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Victim, persecutor or rescuer: these toxic roles can influence your daily relationships, whether at work, as a couple, with your friends or family. Known as the Karpman triangle, this psychological model allows you to analyze and understand these unconscious dynamics in order to cultivate healthier and more balanced relationships.
Have you ever wondered whether you play the role of victim, persecutor, or savior in your relationships with those close to you? The Karpman Triangle, also called the drama triangle, a concept theorized by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman in 1968, can provide you with answers. This model is often used in transactional analysis to understand conflictual or dysfunctional dynamics between individuals. In his article entitled “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis“Karpman describes three roles that people can unconsciously adopt: the persecutor, the victim, and the rescuer.
The 3 characters of the Karpman triangle
This relational dynamic can manifest itself in interactions between colleagues, family members or in a loving couple. And these roles are recognized by several characteristics.
- The persecutor often criticizes or attacks in the form of reproach. He can embody an authoritarian figure in your entourage, but also an illness or an institution (your work for example).
- The victim is a person who perceives himself as persecuted, helpless, defenseless, and waiting to be saved. He is often emotionally dependent and therefore seeks to escape his difficulties through external intervention.
- As for the rescuer, he intervenes to save the victim, even if this help was not requested or is not necessary. He often seeks to reinforce his self-esteem by creating a bond of dependence with the victim. Typically, he will make his victim understand “that she can’t accomplish anything without his help“.
If actors don’t become aware of these roles, they can remain stuck in this toxic and dysfunctional cycle, hindering healthy communication and preventing real problem solving.
Some people systematically adopt one of these roles in their relationships, developing for example the “savior syndrome” or a tendency to constantly victimize themselves. Others will go so far as to exercise constant control over those around them. This dynamic responds to deep psychological problems. The persecutor may have an instinct for domination or control. The victim lacks self-esteem and prefers to victimize herself rather than risk being perceived as a persecutor. The savior seeks to be recognized as a benefactor, which can hide motivations of manipulation and perversion.
Sometimes changing roles
Samuel Mergui, psychologist, underlines in an article in Santé Magazine that “Participants tend to stick to a familiar role that they often return to. However, once they enter this psychological game, participants rotate through all the positions, passing through each end of the triangle.“. Claire Jack, hypnotherapist, confides in the columns of Psychology Today that “Narcissists can move in and out of these roles, from victim (Dad was horrible to me, can you take care of me) to persecutor (Dad and I made up and you’re just a kid, stop exaggerating). And because narcissists get their sense of validation from outside, they’ll do anything they can to pull other people into their drama triangle. If you’re in a relationship with a narcissist, chances are you’ve been sucked in without even realizing it.“.
Feeling good in your body, feeling good in your head!
This role-shifting can have devastating effects on mental health, leading to chronic stress, depression, and even violence. To put an end to it, we must first acknowledge its existence and identify the role we play in it. Then, it is crucial to deconstruct the beliefs that push us to adopt these roles. Among them, thinking that we can make others happy or unhappy, or believing that our happiness depends on others. The third step is to identify invitations to enter the triangle and avoid them, in particular through counter-manipulation techniques. It is also useful to distance ourselves from the other participants in the triangle. Finally, changing the way we communicate, by denouncing the triangle and being more transparent about our emotions and interpretations, can help break this toxic dynamic.
“My only way out of this dramatic triangle is to become aware of its existence (in order to denounce it and get rid of it) or to leave it abruptly (after becoming aware of the situation). Psychotherapy allows me to achieve this.“, concludes Samuel Mergui.