The Drama Triangle



The drama triangle is not a new concept to me. It's one I'm familiar with from my training days and in my professional life. As professionals we are taught how easy it is to enter into the rescuer role, and to see the people we are working with (who are often vulnerable in one way or another) as victims. The difficulty with this is that we are then instantly doing things to or for them, rather than with them, and are not empowering them to do things for themselves, which inhibits their ability to make lasting changes in their situations.

In a recent training I attended (more on that in another post), the drama triangle was applied to adoption, and specifically to supporting a child who exhibits challenging behaviour.  I won't go into the detail of the theory, as there's plenty of easily accessible information out there about it, but in short, it represents a model of unhelpful communication within relationships or situations, where people fall, or are drawn, into one of three roles.
  • The victim - who feels powerless, hopeless and trapped
  • The persecutor - who is dominating, angry or resentful
  • The rescuer - who derives power from trying to fix the situation
The point in being aware of these roles is that being in the triangle is more likely to prolong the difficulties than help to resolve them, and it's only by moving out of these roles that people can move on.

The reason that this is of particular interest to me at the moment, is that we've noticed definite patterns in our responses to the aggressive behaviour sometimes displayed by our oldest child, Little, where we're all tending to fall into the same roles over and over again, so we've been giving some thought to how we can break this.

My partner and I are very aware that different behaviour from each of our children presses different buttons for us. Aggressive behaviour can fairly quickly send my partner into victim mode, with her viewing Little as the persecutor. I then step in as the rescuer, trying to diffuse the situation. The roles can change pretty quickly - if my partner reacts with anger to the aggression, she can become the persecutor with Little taking the victim role; or sometimes I move from rescuer to victim, feeling that I'm not being valued or supported in trying to help. All of these communications are unhelpful, as they do not leave any of us in a place to actually work on the presenting issue.

The triangle is an unfullfulling place to be, and playing out the roles above often leaves all of us feeling frustrated, undervalued and de-skilled. So our current focus is on trying to stay out of the triangle, which takes a lot of deep breathing, stepping away from situations and trying to be kind to ourselves. It also requires an awareness of the roles which we naturally find ourselves drawn to. This is not the first time that I've found myself frequently being pulled into rescuer mode, and it's not the first time that it's caused me problems either! I'm trying to think of it like the Bermuda triganle - stay it in too long and we'll get sucked in completely! It's not always easy, but like anything, the more we practise, the better our chances of success.

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