PART 2 — Escape The Drama Triangle: How To Recognise Hardwired Patterns

The roles we play in the drama triangle aren’t random — they’re survival strategies shaped by childhood experiences.

TRANSCRIPT:

The drama triangle is a psychological model that explains how people unconsciously fall into dysfunctional conflict patterns, playing one of three roles, victim, persecutor, or rescuer. In corporate settings, this dynamic plays out all the time. A manager blames an employee for poor performance, making the manager the persecutor and the employee the victim. A colleague might jump in to help by mediating, stepping into the rescuer role. Before long, the roles shift. The rescuer becomes frustrated and turns into the persecutor. The original persecutor now feels unfairly blamed and becomes the victim, and the cycle continues. This constant rotation of roles is what keeps conflicts alive, preventing real solutions.

But what determines where you first enter this cycle? Why do some people always default to the victim role, while others immediately take on the persecutor or rescuer?

Your entry point into the drama triangle isn’t random. It’s a deeply ingrained pattern shaped by your early childhood experiences. Your role in the drama triangle is a survival mechanism that you learned as a child. At some point in your early life, you unconsciously decided that this was the safest way to navigate relationships, get your needs met or avoid pain. This role became your default way of handling stress, conflict and emotional challenges. If your default role is the victim, it likely developed because you experienced situations in which you felt powerless, unheard or incapable. Maybe you had overprotective parents who never let you struggle, so you never learned how to solve problems on your own. Or perhaps you grew up in an environment where no matter what you did it never seemed to be enough, so you learned to give up and expect others to step in.

Some people develop a victim entry point because they grew up in chaotic or unstable households where they genuinely were powerless and the only way to cope was to accept helplessness and hope someone would rescue them. Over time this mindset becomes ingrained and as adults victims struggle to take control of their lives always feeling like life is happening to them rather than realising they have choices.

If your default role is the persecutor, your childhood likely involved experiences where you felt out of control, afraid or vulnerable. But instead of shutting down, you learned that the best way to protect yourself was to go on the offensive. Maybe you grew up with critical, demanding parents who modelled harshness and control as the only way to get things done. Perhaps you were constantly told to toughen up and not show weakness, so you buried any softer emotions and replaced them with anger or blame.

Some persecutors were originally victims who felt powerless for so long that they eventually decided, I will never let myself feel weak again. This role often develops in children who were bullied or ignored, people who learned that the only way to be seen or respected was to dominate, criticise, or take control. As adults, persecutors find themselves in constant conflict, unable to admit fault or show vulnerability because doing so would make them feel exposed in the way they feared most as children.

If your default role is the rescuer, it’s often because you grew up in an environment where your worth was tied to taking care of others. Maybe you had emotionally unstable parents and you learned that if you soothed their emotions, things would be okay. Perhaps you had a sibling or family member who needed help and you took on the role of the responsible one because no one else did.

Many rescuers grow up in households where their own needs were neglected but they found that if they were useful, if they fixed things, they could get approval, even if it was conditional. The problem is this behaviour continues into adulthood, leading rescuers to take on responsibilities that aren’t theirs, insert themselves into conflicts that don’t belong to them, and struggle with boundaries. They believe they are helping, but in reality, they are keeping others dependent on them, reinforcing the very dysfunction they think they are solving.

No matter which role you enter from, the important thing to understand is that this is not just who you are, it’s a learned pattern, rooted in survival. You didn’t choose this role consciously, it developed as a way to protect yourself, to get love, or to maintain stability in your early relationships, but because it happens unconsciously, most people don’t realise they are trapped in it.

And once you step into the drama triangle, you will inevitably rotate through all three roles over time, creating a cycle of conflict that never truly resolves. So the real question is, what role do you default to and where did it come from? Because once you understand how you got there, you can start to see the patterns playing out in your life. At work, in friendships, in family dynamics. And when you see the pattern clearly, you finally have the power to break it.