You may be familiar with the concept of the Drama Triangle.
I had heard of it before, but never really gave it much thought. I’m learning about it in a much deeper way right now as part of my advanced training with the Spiral School of Awakening.
The Drama Triangle
The original model was developed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman in 1968 as a way of mapping the roles people can move through in interpersonal drama: Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor.
What I found interesting about Karpman’s original model is that these aren’t fixed identities. The roles are interchangeable. We can move from one to another within the same situation, sometimes very quickly.
You can start out feeling like the Victim, feeling powerless and hurt, and then move into Rescuer because you decide you need to fix the situation. And when that doesn’t work, you can suddenly find yourself in the Persecutor role.
The triangle is less about who you are and more about the role you’re playing in a particular dynamic.
The Archetypes Add Another Layer
The model I’m learning today has made me look at these roles even more differently.
In Heart Alchemy, which is a process I am learning with the Spiral School of Awakening; the Victim, Rescuer and Aggressor are treated more like archetypes.
And archetypes aren’t inherently good or bad. But they do have a light side and a shadow side.
The idea isn’t to get rid of the archetype.
It’s to understand the capacity underneath it and notice what happens when that capacity becomes unconscious or gets taken too far.
The Capacity Underneath the Shadow
Take the Victim.
The shadow side: feeling powerless, trapped, helpless or unable to change our circumstances. It can become a place where we hand over our agency and stop seeing what is actually ours to take responsibility for.
But the Victim also represents something really important.
The capacity to feel.
Vulnerability. Emotional honesty. Receptivity. The ability to acknowledge that something hurt.
In fact, emotional honesty is a necessary part of being able to experience life fully. The problem isn’t that I can feel hurt. The problem arises when feeling hurt becomes an identity. When something that happened to me quietly becomes this is who I am and there is nothing I can do about it.
Then there’s the Rescuer.
The shadow side is easy to recognize: fixing, over-helping, taking responsibility for other people, becoming indispensable, or giving so much that resentment eventually starts to build.
But underneath the Rescuer is the capacity to care.
Empathy. Generosity. Service. Attunement.
Those aren’t things we want to eliminate from ourselves.
I don’t want to become someone who stops caring because I’ve learned that rescuing people isn’t healthy. I want to be able to care without taking it too far. To help without needing to be needed. To give without abandoning myself in the process.
And then there’s the Aggressor. Which in Karpman’s model was the persecutor. But in the Heart Alchemy Process we have renamed it to the Aggressor.
Underneath the harshness of the aggressor is something else, the capacity of wanting.
Desire. Boundaries. Directness. Protection. Discernment.
Again, these are not qualities we want to get rid of.
I want to know what I want. I want to be able to say no. I want to be able to speak directly when something isn’t working. I want to be able to protect what matters to me.
The shadow of the Aggressor shows itself when wanting turns into force. When boundaries become punishment. When directness becomes reactivity. When protection becomes armour.
So the questions becomes less:
How do I stop being the Victim? How do I stop rescuing people? How do I stop being the aggressor?
And more:
What capacity is underneath this behaviour, and am I expressing that capacity consciously?
This is such a different way of looking at ourselves.
Because I’ve spent a lot of time in personal growth spaces where the goal can subtly become getting rid of the parts of ourselves that aren’t “evolved” enough.
Instead, we can see that there is something valuable inside all of these parts. And these Archetypes only becomes problematic when I lose conscious relationship with them.
Integration Instead of Elimination
The goal isn’t to graduate from these archetypes and leave them behind. But to become more capable of noticing which part is driving.
And Heart Alchemy takes this even further.
It describes the process as a spiral rather than a ladder.
You can move into the light aspect of these archetypes: the Peace-Maker, the Creator, and the Visionary and Leader, but that doesn’t mean you’ve permanently transcended the Victim, Rescuer or Aggressor.
You will meet them again. Just hopefully with more awareness.
The more of ourselves that we can hold and accept, the less of ourselves we have to reject in order to feel like we’re growing.
You can feel something without becoming powerless. You can care without taking over. You can want without using force. You can hold opposing truths without needing one of them to disappear.
And you can take responsibility for your part without making everything your responsibility.
That’s the part I’m most interested in now.
Not whether I can stay out of the Drama Triangle altogether, but whether I can recognize when I’m in it and choose a differently than before.