One of the roles of psychotherapy is to offer the client new ways to understand their emotional dilemma, with the aim of resolving the impasse. When someone keeps replicating the same pattern of discontent, a repeating carousel of unhappy relationships which reinforce the same fear of rejection, or sadness, or anger, it is a potential sign that the Drama Triangle is being enacted.
This article explains the origin of the Drama Triangle in childhood; its three positions – Rescuer, Victim, Persecutor; what the Drama Triangle looks like in practice; and how this can be worked through and resolved in the therapy room.
The dilemma
Tom and Evie, a co-habiting couple, have had a great week together. Their weeks are always great – it’s the weekends that are the problem. At some point on a weekend nothing Tom can say will be the right thing for Evie. This weekend he wants it to be different. Evie gets home before he does on a Friday, and as he enters the house he can smell the aroma of the meal being cooked in the kitchen.
“That smells great, love”, he says with a smile.
She won’t meet his eye, but responds with a dismissive “Huh!”
“Have you had a bad day?”, he asks, reaching out to hug her.
“Have you had a bad day?”, she repeats, in a mocking voice. “Don’t touch me. Don’t pretend you actually want to know.”
Tom’s heart sinks. Every weekend there is something, but it doesn’t always start as early as this. No amount of talking about it afterwards has ever resolved it. Evie either shuts down from shame at the way she has treated him or she tells him ‘it was your fault all along and you know it.’ He doesn’t know it, he doesn’t understand why this keeps happening, and whenever he asks for anything specific he can do to put it right, he is only told, “Well, if you have to ask!” He knows now that whatever he says will be turned against him. Still, he tries.
“Of course I want to know, love.”
“No you don’t. And don’t pretend you love me. You’re 10 minutes late.”
It really stings when he hears “don’t pretend you love me.” He decides to ignore it. “Yes,” he says, “sorry about being late. I just had to finish something at work before the weekend. It’s only 10 minutes.”
“Only 10 minutes?! So I don’t count, is that it? Work is more important than me?”
“Of course not.”
“So why weren’t you here on time?”
“I can see the food isn’t ready yet, so we won’t be eating any later.”
“Don’t try to change the subject. So being on time for the food is more important than being on time for me?!”
“Come on,” he says, with some frustration, “You know that isn’t what I meant.”
“Don’t deny it now! We both know what you just said!”
“I’m sorry,” he says, now deliberately softly, trying to control his frustration, “you know you’re more important to me than anything. Come on, we have the weekend to ourselves now.”
“No we don’t”, she says weakly, tears welling up. “You’re late! You’ve ruined everything!”
At this point, Tom can feel the annoyance at all those ruined weekends welling up inside him. Through gritted teeth, he says, “I haven’t ruined everything. Let’s just enjoy our bloody weekend.”
“Oh! So there it is, you horrible nasty terrible man! Talking to me like that! That’s how much you care about me! You’re just like my father!”
With that, Evie runs out of the kitchen, up the stairs and throws herself on the bed, sobbing. Tom is stuck now, not knowing what to do for the best. He thinks, ‘Do I go up and console her? Then she’ll reject me and tell me again that I don’t really care. So do I stay down here and wait for her to come back to me? Then she’ll see that as a reason I don’t really care because I didn’t go up. Whatever I do is wrong.’
This repeated type of interaction is an example of the Drama Triangle at play. We will return to Tom and Evie below to analyse the scene.
The structure of this article
This article is intended to be read by anyone currently having psychotherapy, or interested non-clients, or psychotherapists looking for a useful working model of the Drama Triangle. To make this comprehensible to all, I have given life-like examples of emotions, thought processes and behaviours, keeping technical therapy-speak to a minimum. When therapeutic language is useful, I have explained the terms I introduce. When these terms appear for the first time they are in bold type.
The structure of this article is as follows.
The next section, The origin of the Drama Triangle, explains the work of psychotherapist Stephen Karpman, introducing key concepts. This section will be of most help to psychotherapists, but it is written to be accessible to anyone. This section can be skipped by non-therapists without affecting comprehension of the rest of the article.
The following sections are a mixture of Stephen Karpman’s original model and my own observations from working with clients, the latter being the idea of Drama Triangle roles as emotional positions; the typical biography of someone on the Drama Triangle (including three types of Victim), with its attendant beliefs about self, relationship to responsibility, typical sentiments, and why the Drama Triangle is an attempt at emotional resolution that can never work; the relationship between the Drama Triangle, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and Munchausen syndrome; and ways of working with Rescuers, Victims and Persecutors in psychotherapy.
The section called The three positions: Rescuer, Victim, Persecutor is next, and explains why these three roles have capitals; why I call them positions; why the Drama Triangle is a return to childhood relationships; why someone may be on and off the Triangle, or almost always on it, or never on it; and the nature of the childhood needs that are returned to in the Drama Triangle.
The next three sections are biographical sketches, describing how each position is established in childhood and the ways in which each position blights relationships. They are headed Rescuer: saving the Victim, saving myself; Victim: the helpless persecuted innocent; and Persecutor: the angry innocent seeking justice.
The following section, Doubling down or switching position, describes what happens when a Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor is challenged or they realise their position is not having the desired outcome.
The final part, The Drama Triangle in the therapy room, outlines what resolution in therapy looks like. There are 13 pointers for clients to understand the necessary steps for coming off the Triangle, which also serve as 13 pointers for therapists working with clients.
The origin of the Drama Triangle
This section will be of most help to psychotherapists, but it is written to be accessible to anyone. Clients and non-therapists may skip this section and pick up from The three positions: Rescuer, Victim, Persecutor, and the rest of the article will still give all the key information.
The Drama Triangle comes from a type of psychotherapy called Transactional Analysis (TA for short), founded and developed by Eric Berne (1910–70). The idea was originally conceived by Stephen Karpman in an article called Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis, published in April 1968 in Transactional Analysis Bulletin. This paper was declared The Eric Berne Memorial Scientific Award Winning Article in 1972.
Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis introduced the idea of three roles that are played out in situations of conflict: Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor. Stephen Karpman illustrated the model through the roles played in three fairy tales, one of them being the Pied Piper. The story is set in 1284, when the town of Hamelin in Germany had an infestation of rats. A piper appeared dressed in pied clothes (with patches of different colours). He told the mayor he could rid the town of the rats, and the mayor promised to pay him 1,000 guilders in return. The piper played his pipe and the rats followed his mesmeric music. He led them into the Weser River, where they drowned. However, the mayor refused to pay the promised sum: he reduced it to 50 guilders and accused the piper of bringing the rats to Hamelin himself to extort the town. The piper left to plan his revenge.
The piper returned to Hamelin dressed in green, like a hunter, on Saint John and Paul’s Day. Since it was a saints’ day, the adults were in church, leaving the town’s children unattended. The piper played his music and one hundred and thirty of Hamelin’s children followed him into a cave in a mountain and were never seen again. In some versions of the story, three children stayed behind: one child was lame, another deaf, and the last blind, so they could not follow, or hear the music, or see the way. It was these three who told the villagers of the other children’s fate. Variants of the story have the piper leading the children to the top of Koppelberg Hill, from whence they disappeared; or to Koppenberg Mountain; or to Transylvania; or he walked them into the Weser River, where they drowned like the rats; or the piper returned the children only after extorting several times the originally promised sum.
Stephen Karpman’s interpretation of the story in terms the roles in the Drama Triangle – Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor – is:
“In the Pied Piper, the hero begins as Rescuer of the city and Persecutor of the rats, then becomes Victim to the Persecutor mayor’s double-cross (fee withheld), and in revenge switches to the Persecutor of the city’s children. The mayor switches from Victim (of rats), to Rescuer (hiring the Pied Piper), to Persecutor (double-cross), to Victim (his children dead). The children switch from Persecuted Victims (rats) to Rescued Victims, to Victims Persecuted by their Rescuer.”
In this analysis, Stephen didn’t distinguish between Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor as social roles, descriptors of a person’s exterior or objective place in a story, and Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor as emotional roles, descriptors of a person’s interior subjective place in a story. This distinction is critical to make the Drama Triangle a fully functioning and workable model in psychotherapy: it is the emotional framework of the Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor roles that make them productive in psychotherapeutic work, and an understanding of Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor as emotional positions that gives them explanatory power.
Stephen did make just this distinction when he developed the model further in his paper for the USA Transactional Analysis Association / International Transactional Analysis Association conference lecture in 2007, The New Drama Triangles. In this much more detailed, thorough and varied analysis, he made the following points (with my explanations in brackets).
• Transference creates the perceptions of the Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor. (Transference is a fixed perception of a particular type of situation, rooted in childhood experience, usually involving unresolved emotions and thoughts. The situation from the unresolved past is unconsciously superimposed on a present tense interaction. For example, if we had a cruel and vindictive mother, we will be hypersensitive to comments we perceive as cruel and vindictive. That means we will hear them when they’re not intended, react disproportionately when they are there, always be on the lookout for them, see any person making an unkind remark as a version of mother, and react accordingly with unresolved childhood emotions.)
• Those taking the Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor positions play games. (In TA, a game is a repeated pattern of behaviour in which a person deliberately but unconsciously replays an unresolved drama from childhood. In other words, games are based on transference, and their function is to repeat the pattern of unresolved childhood relationships. A more detailed explanation of games will be the subject of the next article on this website.)
• When challenged about their role of Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor, or when that role fails to produce the expected outcome, the person on the Drama Triangle will either play a game (in TA terms) to complicate and confuse the situation, or go into denial and play innocent, or switch roles to another part of the Triangle.
• A role on the Triangle is part of a person’s life script. (Life script, or just script, means the path in life a person decided in childhood is their fate, based on their developmental experiences. Since this was decided unconsciously by a child, it is simple and can always be summed up in a sentence. For example, a child who only ever gets attention by being ill, or being injured, or only when their screams for attention reach fever pitch, and is otherwise ignored, may develop the script, I am unlovable, and I am only ever noticed when I am a Victim. This will set the scene for the way the person conducts relationships and the type of life they will lead – unless there is therapeutic intervention.)
• The roles on the Drama Triangle involve the whole of a person: thinking, feeling, and acting.
• The observable action in the Drama Triangle positions are the Rescuer’s support for others; the Victim’s passivity; and the Persecutor’s revenge.
• The psychotherapist approach is to work with the client to give them what they needed and did not receive developmentally, i.e. to change the script. For the Rescuer, this is permission to think of themself and validate their own needs; for the Victim, it is to have a truly connected and caring relationship; for the Persecutor, it is re-parenting, the experience of having a parent figure who is genuinely there for them.
Stephen Karpman developed the model a third time in a highly technical and detailed paper for the International Journal of Transactional Analysis Research, 2019: Script Drama Analysis II: The Redecision, Transference, Freudian, Existential, and Darwinian Drama Triangles; Script Formula G and the Three P’s of Script Protocol and Promotion. Stephen stated that the ideas in this paper were speculative and theoretical, their use in practice “to be determined in time.” For me, the most useful ideas that have been proven in practice in Script Drama Analysis II are as follows (with my added explanations in brackets).
• When the family dynamic is a Drama Triangle, the child will grow up to unconsciously replicate that dynamic by playing games (in the TA sense). For example, if the authority figure, the parent, is a Persecutor to the child as Victim, that child is likely to see any authority figure as a Persecutor and set a Victim’s game in motion.
• This dynamic may play out in the therapy room, with the client misreading the therapist as a Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor.
• The way the Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor roles are expressed in games needs to be fully explored and understood so that more a healthy response is possible. This must include understanding the hidden motives of the Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor, and therefore their emotional payoffs (payoff: the emotional purpose and end-point of a game, recreating and reinforcing the original unresolved drama).
• It is helpful to give the repetitious game a name, as this gives clarity and helps put the client consciously back in control.
• It is helpful to identify the introjected self and projected self.
• (An introject is an emotional response, a way of thinking, feeling and acting that is copied wholesale from a significant other, without understanding and without knowing it has been done. For example, someone with a Persecutor parent may become a Persecutor because they have introjected the parent’s behaviour. In childhood, this will have been a matter of survival: ‘I have to fight back against my parent’s anger and aggression by being just as angry and aggressive, otherwise I will not survive.’ Or a parent is a Victim, so the child becomes a Victim, too. The reason may be twofold: i. A Victim parent cannot be fully there for the child, so the child feels the gap between emotional needs and the experience of unmet needs. ii. As a way to express to the parent the need for more connection, the only working model the child sees is the parent being a Victim.)
• (The projected self is unconsciously seeing another as a version of oneself, e.g. the Rescuer seeks out Victims as the Rescuer imagines the Victim’s experience of hardship replicates their own. This means that in saving Victims, the Rescuer is Rescuing the projected self.)
• Once the nature of the transference is identified by naming family members and their roles in the Triangle, the client can make a redecision, i.e. now consciously take a different and more healthy path to the one they were taking unconsciously.
• This more healthy route moves the Rescuer from self-delusion to self-love; the Victim from self-pity to self-acceptance; and the Persecutor from self-sabotage to self-determination.
The three positions: Rescuer, Victim, Persecutor
We do not use the terms Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor in the everyday sense, which is why these terms are capitalised, to make it clear they are positions on the Drama Triangle. Taking the Victim position is not a description of external events, such as being ‘a victim of crime’, or ‘a victim of polio’. Used in this everyday sense, the word ‘victim’ tells us nothing about the person’s experience. The person that a newspaper or a statistical report describes as ‘a victim of crime’ may not feel or behave like a ‘victim’ at all, but may instead feel defiant. In the same way, the person who a charity calls ‘a victim of polio’ may in reality be cheerfully getting on with their life. The same goes, for example, for the fire fighter who is the ‘rescuer of a family from a blaze’: he is not a Rescuer in the Drama Triangle sense, as the latter is a description of an emotional position.
Position means that being a Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor is a repetitive and predictable standpoint, a perspective which shapes a person’s response to events. The origin of the position is in childhood, in formative experiences of unfulfilled relational needs. As with the story we started with, it may look as though the emotional storm has been made up out of thin air, as if the person is deliberately trying to make their life miserable. This doesn’t make sense, of course, and the person on the Triangle is not making it up. The situation is real, the emotions are real, the pain is real, but it isn’t present tense – it is the unresolved past being superimposed on the present, a painful formative relationship being replayed as if it happening all over again. For the person on the Drama Triangle, it really is happening all over again, and the person will be unaware that the whole drama has been projected outward from their psyche.
In Transactional Analysis, there is the model of three ego states – Parent, Adult and Child – capitalised to show they are aspects of personality, as distinct from a biological parent, adult or child. These ego states are ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. All that needs to be stated about them here is that when a person is emotionally overwhelmed, under more pressure than they have emotional resources for, they return to the Child ego state. A child is under authority, not ultimately in control, so when someone feels out of control they move into their Child ego and have all the thoughts and feelings they had as a child under stress. The Drama Triangle is always played in the Child ego state.
The Child ego state is not an abstract idea, but entirely personal and autobiographical: each person’s Child ego is different, depending on the influences upon them in childhood. If, when under stress as a child, a person felt loved and supported, then moving into the Child ego as an adult under pressure will bring with it the thought to reach out for support, and the idea that they can get through it. If, however, the stressed child received no support, or was punished unjustly, or if the parents who should have been looking after the child were the very ones causing the child distress, then returning to the Child ego as an adult will be an experience of chaos and abandonment.
It therefore follows that the amount of pressure and the type of pressure a person feels before being overwhelmed and returning to the Child ego is entirely personal and autobiographical. An occurrence such as your partner being 10 minutes late from work is an irrelevant event for one person, but a point of extreme stress for another if it hooks into unresolved childhood conflict. It also follows that some people live almost permanently in their conflicted Child ego and almost permanently on the Drama Triangle; whereas others are off the Triangle when all feels well and on it in situations they find overwhelming. Some people, having been brought up in a secure and loving home, are never on the Drama Triangle at all.
The Drama Triangle repeats and reinforces an impossible dilemma from early life, frozen in time and repeated as if it is happening in the present, but still with the child’s simple understanding of events. The root of the Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor position is a formative belief about oneself in relationships, with attendant repeated emotional responses – fear, sadness, anger – and repeated practical actions – running away from the self-generated conflict, seeking revenge for imagined slights, etc.
While the positions on the Drama Triangle are ways of attempting to get emotional needs met, it is done in ways guaranteed to perpetuate the pain rather than resolving it, because each position replays and reinforces the unresolved dynamics of childhood. Because this is not understood, the Drama Triangle keeps playing out. This makes the position of Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor self-reinforcing, self-justifying, and self-perpetuating.
What do we mean by these unmet or unfulfilled childhood needs that can lead to positions on the Drama Triangle?
A child is, by nature, dependent and vulnerable. The dependence is biological and practical, since a small child cannot do any of the tasks that keep us alive day by day, such as feeding, drinking, or earning the money to have a home and pay the bills. The dependence is also emotional: a child is inherently undeveloped, and therefore doesn’t know who s/he is yet, so needs to explore to find out, to try on different roles through play, through mixing with different types of people, through attempting different types of activities. Practical and emotional dependence means that the child needs support to do all of this. Once they are verbal, children naturally seek affirmation from parents: ‘Look how high I can jump!’ ‘Look! I can tie my shoelaces!’ ‘Look what I drew!’ ‘Look! I can write my name!’ If the child receives the appropriate praise, affirmation and support, with practical and moral boundaries that keep the child safe, then the child is set for a good start and feels free to explore their world.
But what if the support isn’t there? What if the parents are too preoccupied to give the child attention? What if the parents are carping and undermining, so that the child senses s/he can never do anything right? This crushes the child’s natural need for affirmation. For an adult who has had a good start in life, lack of support or undermining from other adults is difficult enough, but such a person has gained in childhood the resources to manage and potentially change this difficult situation, if it can be changed. But a child who is not given support from the beginning knows nothing else: that child learns that the world is hostile, and this forms the internal working model of relationships they take through life. To adapt, the child takes up the position of Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor.
As we will see, a child arrives unconsciously at their Drama Triangle position: as an adult, they do not know they are still doing it, which is what gives it its power. The Drama Triangle is a miserable place to be, and no one would knowingly choose it. The person concerned will consciously understand only that their life is a repetitive cycle of unhappiness.
A person on the Triangle has their favoured position. When that is challenged, or if in a particular situation it doesn’t work as intended, the person switches to another position on the Triangle.
The Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor attempts to put another person in a complementary position. For example, the Rescuer wants the other person to be a Victim and to have a Persecutor, which may be a person or a situation they need to be Rescued from. This does not require the others involved to really be a Victim or Persecutor on the Triangle, only to be perceived as such by the person in the role of Rescuer. If this does not work, the Rescuer tries harder to make the person a Victim, or switches position to become Victim or Persecutor.
For easy comparison, the analysis of each position will follow the same format:
• The unresolved childhood events being re-enacted
• Resulting belief about self
• Typical phrases or sentiments
• Emotions
• Attempted resolution, and why it doesn’t work
Rescuer: saving the Victim, saving myself
• The unresolved childhood events being re-enacted
The Rescuer position has its origins in childhood experiences in which the child had a felt need to earn being good enough, to earn approval from parents, but it proved impossible. Parental acceptance, the foundation of secure attachment, was either unobtainable since parents were emotionally unavailable, or parents were too preoccupied to give the child adequate emotional care, or the child received regular and undermining criticism and unwarranted punishment, or the parents were Rescuers themselves so the child absorbed this way of unhealthy dependence.
In addition, it is sometimes the case that some event happened in childhood for which the child felt responsible, so s/he then spends the rest of her/his life making up for it by being A Good Person, which in this context means being a Rescuer. The event may be parents regularly arguing, or a sibling being very ill or dying, or a parent giving the child responsibilities beyond their capacity. Of course, the child wasn’t responsible and shouldn’t be held accountable but, with a child’s understanding, s/he didn’t know this.
When the child feels the need to constantly prove their worth to parents, or make up for ‘being bad’, and discovers this is impossible, the child feels the constant threat of rejection and abandonment. As described above, a child is inherently both physically and emotionally dependent, so if that dependence isn’t an emotionally safe state, then the child’s only option may be to grow up too quickly, to behave as if their childhood needs are not there, and thus lose their childhood, i.e. lose their safe dependence.
The Rescuer, then, gave up on getting their own emotional needs met in childhood due to the experience of persistent let-downs by parents. One way for the child to manage this is to try to bury their fraught emotions and become practically necessary to parents’ well-being. In this way, the child adapts by reversing the roles, playing the role of parent to parents: ‘If my parents need me, then they cannot reject me.’ Sometimes the parents and child are so estranged that it is impossible for the child to reverse roles, so this relational dependence is sought outside the family. The child seeks out those perceived to be helpless Victims, so the child has somewhere else to belong, somewhere else to feel wanted with some ‘Victim who needs me’. Thus the Rescuer receives vicarious satisfaction by taking on inordinate responsibility that doesn’t belong to them. This becomes an established pattern of needing to be needed to maintain emotional equilibrium: the child becomes a Rescuer to avoid abandonment.
• Resulting belief about self
Thus the Rescuer discounts all their own needs. The Rescuer has learned from parents the life-lesson that ‘my needs don’t count’, or ‘I am not allowed’, or ‘I must make up for being bad’. At the heart of the Rescuer is a deep sense of unworthiness, an abiding guilt for even having any needs. The Rescuer will therefore tend to be in deeply unsuitable adult relationships, in which all the Rescuer’s needs are discounted by the Rescuer him/herself, and to speak up for oneself feels like a crime. In such a situation, it is easy for the Rescuer to be in a relationship where s/he is taken advantage of. Even in an abusive relationship, the Rescuer is unlikely to leave because s/he fears abandonment, so instead the Rescuer frames the abusive partner as a misunderstood Victim who will change if only they can be successfully Rescued.
In the simple either/or mindset of the Child ego, the Rescuer will justify their misery, as if that makes them a good person. In the Rescuer’s framework of thinking, standing up for oneself is bad because it is framed in unrealistic black and white terms: ‘I get nothing for myself because I am kind and thoughtful. If I speak up for myself then I will be a selfish monster, a Persecutor.’
When the Rescuer has designated another as a Victim, the Rescuer will speak up for and act for others, even if the others don’t really need it: that is the essence of Rescuing. When the Rescuer is a parent, and the Rescuer’s Victim is their own child, the situation can become extreme, and one iteration of this has a name in the medical and psychiatric professions: Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), what used to be called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Something factitious is produced artificially rather than naturally, so it lacks authenticity.
In Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), or Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the Rescuer parent makes her/himself artificially necessary to their child’s well-being by turning the child into a permanent Victim, Rescuing the child from being Persecuted by imaginary illnesses. In this way, the Rescuer parent has resolved their childhood fear of abandonment for ‘being bad’, by taking the position: ‘I can redeem myself by being always good, by looking after my helpless Victim child, who will always need me.’
The name Munchausen is from Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, a book by Rudolf Erich Raspe, published in 1785, in which the titular character tells fantastical tales of his military exploits. Similarly, the parent maintains their Rescuer position by telling fabricated stories, and this is by proxy as the stories are about the child rather than the parent her/himself. Thus the parent will imagine an ordinary childhood illness is life-threatening, and treat it as such, taking the child to the doctor far more than is necessary and never being content when the results are normal. The parent will over-protect the child and imagine the worst will always happen. For example, ‘My child can’t play outside because next door’s dog might jump over the fence and bite him, and he’ll have a wound, and it will go septic, and then it will spread, and he will die. What sort of a monster would I be if I let my child go outside?! Stay close to me, my baby, and let me protect you.’ It is important to state that these feelings and thoughts are completely real to the Rescuer parent, who treats the child’s imagined illnesses and potential fatalities as fact, even when contradicted by a medic (‘Surely the doctor must have missed something!’), and the imagined disaster sequence seems inevitable unless the parent ratchets up their Rescuing activities to save their Victim child.
• Typical phrases or sentiments
The typical phrases or sentiments of the Rescuer are:
‘You don’t need to think about me.’
‘I feel guilty if I spend time/money on myself.’
‘I don’t know how to spend time on my own.’
All the above are not only sentiments of self-sacrifice for the Rescuer, but of unworthiness, and signs of an incompletely formed sense of self for the developmental reasons described above. This leads to emotional symbiosis (emotional reliance on another for one’s sense of identity, also known as enmeshment), a lack of healthy independence, and therefore fear of abandonment, and thus sentiments such as:
‘You’ll always need me and I’ll always be here for you.’
‘But how will you cope without me?’
‘Don’t you need me any more?’
The Rescuer may make statements about the number of cups of tea they’ve only half drunk, never having time to finish them because they are so busy looking after others. If not cups of tea, it may be half-eaten meals, or ‘no time left for myself’. Clearly, some people do genuinely find themselves in situations where time is scarce and they are over-burdened with responsibilities, such as having a very ill child, or an ill parent, or a large family of dependents, or a new and more responsible job. They are not Rescuers. What distinguishes the Rescuer is the motive: that the half-drunk tea, or the half-eaten meals, or the ‘no time for myself’ is spoken implicitly as if self-neglect in the service of others is a badge of honour: ‘the more I sacrifice, the more of a Rescuer I am.’ This feeds the Rescuer’s need to be needed, staves off the fear of being alone, and puts off facing the fear of abandonment.
A Rescuing parent will not allow their child to grow up, as an emotionally maturing and increasingly independent child brings with it the threat of no longer being needed and, with that, a return to the parent’s fears (from childhood) of abandonment.
• Emotions
The primary observed emotion of the Rescuer is often happiness – but it isn’t real. The Rescuer’s happiness is a racket emotion, felt to hide the forbidden true feeling underneath. (For more on racket emotions, see Emotions: why they’re all useful, and the cycle of problems when emotions are blocked.)
In reality, the racket of happiness hides the Rescuer’s fear of abandonment, their fear of not being needed; their sadness at never feeling worthy; and their anger at unfair treatment in childhood.
Sometimes the Rescuer’s emotions go through a boom and bust cycle. The racket of happiness is maintained and personal needs are suppressed time and time again, to the point that true feelings can be suppressed no longer. In a fit of anger, the Rescuer protests, ‘But what about me? Why does no one ever look after me?’, not seeing the irony that they would never allow anyone to look after them. When the outburst is over, they will feel shame at the expression of anger, and return to the usual Rescuer position. The cycle starts again.
There is another way of managing this. Some Rescuers, when they are not trying very hard to appear happy, show disproportionate levels of anger that go beyond all reason, and indeed cannot be reasoned with, as it is the anger of a child, i.e. the anger of a person in the Child ego state. This happens when the Rescuer has found a cause they can emotionally invest in, because the cause they support is itself run by Rescuers who have simplified reality to fit the Drama Triangle. In the cause, there is a clearly identified Persecutor and Victim, with themselves as Rescuers. Now the individual Rescuer has common cause with other Rescuers, so they reinforce each others’ ‘righteous anger’, identifying together with those they project as Victims, perpetuating the Drama Triangle without examining the autobiographical roots of (i) their emotional resentment; (ii) their need to find meaning in life through a simple and rigid perception of Victims and Persecutors.
• Attempted resolution, and why it doesn’t work
To summarise, the Rescuer has given up on having emotional and relational needs met openly or directly so, to counter this despair, the Rescuer gets emotional needs met by proxy. The Rescuer projects onto those s/he has decided are Victims, seeing in them a version of the abandoned, unloved and persecuted self, thereby seeking satisfaction and meaning by giving others the attention s/he craved in childhood.
Thus the Rescuer’s attempted resolution for inner conflict is to feel wanted, to feel a substitute for love by finding Victims who need Rescuing from their Persecutor. The Rescuer’s unspoken motive is: ‘I can resolve my fear of abandonment by being A Good Person, and be appreciated for my goodness by seeing my worth reflected in the gratitude of the Victim I have saved’; or ‘I can resolve my barely-repressed anger at unfair treatment in childhood by expressing my anger towards Persecutors and saving the Victims who are projected versions of me.’
As an adult, the Rescuer projects onto the world the domestic relationships experienced in childhood. This position functions as long as there is a supply of actual or imaginary Victims to feed the Rescuer’s proxy emotional satisfaction. If this supply is halted or threatened, the Rescuer is in emotional crisis and temporarily becomes sad Victim or angry Persecutor.
There are four key reasons why, in the long term, the Rescuer position only perpetuates the unresolved past.
First, it is important to note the Rescuer’s, Victim’s and Persecutor’s relationship with personal responsibility. As we will see below, whereas the Victim and Persecutor take no responsibility for themselves at all, the Rescuer takes inordinate responsibility that doesn’t belong to them. Thus the Rescuer’s position is unrealistic, negating any chance of emotional resolution.
Second, the Drama Triangle sets up inherently unhealthy relationships. Any healthy adult relationship carries with it the appropriate level of personal accountability and responsibility. The Rescuer’s gross over-estimation of what they are responsible for invites the genuine Victim to continue their complete abdication of responsibility. Now we are in a perpetually unhealthy alliance, a co-dependent relationship in which the Rescuer needs to rescue, but not too much, for s/he needs the Victim to still be a Victim in need of Rescuing; and this suits the Victim completely, as s/he wants a Rescuer, but doesn’t want to be Rescued permanently or too much, as then s/he cannot continue to be a Victim. The imbalance of personal responsibility combined with the holding of complementary positions means that the Rescuer and Victim can perpetuate their unhealthy relationship indefinitely.
Third, to find Victims to save and Persecutors to save them from, the Rescuer must simplify reality to make it fit the Drama Triangle, done from the black and white, either/or thinking of the Child ego. To be able to find a Victim, the Rescuer must unequivocally take sides, projecting onto the supposed Victim to make them the innocent and helpless child the Rescuer once was, projecting onto the supposed Persecutor to make them an evil villain, usually a stand-in for a parent. What happens when reality breaks through, and it turns out that the perceived Victim isn’t so helpless and blameless after all, and the perceived Persecutor’s motives turn out not to be evil? The Rescuer will see the cognitive dissonance (realisation of logical or moral inconsistency, of holding two or more mutually-exclusive beliefs, or beliefs that conflict with reality), with the uncomfortable result that the Rescuer now knows s/he is in error, so they will take one or more of the following defensive positions:
i. walk away from the discussion, that is to say, walk away from the discomforting reality;
ii. conscious and vocal denial of the newly-realised reality;
iii. double down with force on the mental constructs that support the Drama Triangle;
iv. switch position to Persecutor or Victim of the one who challenges their distortion of reality.
Fourthly, and most importantly, the Rescuer position doesn’t resolve the central question of perpetual inner conflict. No matter how numerous the supply of Victims to save and Persecutors to save them from, it solves nothing: the unresolved childhood relationship is still being played out in the present tense. The Rescuer will not have understood the nature of their dilemma, nor resolved their fear of abandonment, nor moved to a more healthy emotional position.
Victim: the helpless persecuted innocent
• The unresolved childhood events being re-enacted
The word innocent is a descriptor in this heading because each position on the Triangle is established in childhood. A young child cannot be held responsible for the influences upon them: a child is subject to parental authority, or lack of it, to parental care, or lack of it. Children crave attention, affirmation, to develop their personalities, and to know they are cared for come what may. Children have no power to change events, but are subject to whatever is given.
The Victim is passive, taking no responsibility for their situation as an adult, because they are re-enacting the drama of childhood, when it really was not the child’s responsibility, but the parents’. Now, in adult life, the situation has changed, but the person’s frame of reference has not.
The origin of the Victim position is childhood experiences in which the young person felt gravely unsupported or victimised. One of the following situations persisted in which the parents were experienced as Persecutors.
i. The child could not change the attitude of parents or carers by positive or straightforward means: simply being honest about the situation and asking for help or support seemed impossible, or the child knew from experience that asking to be noticed would fall on deaf ears, or would result in backlash; or the parents were persistently neglectful or abusive. Thus the child felt unjustly punished or abandoned in childhood, and this became established as an emotional position and a cognitive expectation in life: the child becomes a Victim.
ii. The child could not change the attitude of parents or carers except when the situation became extreme. The child was only noticed and looked after when s/he was seen to be helpless, for example when s/he was terrified, or unwell, or injured. Thus being terrified, unwell or injured became an established pattern to receive much-craved-for attention, so these situations would be generated by the child. This is sometimes known as learned helplessness.
Either of the two situations above is a counsel of despair: the dependent child is helpless to change the bigger picture, so is in a situation of enforced passivity or reinforced Victimhood. When this solidifies into an emotional position, the only perceived way out of the helplessness of being subject to a Persecutor is to hope for a Rescuer. ‘Perhaps,’ thinks the child, ‘if I try hard enough to show my Persecutor how much of a Victim s/he has made me, s/he will relent and become my Rescuer.’ The child will never have their wish.
The adult Victim may then be in a romantic relationship that replicates this familiar dynamic of neglect or abuse; or seek a partner/friends who will play the role of Rescuer, so the Victim can maintain their emotional stance of helplessness without taking any personal responsibility to change it. This will either attract a genuine Rescuer to perpetuate an unhealthy alliance; or the Victim will find a partner not on the Triangle who eventually leaves because they tire of the drama; or friends will be worn out by the Victimhood and move away, leaving the Victim to experience the abandonment they feared from the beginning and were trying to mitigate against.
There is a third circumstance in which a child may become a Victim.
iii. The child has one or both parents in the Rescuer position. For such a parent, the growing independence of the child brings with it the threat of abandonment. The parent’s need to be needed, their insistence on doing for the child when the child can easily do for her/himself, the babying of the child when they are now an adult, may result in the child’s fear of breaking away from the parent, fear of independence, of responsibility, and thus the son or daughter retreats into the parent’s preferred role for the child: helpless Victim.
The Victim position is taken to an extreme in what the medical profession calls Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (FDIS), what used to be called Munchausen syndrome (not to be confused with FDIA or Munchausen syndrome by proxy, described above). The Victim who engages in Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (FDIS), or Munchausen syndrome, seeks attention by imagining physical or psychological conditions that require medical attention, or s/he deliberately induces symptoms. Physically, the person may make up or imagine presentations that are difficult or impossible for a medic to detect by immediate examination – thus guaranteeing more attention – such as persistent headaches, stomach problems or chest pain, or s/he may produce symptoms by cutting or burning a part of their body, deliberately infecting or reopening the wound, then seek validation for the problem from a medic. Psychologically, to reinforce the Victim position, the person may say they have visual or auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), or will research then self-diagnose and present with a psychiatric disorder, or pretend to be distressed or deliberately induce distress, and then seek validation for the problem from a psychiatrist or psychotherapist.
The motive is to present symptoms that reinforce Victimhood, Persecuted by the exaggerated, imaginary or induced condition, so that the medic, psychiatrist or psychotherapist can play the role of Rescuer. As we will see below (under Attempted resolution, and why it doesn’t work), this creates a potentially intractable Drama Triangle: the Victim will resist any move towards discovery of the true situation by the medic or psychotherapist. If the intended Rescuer insists on uncovering the truth that the condition is imagined or self-induced, the Victim will leave and seek out a new Rescuer with another surgery, hospital or psychological practitioner.
The emotional underpinning of FDIS or Munchausen syndrome may be any one of the three Victim patterns described above:
i. to continue self-punishment on parents’ behalf as physical or emotional self-injury, to confirm the child’s self-image as bad, deserving of only a wretched life, hoping that at least this time the story will end differently and the medic or psychotherapist, unlike parents, will take quasi-parental responsibility and be there for her/him;
ii. to seek help for induced medical or psychological distress because as a child they learned that this is the sole condition under which positive attention – or any attention at all – can be received;
iii. fearing independent adult life, to continue the role of helpless Victim imposed by a Rescuer parent or parents (as described above under the main heading Rescuer: saving the Victim, saving myself, subheading Resulting belief about self).
• Resulting belief about self
Cognitively and emotionally, a young child draws universal conclusions from necessarily limited but profound experiences. Thus the child who develops the Victim position believes one of the following:
i. I am innocent – others are to blame.
I am innocent – others are to blame was surely true as a child. But when this becomes a fixed life script, an emotional, cognitive and practical position established in childhood and continued into adulthood, the Victim is condemned to a life without personal responsibility, in which healthy and mutual relationships are impossible.
ii. I am shameful – my life is bad because I am bad.
As stated above, our personality and our frames of reference for relationships are formed in childhood. A child’s primary experience of their personal worth is through relationships, through what I experience viscerally and how I am treated. If a child is treated consistently with love, care, and healthy boundaries, over time that child will conclude: I feel lovely so I must be loveable. If a child is treated consistently with neglect or abuse, that child will often conclude: I feel bad because I am bad. In the latter case, the child will grow up to feel persecuted by life, engage in self-sabotage, and believe I am a Victim because it is all I deserve.
This all-pervading sense of one’s unworthiness, one’s inherent badness, is what psychotherapists call shame. This is distinguished from guilt, which is a bad feeling about a particular regretted action or inaction. A guilty person thinks, ‘I am basically OK, but I did a bad thing, which I will try to resolve by putting it right and making up with the person I have wronged.’ In TA terms, the guilty person holds a healthy life position, I’m OK, You’re OK, that is to say, a foundational general starting point for relationships in which a person thinks positively of self and others.
Shame is not a bad feeling about a particular action or inaction, like guilt, but a sense of badness about one’s very existence. A person who feels shame thinks, ‘I do bad things because I am a bad person, and this cannot be resolved.’ In TA terms, the person carrying shame holds the life position, I’m Not OK, You’re OK, that is to say, a foundational general starting point for relationships in which a person thinks of others as good and oneself as unacceptably bad.
iii. The world is too scary so I must retreat to my Rescuer for safety.
This is the slightly more subtle form of the Victim position, created when a parent is a Rescuer to the child, always treating the child as inadequate or a failure so the parent can Rescue, or treating the child as if they are a much younger developmental age than their actual capacity, resulting in the child’s fear of independence. Stymied by the parent’s need to be needed, the child concludes: The world is too scary so I must retreat into passive Victimhood and be Rescued. This conclusion is the implicit intention of the parent’s behaviour, so the parent can avoid abandonment by their own child. In adult life, this person will follow the same model and look for a Rescuer to affirm their Victim status.
adult romantic relationship with a Rescuer who will affirm his position as a Victim.
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• Typical phrases or sentiments
The typical phrases or sentiments of the passive Victim are:
‘No one knows how much I’ve suffered.’
‘It’s alright for you — look how bad it is for me.’
‘But what about me?’
‘Nothing ever goes right for me.’
‘No one ever thinks about me.’
‘Why does this always happen to me?’
‘I will never have what I want.’
‘You treat others / everyone else / a particular person better than you treat me.’
‘If it weren’t for you …’
‘I can’t help it.’
a virtue, as if not being a Victim is a vice. In a child’s mind, it is an either/or choice between
being a tender-hearted Victim or a hard-hearted Persecutor, so he chooses to remain a Victim.
On the Drama Triangle, an adult will be in the Child ego and think in the same terms.
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• Emotions
The Victim’s primary emotions are sadness at poor treatment and fear of abandonment. The Victim represses anger, as that would (s/he imagines, based on childhood experience) result in punishment or rejection. But there is anger in the Victim, which leaks out as passive aggression in phrases spoken sarcastically, such as ‘Yes, you go out and enjoy yourself, and don’t you think about me!’
• Attempted resolution, and why it doesn’t work
Unlike the Rescuer, the Victim has not given up on getting emotional needs met, but the method guarantees the continuation of the drama so that needs cannot be fulfilled.
The Victim does not take responsibility for changing their circumstance, as the original blueprint for experience is childhood, when they really were helpless and the responsibility belonged to others, usually parents. Therefore the Victim’s stance is to be passive, to do nothing to improve their lot. Instead, the Victim imagines that if someone only knew how hard their life is, then that person could become a Rescuer, a stand-in parent, and make it all go away. This functions as long as there is a Rescuer to maintain the Victim’s passive position.
However, all this strategy does is perpetuate the problem. And to maintain the Victim position, Rescue can only be temporary: Victimhood is a position, and it will not be long before it is reasserted.
If there is no Rescuer, the Victim is in emotional crisis and either ramps up the Victim position, or the Victim temporarily gets in touch with anger and becomes Persecutor to punish someone for failing to Rescue.
In short, being a Victim cannot resolve the drama: it is a helpless and passive position, perpetuating the unresolved childhood relationship in the present tense. To illustrate this, we return to the story of Tom and Evie that began this article, starting with the previously untold back-story, which includes the necessary biographical theme of a Victim: a failure of parenting to understand the child’s need for emotional security.
Evie’s parents split up when she was 3 years old. She has no memories of her mother and father being together. It was only when she was 19 that she understood, through overhearing her mother on the phone, that her parents parted ways because her father was an alcoholic. At that point, her childhood experience began cognitively to make sense, but her emotional foundation was unchanged.
Her earliest memories are from when she was 5. Her father was always due to pick her up at 5pm on Friday for the weekend. She would sit watching the clock after school until 5pm came round … then 10 past 5 … then quarter past … 20 past … half past … quarter to 6 … 6pm … Still no daddy. A 5 year old thinks in simple either/or terms, so if daddy isn’t here at 5pm, nor at 5.10pm, etc., it feels like an eternity, as if he is never coming, and that is deeply upsetting. Often it would be into the evening, as late as 9pm, before he’d turn up, well past Evie’s bedtime, so she had long been put to bed, crying herself to sleep because ‘daddy doesn’t love me – if he did, he would be here’. When he turned up at all – often he wouldn’t – he was reeking of alcohol. Mother would refuse to let him take their daughter, and Evie would lie awake hearing them argue:
“Where the frack have you been, Derek?! Look at you! You can barely stand! You’re not safe to drive. You can’t put your daughter in a car now. You’re not doing it! What sort of father are you?!”
He would barely utter a reply, but slope away looking sorry for himself, muttering that “My whole life is controlled by women.” This was father’s excuse for not taking responsibility for himself: father was a Victim, who would drink away his problems rather than dealing with them, and goad his now ex-wife into being a Persecutor.
Evie would regularly be awoken on a Friday night to hear mommy shouting at daddy like this, not understanding what it was about. All she knew was that daddy didn’t love her because he never came on time when he turned up at all, and mommy didn’t love her because even when daddy did turn up, mommy wouldn’t let her go with daddy. She’d lie in bed, alone and crying, wishing that at least mommy would come and give her a cuddle. She didn’t. Instead, she’d hear her angry mother downstairs, kicking and banging things and shouting, “Bloody Derek! Why did I marry that loser?!”
After an awful weekend of tears and loneliness, Evie would have settled by Monday evening after a good day at school. By Monday, mommy had calmed down, too, and they’d have a good week together. Then the dread of the weekend would start again after school on Friday, with Evie’s cyclical crushing disappointment of feeling rejected by both parents. By the time she was 7, her father had stopped coming at all. She never saw him again. He was never spoken of again.
Now Evie is an adult. She makes no conscious connection between these events and her weekends with Tom. She doesn’t realise that, in her isolation and loneliness, in her feelings of abandonment by father who was always late when he turned up at all, by angry mother who turned him away, she takes up the Victim position at points of stress, when she returns to helplessness in the Child ego. A key point of stress for her is weekends, when she plays out the Drama Triangle with Tom, putting him in the role of Persecutor, that is to say, a stand-in for her father. She doesn’t realise that everything she says to him is a coded re-enactment of the past. She doesn’t realise that her heightened emotions and her inability to regulate them, her body language, her tone of voice, all point to transference (a situation from the unresolved past, unconsciously superimposed on a present tense interaction), a re-enactment of childhood. At the beginning of a weekend, Tom is her father. On a Friday evening, she is 5 years old.
Neither Evie nor Tom have understood the pattern. Evie has 5.30pm in her mind as the time when Tom should be home on a Friday. She doesn’t understand why she is in a state of extreme apprehension after 5pm, and that this goes back to being a little girl. When Tom is home at 5.30pm or before, Friday evening will be good, but at some point over the weekend Evie will accuse Tom of not paying her enough attention, or of ignoring her, or she accuses him of thinking that some activity he engages in is more important to him than her. Since, on a weekend, Tom is a stand-in for her father, and she is unconsciously replaying events that are frozen in time, when he tries to give reassurance she accuses him of lying.
Returning to the story we started with, this Friday Tom has arrived home 10 minutes after 5.30pm, the fixed time Evie has in mind. Evie returns to her 5 year old sadness: ‘he doesn’t love me – if he did, he would be here’. She hears everything he says as an excuse for not taking responsibility for looking after her feelings. She is determined to prove to Tom-as-her-father how much being late hurts her. He is determined for the weekend to go well.
So when Tom sees her demeanour, hears her dismissive “Huh!”, and asks “Have you had a bad day?”, then reaches out to give her a reassuring hug, he is met with rejection: “Have you had a bad day?”, she repeats, in a mocking voice. “Don’t touch me. Don’t pretend you actually want to know … And don’t pretend you love me. You’re 10 minutes late.”
Whenever he asks what he can do to put things right, she replies, “Well, if you have to ask!”, because a father should know what his little girl needs, and should know how to put things right. Additionally, “Well, if you have to ask!” is the ideal reply to stay on the Drama Triangle, because the lack of an answer ensures that resolution is impossible.
When she accuses him of thinking work is more important than her, of thinking that being on time for the food is more important than being on time for her, she is unconsciously telling Tom her experience with her father, who never put her first. When she tells him, “You’re late! You’ve ruined everything!”, of course Tom has no understanding why 10 minutes makes such a big difference, and Evie doesn’t understand herself that she as an adult is speaking the words of a little girl.
A person on the Drama Triangle will try to push the other person into a complementary position. Evie goads Tom with emotionally provoking statements, and by blocking all his attempts to bring resolution. When this works, when his resolve to stay calm has evaporated in the heat of her emotion, and he eventually says through gritted teeth, “I haven’t ruined everything. Let’s just enjoy our bloody weekend”, she responds with “Oh! So there it is, you horrible nasty terrible man! Talking to me like that! That’s how much you care about me! You’re just like my father!” She has no understanding of how young she sounds, nor the importance of that last sentence.
As described above, a person’s position on the Drama Triangle affects every aspect of behaviour – thought, emotions, action. We have seen Evie’s Victim thoughts and emotions. The last act completes the play: she returns to the location of her pain as a child. She would hear her father arriving and being turned away by her mother as she lay in bed crying: now she runs out of the kitchen, up the stairs and throws herself on the bed, sobbing.
She has re-enacted her own parents’ Drama Triangle: her father, a Victim, would goad her mother into being Persecutor, depriving him – as he saw it – of seeing his own child, taking no responsibility for his own actions as an alcoholic. Now Evie is the Victim, goading Tom into being her exasperated Persecutor, depriving her – as she sees it – of having a fully loving and caring relationship, taking no responsibility for her own actions in outwardly recreating the drama of her own psyche.
No matter what Tom does, he is wrong. If he goes up to her on the bed, she will reject him, and tell him he doesn’t mean it. If he stays downstairs, she will tell him he didn’t even go upstairs to see her. Thus she perpetuates her position as Victim.
The only route out of this is for Evie to understand her position on the Drama Triangle by understanding her own biography, to comprehend that she is re-enacting unresolved events, and to let Tom be loving Tom, not a version of her rejecting father.
Persecutor: the angry innocent seeking justice
• The unresolved childhood events being re-enacted
The Persecutor is the active counterpart to the passive Victim. Like the Victim, the Persecutor felt unjustly punished or abandoned in childhood, but it is anger rather than sadness that is most active. The anger of the Persecutor has its origins in childhood experiences in which the child felt injustice due to circumstance, neglect or abuse, and that sense of injustice solidified into an angry position which, as with the other positions, is typically returned to at times of unmanageable stress, but in some people is an almost permanent characteristic.
As with the Victim, the word innocent is a descriptor in this heading because each position on the Triangle is established in childhood, and a young child cannot be held responsible for the influences upon them, subject to whatever they are given, with no power to change events. Innocent is a word that describes not only the origin of the position, but also the attitude of the person: the Persecutor takes no accountability for their behaviour, as the emotional-behavioural blueprint is that of childhood, when others were to blame.
In the present, innocent is not an appropriate word: the behaviour of an adult Persecutor can be immoral and sometimes illegal. More than anything, the Persecutor wants revenge, to settle the score. When any situation or person has a present-day emotional hook that returns the Persecutor back in transference to childhood, when s/he had to vigorously defend to survive, s/he now goes on the attack. The motive of the Persecutor is to turn the tables: the Persecutor’s Victim is a stand-in for the attacking parent, or sibling, or other childhood bully.
• Resulting belief about self
The Persecutor thinks everyone is out to get me, because that was their childhood experience. For the Persecutor, anger is the default emotion, attack is the best form of defence, relationships mean showing others who’s boss and, in the Persecutor’s frame of reference, all responsibility for their actions, however vicious and sadistic, belongs to the Victims they Persecute.
The Persecutor is easily slighted, easily offended, quick to anger, and never takes responsibility. In the either/or framework of the Child ego state, anyone who agrees with them is on my side, and anyone who disagrees is automatically against me. Therefore anyone who disagrees with a Persecutor is characterised in an extreme way, when in reality it is the Persecutor taking the extreme position. The person the Persecutor considers to be opposing them is branded evil, a hater, a narcissist, a bigot without empathy. This is an act of projection, also called projection and denial or projective identification: the person denies the existence of a character trait they consider unacceptable in themself, which is projected outward onto someone else – I am not the hater, you are; I am not a narcissist, you are; I am not the one without empathy, you are.
• Typical phrases or sentiments
The typical phrases or sentiments of the Persecutor are:
‘I will make you pay and you will have brought it on yourself.’
‘Of course I’m angry. What do you expect when you behave like that?’
‘It’s your fault I behave like this.’
‘Look what you made me do.’
‘Nothing ever goes right because of you.’
‘If it wasn’t for you …’
‘If you do not do what I want then I will kill myself.’
The last phrase or sentiment requires explanation. As described above, the Victim and Persecutor are passive and active responses to the same or similar treatment in childhood. The Victim can sometimes go to extremes to play out their role. This may be done privately, such as self-harm that no one knows about, as in the case of the second type of Victim, whose script is I am shameful – my life is bad because I am bad. The Persecutor may also go to extremes to play out their role, sometimes disguised as a Victim, as in: ‘If you do not do what I want then I will kill myself.’ This can only be an expression of a Persecutor’s motive. The Victim is passive, stressing their sadness, seeking a Rescuer to come and put everything right. The threat to commit suicide if I don’t get my own way is the sentiment of a Persecutor to a would-be Victim. The threat is not real: no genuinely suicidal person ever has this motive. This is an act of angry aggression and coercion, a tactic that attempts to frighten and force someone into following orders. It comes from the either/or cognitive framework of the Persecutor in the Child ego: If you do as I say, then you love me; if you do not do as I say, then you hate me and deserve to be punished.
• Emotions
The child who takes the Persecutor position has adapted in one of two ways:
i. The child represses sadness, fear and helplessness, covering it with anger, because with sadness we feel weak, but with anger we feel strong.
ii. The child withdraws in defeat at the overwhelming odds. As the child grows, they carry private anger, which is activated and expressed in adolescence or adulthood when they are no longer physically vulnerable. Once the child has grown, their motive is: it happened to me then – never again!
The anger of the Persecutor, then, may be a lifelong habit from a childhood adaptation, or an adult expression of the anger that was too dangerous to express openly as a child.
As we have seen, the child who becomes the sad Victim takes the position of helplessness, fearing that an expression of anger will result in destructive punishment or abandonment. Conversely, the child who becomes the angry Persecutor takes the position of angry revenge, fearing that an expression of sadness will result in vulnerability and defeat.
• Attempted resolution, and why it doesn’t work
The Persecutor has not given up on getting emotional needs met, but the method guarantees the continuation of the drama. The Persecutor’s stance is to seek revenge, to get even, and to do nothing to repair relationships, as it is all your fault. This can be sustained as long as there is a supply of actual or perceived Victims to satisfy the Persecutor’s need for revenge. If this is not the case, the Persecutor is in an even deeper emotional crisis and either ramps up the Persecution, or the Persecutor temporarily gets in touch with sadness and becomes Victim; or the Persecutor sees that the person being attacked is emotionally (or physically) too strong to succumb, so the Persecutor panics and plays Victim.
Being Persecutor cannot resolve the drama. The Persecutor imagines that once they have exacted revenge for injustice then all will be well. That will never be. After this bout of anger has been satiated there will be the next real or imagined injustice, then the next, then the next. Anger and revenge is no basis for healthy relationships, and being the Persecutor in need of a Victim perpetuates the unresolved childhood relationship in the present tense.
Doubling down or switching position
As we have seen, a person on any part of the Triangle will attempt to pull the other person in an interaction (husband, wife, partner, friend, boss, employee) onto a complementary part of the Triangle: the Rescuer seeks a Victim; the Victim seeks a Persecutor and/or a Rescuer; the Persecutor seeks a Victim. In each case, it is a childhood drama being re-enacted in the present tense. It is emotionally very powerful, and gains even more power by the fact that the person is unaware, seeking resolution in actions that can only perpetuate the drama.
Those on the Drama Triangle have a favoured position according to the compromise they made in their childhood relational dilemma: those who gave up on their needs being met are Rescuers; those who didn’t give up but felt hopeless and felt forced into sad passivity are Victims; and those whose primary response was a child’s anger at care withheld and unjust treatment become Persecutors.
The intended outcome of taking a position is to meet childhood needs but, as we have seen, the Triangle guarantees those needs cannot be met. At moments when this becomes clear to a Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor, or when their position is challenged, rather than moving off the Triangle, they either walk away, feign innocence, double down on their position, or switch position.
To double down:
• The Rescuer protests, ‘But who will look after the poor Victims?’ or frame the challenger as a Persecutor for being so ‘heartless’ and for ‘not caring about the Victims’.
• The Victim will stress their Victimhood in a way that tries to make the challenger look as if they lack comprehension or compassion: ‘You don’t understand because if you’d had a life like mine you’d be a sad Victim, too’, or ‘You don’t understand how much of a Victim you are making me now.’ The Victim may become theatrical and histrionic in a way that easily fools the naïve into action as Rescuers.
• The Persecutor plays a similar move to the Victim: ‘You don’t understand, because if you’d had a life like mine you’d be a Persecutor, too’, or ‘You don’t understand how much of an angry Persecutor you are making me now’, and the Persecutor may turn their anger on the person who challenges their position, as to the Persecutor the challenger is just another person who opposes them getting justice.
The alternative to walking away, feigning innocence or doubling down is to move position to another part of the Triangle. In this way, another aspect of the unresolved childhood drama is played out.
The typical switches are:
• Rescuer to Victim or Persecutor. When the suppressed needs of the Rescuer can be held down no longer, they become the helpless passive Victim looking for a Rescuer to make it all better, or they become the angry Persecutor looking for a Victim who stands in for the inadequate parent, wanting to take revenge for childhood injustice.
• Victim to Persecutor. A Victim hopes to turn someone into a Rescuer, but they may refuse to take up that position: instead the non-Rescuer asks the Victim to take responsibility for their life, to get off the Drama Triangle. The suppressed anger of the passive Victim is now unrestrained, and they become the active Persecutor, turning their previously intended Rescuer into an intended Victim.
• Persecutor to Victim. The Persecutor hopes for the intended Victim to collapse under the weight of aggression so as to feel the satisfaction of revenge for wrongs done. When that doesn’t happen, and the intended Victim doesn’t behave as a Victim, but stands up and fights back, the Persecutor may panic and switch position to Victim to recite how no one knows how hard my life is to back out of the situation. In moving from Persecutor to Victim, the antagonist hopes their sorry tale of woe will turn their intended Victim into a Rescuer to calm the situation down that has not gone as intended.
Here is an example of what it may look like in practice.
It is Debbie’s first week in her new admin job, using a computer system that is new to her. Mike steps into her office and sees her leaning forward, staring at the screen with a frown. He walks over and says, “You having trouble?”
“I just don’t get it”, she says.
If Mike is a Rescuer who has spotted someone he can cast as a helpless Victim, to maintain his emotional equilibrium he needs the interaction to go like this:
“I just don’t get it”, she says. “I don’t like to ask, but can you help me?”
“I don’t like to ask” sounds sweet to Mike, as that makes her a little more helpless, a little more of a Victim needing his help. His heart skips a little faster at the chance to Rescue because somebody needs him.
“I can see the problem right away”, he says with a smile, and shows Debbie how to take the next steps. She now has her problem solved, and he walks away happy to have done a little Rescuing. Potential drama has been averted because Debbie has played the role that helps Mike maintain his place on the Drama Triangle. In her own life she isn’t a Victim, but without knowing it she has played the role of Rescued Victim for Mike. He returns to his office feeling cheerful.
However, if Mike is a Rescuer who thinks he has spotted a helpless Victim, all is not well with him if the interaction goes as follows:
“I just don’t get it”, she says.
“I can show you, if you like”, he suggests.
“Thank you, but I’ll be fine. I’ll remember better if I can work it out for myself.”
“OK”, he says with a false smile, wounded.
If he returns to his office having moved from Rescuer to sad Victim, he will be quiet and withdrawn for the rest of the day and avoid any further contact with Debbie, just as he avoided his rejecting mother as a child. He will return to the either/or thinking and the universal thinking of the Child ego state, muttering to himself, “No one appreciates me. No one cares about what I contribute here. I’ve never belonged here. Everyone gets recognition except me.”
If he returns to his office having moved from Rescuer to angry Persecutor, he will seek opportunities to take his revenge for perceived rejection. He will say to anyone who will listen, “You know Debbie, that new admin next door? Useless. Completely useless. She can’t even use a simple programme. How the hell did she get the job if she can’t even do a simple task?”
If Mike is not on the Drama Triangle, and the interaction plays out the same way …
“I just don’t get it”, she says.
“I can show you, if you like”, he suggests.
“Thank you, but I’ll be fine. I’ll remember better if I can work it out for myself.”
… he will just say, “OK. I’ll be just next door if you need any help.” That’s it. No drama because nothing is at stake. In 2 minutes Mike has forgotten the interaction because he’s getting on with his own work.
The Drama Triangle in the therapy room
In summary, the Drama Triangle is a model for understanding unresolved emotions that have their origin in conflicted childhood relationships. The ideas, feelings and actions of childhood remain unresolved because the person has turned this into a position – that is to say, they have done what every young child does: turn their particular personal experience into a universal truth about their life. The emotional content of this universalised position rebounds when there is something in the present tense that hooks back emotionally into the early situation, which causes it to replay. This hook is likely to be completely unconscious, but can easily be spotted because of its repetitious nature. The Drama Triangle cannot be resolved, so its presence will always threaten relationships. The only way out of the Drama Triangle is to leave it behind altogether.
How can that be done?
This is where psychotherapy plays a vital role. Each client needs to be related to in their own way and according to their own biography and present needs, but in general, in my own practice, my approach includes the following components.
1. We have a theoretical model for understanding behaviour. In my experience, the Drama Triangle is a very powerful explanatory device. It is critical that the client understands the model, as it provides a framework for them to understand their own experiences and behaviours with greater clarity.
2. We understand that the origin of the Drama Triangle position is in our developmental years, in childhood. We need to be able to tell that story, to understand how we got here, to link past experience and present assumptions, expectations and emotions, so we can spot the transference, the imposition of the past on the present.
3. We understand that the conclusion we reached as a child, that led to being a Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor, was a reflection of our real experience. What any child wants and needs is emotional intimacy, which means being open and honest about needs with the expectation that those needs can be met. If a child receives this, then emotional intimacy as an adult means the ability to be truly open, without the need for social role-playing or emotional barriers, without any expectation that oneself or another is anything but their honest self. Someone on the Drama Triangle received inadequate emotional intimacy, if any at all. We acknowledge the enormous emotional impact that had on our life.
4. We understand that we have been stuck because, without emotional intimacy, emotions were not allowed to healthily complete their cycle – the fear of abandonment was not resolved with reassurance; sadness did not result in a comforting presence; anger never made the situation right. In therapy, we find ways to express and direct the emotion where it really belonged then and still belongs now. As much as possible, we complete the emotional cycle so we can live in the present, free of the Drama Triangle.
5. We understand that the position we reached as a child was a simple version of reality, reflecting the fact that as a child we think in simple terms and draw universal conclusions from our immediate experience. We now need to bring our more sophisticated adult understanding to bear on the past, and particularly on the way the past repeats in the present.
6. For anyone on the Drama Triangle, we ask reality-testing questions, such as: What did the child who was me truly want? What do I want now? In the present tense, does my position make me happy? Does it help me achieve the relationships I want? What awareness do I need to have, what changes do I need to make to achieve that without being a Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor?
7. With a Rescuer, we understand the ways that fear of abandonment has been reinforced by taking the Rescuer position. This means addressing the Rescuer’s fantasy of being the person everyone needs, conceiving of others as helpless Victims as a defence against the fear of abandonment. We work towards the point that the Rescuer position can be left behind by understanding that we are now an adult, not now a dependent and potentially deserted child. Since the Rescuer invalidates their own needs, we fill in the developmental gap by finding permission to validate personal needs without guilt or fear.
8. For the Victim and Persecutor who have taken no responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour, we acknowledge that we are not responsible for what was done to us; but we are responsible for what we do with it now. In reality, we can only act responsibly on issues we have awareness of, which is why points 1 to 6 above and the points that follow are critical.
9. With a Victim who developed the life script, I am innocent – others are to blame, we acknowledge the pain of so many let-downs, that indeed the child was in no way responsible. But we also have to update the Child ego, to acknowledge the reality of the present, that the only satisfying adult relationships are those in which everyone takes due responsibility. To be able to do that, the early unresolved emotions must be expunged – see points 3 and 4.
10. With a Victim who developed the life script, I am shameful – my life is bad because I am bad, we acknowledge the pain of so many let-downs, and centrally that the child concluded s/he was being rightly punished for being inherently bad. We pick apart all the components of shame and self-defeat that have blighted this Victim’s life. It is critical that the therapist does not play the part of Rescuer, but works with the client towards self-determination, self-reliance, self-trust and self-belief.
Mimi & Eunice by Nina Paley.
11. With a Victim who developed the life script, The world is too scary so I must retreat to my Rescuer for safety, it is again critical that the therapist is not Rescuing, but enabling, helping the client develop reparative courage, self-belief and self-reliance.
12. A Persecutor is someone who did not have an emotionally secure relationship with parents, so having the experience of a parent figure who is genuinely there for them may well be novel, healing, and very hard to accept. It requires the Persecutor to do new and difficult things: to trust, to accept care, to stop defending and be vulnerable. In this way, the therapist can take a quasi-parental role. Since it is anti-therapeutic for the therapist to allow her/himself to be the Persecutor’s next Victim, there is the absolute need for firm but caring boundaries. Often, the Persecutor has never been asked the fundamental questions a good parent would ask: What did the child who was me truly want? Where does a life of blaming and attacking others get me? Does this make me happy? Does it help me achieve the relationships I want? The reality of the Persecutor’s life is that every act of Persecution is self-sabotage, ensuring that genuine care and acceptance is impossible, so the ultimate aim is to move the Persecutor off the Drama Triangle, from angry self-sabotage to attentive self-determination.
13. Anyone on the Drama Triangle will engage in a repeated pattern of behaviour in which the unresolved drama from childhood is deliberately but unconsciously played out with another person. This is known in Transactional Analysis as a game. Game analysis can be critical in helping a person understand how they reinforce their position on the Drama Triangle, and that is the subject of the next article, to be called Games: re-enacting the unresolved past.
About Ian Pittaway
Ian is a psychotherapist and writer with a private practice in Stourbridge, West Midlands. Ian’s therapy is integrative, chiefly comprising key elements of transactional analysis, object relations, attachment research and person centred therapy. Ian has a special interest in trauma recovery and bereavement.
To contact Ian, call 07504 269 855 or click here.
© Ian Pittaway Therapy. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.
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