let’s say that objectively speaking, you were victimized by another person. And you have also adopted a victim role in the triangle:

By forgiving the other person, you manage to snap out of the toxic dynamic of the triangle and avoid the negative psychological consequences of assuming the victim role.

However, dropping your victim role does not mean denying you were victimized. As we’ve seen, the attitude of victimhood is separate from the event of being victimized. The same counts for holding people accountable.

They may occur together & can also exist without the other. Victim empowerment is not the same as victim blaming.

You may still have been objectively mistreated. And if so, it iis important to acknowledge and accept it, rather than gaslight yourself into thinking you were just making drama.

Because by acknowledging what happened, you can empower yourself to find ways to prevent it from happening again. Ways which don’t involve some sort of denial of the reality that you were indeed victimized.

(Side note: This is tricky to get right, because when we’re in the victim role, we will always believe we were objectively victimized. When in doubt, a therapist might help. But a great primer on discerning between the 2, is getting acquainted with the concept of separating facts from stories.)

The point is:

Forgiveness does not involve denying what happens or denying accountability.

If anything, it involves acknowledging what happened fully and letting go of the grudge.

We are forgiving, not to let people off the hook, but to break the cycle of the drama triangle.

History is filled with horrors perpetrated by people who felt justified by their own victimization (again, demonstrating the blurry line between the roles). Forgiveness is a way of interrupting that cycle.

I’ve come to believe one of the most powerful things we can do for society & humanity is forgive it.

Not just forgive it as if it was some external thing, but forgive it as if it was us.

With all our beauty, flaws, goodness, darkness & imperfections. Multiplied & magnified 7 billion times.

Because society, in essence, is humans at scale.

Last year, I had a deep experience with forgiveness.

I visualized conversations with many people I needed to forgive or ask forgiveness from.

Interestingly, for each finished conversation, a body part which had been stiff or painful completely relaxed.

My current working theory is that “holding a grudge” involves a literal type of holding. Where the grudge is somatically held in our body, as a form of tension and pain.

In that sense, as long as we don’t forgive what happened to us, we are letting it hurt us again and again, psychologically and somatically.

I continuously re-discover just how much of holding ourselves back can be resolved by finding the courage to forgive the world and forgive ourselves. And as counterintuitive as it may sound, both of those are one and the same.

Because the drama triangle is a coherent whole, which means that forgiving it, involves forgiving the whole field:

• Forgiving what was “done to us”
• Forgiving the ways in which we were complicit in it or submitted to it (even if we had no other choice).
• Forgiving all of us for playing the roles we played (including ourselves once again).
• Forgiving the world for the parts of it we wish were different

This all serves to facilitate our own healing, but I think it is even more powerful when our own healing is not the intention.

Yesn ,he “forgiveness isn’t for them, it’s for you” meme can help people move toward forgiveness when they otherwise wouldn’t. But it can also lead to pseudo-forgiveness—a kind of spiritual bypassing—where you skip actually extending forgiveness & just reframe it for your own peace.

To tie this back to “forgiveness is for you”, paradoxically:

When I truly forgive the other for them, I often realize a part of me yearned to be forgiven. And in forgiving them, I too am forgiven by virtue of invoking the feeling of real forgiveness.

This is what I mean with experiencing forgiveness as a field.

And to experience it as a field means to experience it as an energy.

Forgiveness as an energy is not the same as forgiveness as a word or concept.

Sometimes I have the words “I forgive you” on the tip of my tongue. But right before I speak them, I taste their essence. And its tainted. It tastes like ego. Using the word “forgiveness” a power move.

By telling the person “I forgive you”, my ego intends to position me as the one at whose feet they were supposed to beg for it. It positions me (the forgiver), above them (the sinner). That’s forgiveness as a word, but not as an energy.

Because the energy, in that case, is still guilt. It’s a sneaky a way for the drama triangle to persevere while pretending to be the empowerment triangle.

There are other times, when I can feel the words “I forgive you”, in my heart. And it feels so profoundly impactful that the words would feel like a mere formality from my end.

Because there is no doubt in the world that forgiveness has occurred.

Whether I say it explicitly or not. It’s palpable. There’s not even a “forgiver” and a “sinner” in this dynamic. That illusion has been lifted. There is only forgiveness as a total experience within the heart.

Now the choice to speak the words “I forgive you” is a matter of discerning if the other person is longing to hear them or not. Because they don’t need to be communicated for me. Only for them, should they want it.

(This is similar to how apologies work. Sometimes they’re an energy, sometimes just a word.)

The Need for Closure

In essence, each role in the drama triangle is seeking to achieve some form of salvation.

The victim wants to be saved. The persecutor and the rescuer want to do the saving themselves.

They all want to end the triangle (or at least believe they do), but because they are stuck in the field of guilt, each misguided attempt at salvation only creates more guilt and reinforces the drama triangle.

In reality, the only thing that can lead to salvation from the dynamic is to release ourselves from the field of guilt altogether, by making a conscious choice to let go of it and embody the field of forgiveness instead.

A common reason we don’t feel ready to do so, is the need for formal closure.

The need for closure is a fascinating dynamic:

It’s energetically saying to the other person: “I refuse to move until you ____ (do what I believe would create closure).”

In that sense, the need for closure is an attempt to reclaim our power after an experience of loss we felt powerless to.

By demanding the closure we believe we are owed, we attempt to claim that power back. But when we stake our healing on another person’s response, we unknowingly place our broken heart in their hands, hoping they will return it whole.

In doing so, we actually offer our heart as a hostage, waiting for an outcome we cannot control. So ironically, in the attempt to claim our power back, we’re giving our power away.

The way to truly reclaim the power is not to deny our need for closure, but to hold it with tenderness.

To ask:

• What within me is seeking resolution?
• What pain is longing to be witnessed?
• What is the loss that I am grieving (in other words: what am I loving intensely that is not, or no longer here)?

Finding the ability within ourselves to accept and move forward can be an act of radical self-liberation, and open us up to the capacity to align with the field of forgiveness.

Because just as with grudges, the demand for closure is a physical “holding”, while the decision to forgive is a physical “letting go”.

None of this denies that receiving proper closure can be a beautiful and healing experience (or that in an ideal world, relational accountability would be taken by all parties at all times).

When closure is offered with care, it can indeed facilitate the restoration of inner trust, dignity, and peace.

But when it is withheld or impossible, we do have the power to offer ourselves the understanding we seek to receive from others.

And the times we most crave closure are often the times it is least available to us.

So around the topic of closure, an inquiry I invite you to make is this:

In which way am I using the concept of closure as a horcrux for the continued experience of being in the drama triangle?

And in which way can I use it as a doorway back to myself?

To my own heart, and the love inside it.

Of which forgiveness is a natural consequence.

P.S. If you want to learn how to:

• Put all these ideas into practice step-by-step
• Learn many other ways to transform conflict into intimacy
• Experience deeper connection with yourself, life and reality

I am launching an immersive online group training first of April, and if you sign up in the next 3 days, you can do so at a discount.

I’m obviously biased, but I honestly believe that anyone who enjoys this blog would enjoy the training 10 times more. As it’s a place where we don’t just learn about things, but actively practice them with other people and apply them to what happens in our daily lives.

If that sounds like your jam, you can sign up for it here.

It would be a huge pleasure to welcome you!