Drama Triangle Relationship Games You Don't Know You're Playing B-Side

Nadine: [00:00:00] You're listening to This Won't Fix You. I'm your host, Nadine Pittam, and this show is a curation of interesting models, metaphors, and images discovered or manifested through my work as an accredited psychotherapist. You can expect to hear nifty ideas, clever language, and thought provoking ways of looking at life.

Nadine: Each episode, you'll get one of two alternating perspectives. First, a conversation which introduces and discusses the theory or idea, and we call this the A side. And then the B side, which, while not therapy, is a deeper exploration. of that theory or idea from a more therapeutic standpoint. Hello, I'm Happy New Year.

Nadine: Did you celebrate Christmas? Did you have a lovely time? Did you spend time with family and feel like all the patterns of old came up? Or did you have a lovely time? [00:01:00] Christmas is the most time of the year, isn't it? You know that song, it's the most wonderful time. Glennon Doyle said it's just the most time of the year, and I think that's fair.

Nadine: So anyway, welcome to the new year, this lovely clean slate that we all have, and I appreciate this episode is a touch late, that is just because of Christmas, and I didn't think anybody would be downloading my podcast on the 27th of December, so I thought I'd stall it. I also thought, because I'm talking about the drama triangle, it might actually be.

Nadine: I don't know, more relevant for people, more interesting to people to listen to in the New Year after they've spent time with family and in all those old patterns where old dynamics surface. So Richard and I talked quite generally about the drama triangle and I'd like to pick up on, basically just to go into more detail on each of the three.

Nadine: different prongs of the triangle. And I thought what would be a good idea would be if I started with the rescuer, because [00:02:00] I imagine if anything, the majority of you are rescuers, if anything, on a regular basis. So let me introduce the, the, the idea of the drama triangle again. So there are three points on the triangle, obviously there are three points on the triangle and we can, Behave in ways and relate to people in ways that, that kind of follow these patterns so we can, that's if we're, if we're unhealthily relating to people.

Nadine: So we might be a rescuer, so we might want to try and intervene and help people and arguably take control of, of their lives. We don't like people feeling pain or suffering and so we jump right in and, and fix that. One of the other points on the triangle is the victim. So these are people who, uh, in that moment, feel like they are powerless.

Nadine: They don't have urgency over their own lives that they can't [00:03:00] bring about change and they think everybody else and everything else is to blame. And then there's the persecutor and the persecutor is Someone who gets cross angry and, well, persecutes, bullies, verbally attacks, or sometimes physically attacks other people because they are ridiculous.

Nadine: They're the ones that are causing all the problem. And the issue is, I'm speaking about these three points on the triangle as if they are, um, as if we are exclusively one or the other. And we're not. The idea is that we move between them. So if we. Are on the drama triangle at all, then we will, we will be playing all three roles at some point, I should think.

Nadine: at various points in our lives. So it takes a lot of bravery, it takes a lot of courage to genuinely sit and think about whether we are these things because we might reject this outright. Oh, I can't possibly. I'm not that. I know I'm not that.[00:04:00] 

Nadine: So essentially, the drama triangle is all about control. And I want to spend the majority of time here on this episode talking about the rescuer role because I think this is the one that is most celebrated in our society and so arguably is the most toxic because it kind of perpetuates the whole drama triangle but without doing it in an obvious way it does it in a, in a subtle way that that kind of undermines autonomy really.

Nadine: And we know that persecutors are bad and we know that victims are frustrating, but because we idealize and idolize our rescuers in society, then I think this might be your most interest. So if you have a tendency to behave in any of the following ways, then you would probably benefit from a bit of time reflecting on whether you are playing the rescuer, whether you're playing the hero in a situation.

Nadine: And so maybe, I don't know, maybe this will be a challenge for you. [00:05:00] So first of all, do you feel tired? and fed up or frustrated with people, uh, constantly asking you to help them or calling you when they're in a crisis. Maybe you feel like people are taking more from you than you are prepared to give.

Nadine: Maybe you get frustrated with people when they don't take your advice or help, or you feel like they're stuck in a cycle of something. And maybe you find, maybe you find other people's suffering really, really hard to bear. Do you think that being a good person is tied to How much or how effectively that you help people.

Nadine: And that's a huge one because our rescuers do have their worth tied inextricably to their capacity to help other people. And so if you answered yes to some or all of those questions, then it might be worth considering that you might be caught up even just a little bit in the drama, drama, triangle behavior patterns.

Nadine: So let's think back then what kind of a kid were you? So maybe you were. [00:06:00] Maybe you were a good kid. Maybe you were the one that always helped the teacher or helped your parent or a sibling, or maybe you always sorted out family issues. Maybe you were even rewarded for it or praised for it, or perhaps even just acknowledged for it.

Nadine: Maybe your capacity to, in inverted commas, help was just something that people really noticed about you and said about you. So basically, if your attention to others was noticed and not necessarily questioned. Then that would be a perfect training ground for becoming a rescuer. Because if our behavior to, if, if our tendency to rescue or to in inverted commas, help people was questioned, then that, that would be, that would be really helpful, but it rarely happens in our society.

Nadine: So as parents, if we can say to our child, you know, it's very lovely that you help that person, but it seems like it costs you too much. It seems like it costs you. And I think that's the question, isn't it? It's not, let's never ever help [00:07:00] people. That's not what this is about, but it's about where does that help come from?

Nadine: I'll come back to this a little bit later on. What is it costing you and where is the drive to help coming from? And like I said, on the air side, this is something that our media absolutely love. We have TV shows. Does that help? TV show called the Pride of Britain Awards, which is dedicated to our kind of everyday heroes, dedicated to celebrating selflessness.

Nadine: Again, we need to think about it. It's not that we shouldn't ever help other people. Absolutely not. That is not what I'm saying. Cause it sounds like I'm celebrating a kind of selfishness here. And I'm not at all. What I'm trying to articulate is that we live in a society which values selflessness, and that can often be interpreted to be selflessness without limitations and that that can be something that we.

Nadine: feel like we should be, that we don't know how to stop helping and we don't know if we did stop, we don't believe that we could still be a good person. [00:08:00] You think that if you give up being so helpful that you'll be a horrible friend or you'll be a horrible parent or just a horrible person and you won't.

Nadine: I promise you, you won't. What you will become is more bounded, I'm sure. But you'll be more aware of how you save people and how that might, yes, it might send them into a kind of despair for a while. If you withdraw help, if you withdraw that controlling help that you've been giving for years and years and years or even weeks or months, if you withdraw that, then yes, the other person might descend into despair for a while.

Nadine: And so you have to be prepared for that. And of course, there is an intense darkness lurking at the bottom of this, because if we're dealing with people who are rescuing. Other people who are without that rescuing on the verge of a kind of life death situation, then that becomes problematic, doesn't it?

Nadine: And I appreciate that we have to draw a boundary then around ourselves, and we have to know what we're capable of enduring. So, [00:09:00] if I stop helping this person in this way, and they take their own life, is that something that I'm prepared to live with? And I appreciate that is a kind of really scary concept.

Nadine: The majority of our rescuing does not kind of fall into that category, but I appreciate that that is at the edge for some of us.

Nadine: So it might eventually, if we withdraw our help, then it might send them into despair for a while, but it might also eventually give that other person the opportunity. To take control of their own lives. Which they don't need to do while you're out there saving them all the time. Because you're doing all the responsibility taking for them.

Nadine: Hello, I'm sorry, I'm interrupting myself now. Because it occurred to me just after I'd sealed up this episode that I might actually be misleading you in one or two ways. So I just wanted to add a little footnote. So [00:10:00] here's my little footnote. The drama triangle is fluid. So if we are on it at all, we're likely to be on it as all three roles at some point.

Nadine: So I'm talking here about the rescuer role in this particular episode, but I don't want to lead you to believe that you could just be a rescuer. So if you have been a rescuer at any point in your life, then you are likely to have. In that same sort of interactive sphere, being victim and or persecutor.

Nadine: So the rescuer is, yes, like I said earlier, the role our society supports and adores. But if we play the rescuer in our relationships at all, then we will almost definitely be feeling at some point like a victim. Because the person that we are rescuing Isn't going to follow our advice because they are a victim.

Nadine: So when the person that we're advising doesn't follow our advice or when they keep coming back to us again and again with the same problem and they don't seem to get better or they don't seem to be able to help themselves, that could easily make us feel like a victim because We feel a little bit frustrated, like, God, they don't listen to me.

Nadine: [00:11:00] Why don't they listen to me? And we can go, God, I'm just wasting all my time. They're not, they're taking advantage of me. They, you can already hear in my language how I'm tipping into persecutor. Do you see how it's all a kind of dance? Because as soon as we rescue somebody and they, and they're a victim, if we're rescuing them, then they're a victim, they're utterly disempowered and we are continuing that disempowerment, then we will fall into a victim role at some point when they don't take our advice.

Nadine: And when they remain stuck in that place, and so then easily we will then ping to persecutor and start being cross with them, whether we do that to their faces, so to speak, or whether that just happens privately in our own minds, we can become quite ranty about what it is that they've not done. So it's all a dance.

Nadine: And if we never set ourselves up in the first place as being able to fix or rescue anybody, then we wouldn't indeed be the victim or the persecutor at any point. Anyway, I don't know whether that adds anything extra. I hope it does. Back to what I was saying [00:12:00] before.

Nadine: So if you take yourself to therapy as a rescuer, or if you catch yourself being a rescuer, then it's entirely possible that your therapist could be the first person that you've ever met in your life who doesn't praise you for that unboundary, limitless act of selflessness. Because when we're praised for something, we do it more.

Nadine: Therapists. By contrast, they value the person regardless of what their behavior is. I value you and your struggle and I value your Everything that is making you behave in the way that you're behaving. I'm curious about that and I want to liberate you from the traps of feeling like you should be behaving in any way.

Nadine: Whatever that might be. So I suppose Away from therapy, the thing that you could look for in your own behaviors is to what extent you're disempowering the other person. To what extent are you doing things for them? Or to what extent is the [00:13:00] guiding of the process something that's coming from you? Let me give you an example.

Nadine: So if you're helping someone, for instance, get a job, have a think then. Are you the one that's asking all the questions? Are you the one that's driving even the desire in this other person for a new job? Are you finding all the job adverts or maybe even helping or actually writing the application for the person, the other person?

Nadine: What extent, to what extent are the ideas and the solutions yours? So let's say that, that someone you care about does hate their job, or maybe that someone that you love or care about is not liking being single and they want a partner, or they're feeling stuck and they're unable to move on. What happens in your head, first of all?

Nadine: How do you feel like you're wanting to respond? How do you respond? Do your thoughts go straight to how you can help? Do you think, Oh, well, I know where the best jobs are. I know how to write an application form or I [00:14:00] could engineer my friend to meet this other friend who I think would be a really good match.

Nadine: Of course, any one of these things could be genuinely helpful for a person, but it's the motivation behind. Your need or desire to do that that's interesting. It's the intensity of your, and invert commas, helping. It's the degree of instruction and advice that you're giving the person that matters. So are you starting your thoughts or sentences with things like, Oh, what you need to do is, or tell you what you need to do.

Nadine: Tell you what, what would work best. Or I know this person who's gone through this process. Why don't you do it this way? Because if you're doing that, the chances are that you're coming at it from your frame of reference rather than their frame of reference. So instead of those kinds of sentences, how much more productive and helpful might it be instead to sit with your friend and to ask them what kind of help they need?

Nadine: You're single. You don't want to be single. Tell me how I can support you. What is it that we can do here? And let them, Come forward and [00:15:00] tell you those reasons. Maybe you could sit and say, I can see why you hate your job. What is it that you want to do? And what's in the way of change that I can help you with?

Nadine: Let's have a chat about what obstacles are in your way, but invite them to tell you what the obstacles are. So you're inviting the other person to come up with the solutions. So you're not disempowering. And that important notion of control then is removed. On a more complex note, let's look at something a little bit more full on then.

Nadine: So let's say, you know, someone who's struggling with say an addiction. And you might be lecturing or judging them from the outside. And you might be doing that directly overtly, but you might also be doing that implicitly because maybe you don't like their addiction, but once you stop lending them the money, once you say, I'm not going to come out with you, if you're going to get out of your head.

Nadine: And so then if you leave, when they're showing signs that they're on their way to getting out of their head, then you're no longer [00:16:00] the one who's there to enable them. So if every time they start acting in a way that, that you've kind of drawn a boundary around and said, I don't want this. Then that's the way that's actually quite liberating for the other person.

Nadine: And I get that that's challenging because what if you're withdrawing that night? Means that they crash and burn or they have a horrible experience one way or another, which of course they might. You are not responsible. They're responsible for their own lives. You told them what you were capable of enduring before you went, what you wanted from the evening.

Nadine: You've been out with them. They've taken it to that level. That is their responsibility. But I appreciate that that is a really, really challenging place to find yourself in. So I once knew a mother of a grown up son, and she couldn't stop lending him money. She couldn't stop going down to his house, helping him tidy up, doing his laundry, until eventually he became really kind of incapable of [00:17:00] doing an awful lot of anything for himself.

Nadine: At all. She took him on holiday, uh, um, but she went somewhere which suited him and all his needs. And all of this, of course, enabled him to live in his life of victimhood. He was quite, I say quite happy. He obviously wasn't happy, but he, he was happy on one level. He was content, at least, to let his mum do all these things for him.

Nadine: So that kind of powerlessness gives you a certain amount of control. He had a lot of control over her. And so without knowing it, really. Both the mother and the son were holding tight onto their controlling. So he's controlling. His mum's life, and she's trying to control her son's lifestyle. Neither is allowing the other one to live their own life.

Nadine: They're both being co dependent. And that is to say that each is dependent on the other to keep them in that kind of entrenched behaviour pattern. Because that's the thing. The drama triangle needs the fuel of the other parties. So the persecutor needs a victim. The victim [00:18:00] needs a rescuer. And the rescuer needs a persecutor to rescue the person from, so it, each, each role on the drama triangle requires that there are other, other parties at play in there too.

Nadine: So, the mother in the situation I've just outlined, she couldn't be his saviour. If he didn't need her, so his victimhood enabled her saviour complex. And he couldn't be in the mess that he's in without her to bail him out all the time. Stepping outside of it is really, really difficult, I appreciate that.

Nadine: Which is why therapy is a good place to take this dilemma to, really. So that you can See what's hiding underneath this need for you to be in that particular role. The truth of not intervening is such a painful thing, and that's perhaps why we stay on the drama triangle, because as soon as we stop playing those games, as soon as we stop playing those roles, then what we've got is pain.

Nadine: We're faced then with the truth of [00:19:00] something. And that's brutal. That's That's where the real challenge comes. So, let me say this again in another way. If we stop intervening in someone else's life If we go back to the rescuer that this kind of section of the B side is about. So if we stop our rescuing, then either we or the other person has to face a truth that is really, really challenging to face.

Nadine: And your therapist won't collude with you. They won't collude with that narrative of, I can't stop. What kind of friend, mother, father would I be if I didn't help this person? The therapist wouldn't collude with that. The therapist would help you look to the small amount of agency that you do have. And they would look at all the things that are in the way of your withdrawing.

Nadine: All the things that are, uh, making you believe that you're the only person that this person can turn to, to, to feel better. So in therapy you'll learn your worth. And it's not kind of an intellectual learning. [00:20:00] It's a gut level thing. So I might tell people in my room, I could tell you 20 times that you're worthy without your needing to help others, but that won't necessarily impact you in any way.

Nadine: Over time, what happens is that you learn to feel that worthiness in the presence of somebody else. And when you feel like Your no is valued when you feel like your capacity to say, no, this is too much. When that is valued, that changes things, but that doesn't happen overnight. That's a long process because you need to have more than one disconfirming experience in order to rewrite a narrative that you have about yourself and your own worthiness.

Nadine: So as your truths are valued through therapy, you will become a kind of more and more able to value other people's processes and other people's perspectives too. And here's the joy of something, that as your truths are valued, [00:21:00] you will then become better and better able to value other people's truths too, and other people's processes and perspectives.

Nadine: So your, let's say your friend doesn't value a tidy house as much as you do, that doesn't make them any less worthy. Your grown up child doesn't value an intellectual job. or a career in the same way that you do. That doesn't make their perspective any less valid. Maybe they don't want to earn the kind of money that you think is important to earn.

Nadine: And your best mate might always want to rely on you to be there when they're having a drama. But none of this means that you have to get involved in their life. So if you find yourself moaning, this is the key, isn't it? So if you find yourself moaning, and this is the key, if you find yourself moaning about how someone else has been lazy or foolish or ridiculous or weak willed.

Nadine: Take a step back. This response is a little persecutory, really, and You're in that space because your control, or your need for control, is [00:22:00] obscuring your own feelings of inadequacy which are utterly unrelated to this situation. But they're playing out here because they've been transferred. So your feelings of inadequacy are transferred from the past onto this situation.

Nadine: So you are then caught up in a frenzy of proving your adequacy and you do that through making yourself needed. It's a kind of way of making yourself believe how worthy you are. It's their life. It's their choice. So pull back, look at your role in the dynamic. And if you're invested in them taking your advice, you're probably trying to control them.

Nadine: And this does not mean that you stop being a good friend. So if someone asks you for help, then you can offer it. Of course you can, but, but make it come from them. Make the, the way that you are helping come from them. Make sure it doesn't cost you more than you're prepared to give. If it feels like a compromise.

Nadine: Then you're probably giving more than, than you're comfortable with. And you're doing that for a reason of [00:23:00] compulsion that perhaps arguably you would benefit from having a closer look at. And that just about ties up all I wanted to say on this brief overview of the rescuer role on the drama triangle. I hope you found it interesting, if not even a little bit insightful.

Nadine: Thanks very much. See you soon. If you like what we do here, then,

Nadine: You can show your appreciation by doing any one of these three things. You can either share an episode that you like, particularly with a friend. You can send me a message on fan mail. The link is in the show notes, or you can buy me a coffee. Again, link is in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening.

Nadine: See you again soon. Bye.