This is part 3.1 of my ongoing video essay series, “The Subtle Art Of Taking It Personally”.
Audio/video version available on YouTube:
The appeal of the drama triangle
At almost any moment, you can open a social media feed and see a political post and immediately know who they want you to hate, who they want you to protect, and who they want you to cheer for. Fast, spoon-fed moral clarity gives us the false security of knowing exactly who’s wrong, who’s right, and who’s here to balance the scales of justice. It doesn’t take long for a conflict to become a story about harm, helplessness, and heroism.
Stephen Karpman gave a name to this primal pattern of social and relational sensemaking. He called it “the “drama triangle”, because of the three sides: the victim, the villain, and the hero. Karpman actually called the villainous role the persecutor, and the heroic role the rescuer. I’ve chosen the names villain and hero instead because I think they fit better with the word “victim” — hero and villain are heavier with identity and moral charge.
I think the “drama triangle” is a good name, because “drama” is something we all innately gravitate toward. Simply hearing the three roles of villain, victim, and hero, evokes our deep and archetypal spirits. We don’t have to think hard about the drama triangle. We just “feel” it animalistically and viscerally in our bodies. It’s a primitive meta-story we effortlessly fall into. It doesn’t bother us with the mental load of situational nuance or characterological multi-dimensionality. It doesn’t ask us to challenge our sacred beliefs or drop our self-protective defenses.
Drama is the stuff of blockbuster movies and television that we invest our good time and energy into. It’s the name of a literary genre that contains morally charged conflict, the tension of which often resolves when someone in distress is saved from someone evil. Whether it’s an absurd comedy or a grave tragedy, ancient neuroarchitecture comes online when we step into the drama triangle – or when the drama triangle closes in around us.
Most news stories, which feed on our attention, consist of a drama triangle, or at least a drama dyad with a villain and a victim, if the hero has not appeared yet. Popular political analysis and cultural commentary very often follow the drama triangle structure, revving up our primal emotion engines with fear, outrage, righteousness, vindication, and tribalism. These triple espresso shots of the feels fire us up like the gun at the start of a foot race, as we hear our inner mental mob shout and get out the tikki torches.
And families and couples also create drama triangle narratives to understand their functioning and navigate life together, but at a substantial cost.
What is the drama triangle?
The drama triangle is a shortcut for moral sensemaking that we use subconsciously to decide who we should trust, help, punish, lead, sympathize with, and celebrate. These are all valid social decisions to want to make, but the drama triangle is a misleading model that comes at a heavy price.
You can recognize a drama triangle by the triad of one-dimentional characters. Someone is harmed, someone else causes harm, and someone else intervenes and rescues. The three roles require and imply one another. Villains need someone to victimize, victims need heroes to save them, and what hero doesn’t have a villain to defeat?
The drama triangle is self-reinforcing. People become trapped in their roles, as new events are interpreted through them. Future actions of a person labeled as a villain are interpreted through the lens of malevolent intent rather than vulnerability, while someone previously seen as a victim receives the benefit of the doubt, and the deeds of someone already dubbed a “hero” are seen as justified and virtuous, even when they’re ethically dubious.
Other times, individuals can rotate among the three roles, in a dynamic “dance”. Victims can retaliate and become villains, heroes accumulate power and become oppressive, and villains claim victimhood if they’re harmed later. But despite the role switching, the meta-narrative of the drama triangle stays intact.
The drama triangle originated from transactional analysis, an area of applied psychology that seeks to better understand common patterns of communication and social dynamics. These recurring interaction patterns have been called psychological “games,” because they involve players (roles like victim, villain, and hero), strategies (often unconscious) to win or benefit, and emotional payoffs which are like “points” in the game. The drama triangle is pervasive and seductive because there are psychological, need-driven incentives to occupy each role which has its particular emotional payoffs — such as sympathy and protection (for victims), power and status (for villains), and significance and control (for heroes).
So living in the drama triangle is an attempt to meet valid human needs like belonging, security, moral clarity, and even purpose, but the cost of meeting our needs by unconsciously acting out the drama triangle roles with each other are numerous. We lose freedom and flexibility to act counter to our now rigid role. We repress feelings and thoughts that don’t match our oversimplified identity. The drama triangle inherently escalates conflict and damages relationships, as well as the fabric of society through blame, shame, denial of context, absence of agency, and polarization. We lose growth opportunities to expand our understanding of others and ourselves, as we trade open-mindedness and epistemic humility for supposed moral certainty and comfort.
The drama triangle simplifies complex relational systems into cheap novel plots, and from the inside of it, we mistake our poor social map for the territory. We place dignity, agency, harmony, and truth at the altar of this soothingly simplifying meta-story, in order to believe in it.
The anxiety (and controversy) of moral complexity
Pointing out the inaccuracy of the drama triangle can be controversial and offensive, just like questioning the myth of pure evil (from part 2.5) because we all still have the tribal and stone age brain architecture that wants to strip people down into caricatures for certainty, influence, and a sense of purpose. To the extent that we model the social world around us in drama triangles, the very notion that morality isn’t so black and white can feel threatening and destabilizing. It’s a heavy lift to question the moral assumptions that we’ve relied on to get by.
I’m not trying to minimize or deny real victimhood, real evil, or real heroism, all of which exist at times. The drama triangle is not entirely disconnected from reality. All models are partially wrong, but those models which strongly persist have at least some grains of truth in them. Good and evil are real, and moral equivalence is not a guarantee in every conflict. Individuals and groups in specific times and places do sometimes have unequal proclivities toward the three drama triangle corners.
Isolated acts of violence, violation, or selfless generosity between unrelated people with no substantial history between them is not really what the drama triangle or this essay is about. Such acts could, and often do initiate and lead to a drama triangle dynamic, as reactions between parties unfold, but they don’t always. Sometimes victimization, villany, or heroism make a brief appearance and then vanish — not an ongoing game, just a single move. Even then, however, people are impacted, and that impact can involve adopting beliefs that affect how they act in future, ostensibly unrelated social situations. In other words, a single transaction with one person, especially one in which we’re harmed, can make us more prone to see future transactions with everyone through a morally defensive and distorted lens.
But generally speaking, the drama triangle refers to a common pattern of human social dysfunction. It’s an portal into our strong tendencies to exaggerate and distort the degree of moral asymmetry in almost all conflicts, for unconscious defensive reasons.
My claim isn’t that the drama triangle has no relationship to reality. It’s that our tribal nature often leads us to pigeonhole each other into these three dehumanizing categories across time, and that significantly compromises connection, success, and happiness personally and collectively. I believe that we can and should strive to correct for this primal instinct, using our more sophisticated and higher human abilities like self-awareness, systems-based reasoning, and true compassion (as opposed to tribal self-righteousness disguised as compassion). In order to have more peaceful and life-enhancing relationships on all levels, from marriages and families all the way up to international relationships, I think we need to get better as a species at honoring the moral complexity and multi-dimensionality in each person and community.
And I think seeing and understanding the drama triangle is a big step in that direction.
How the drama triangle distorts reality
The problem with the drama triangle is that, like it’s relative “the myth of pure evil”, it’s a crude model that does a poor job of describing reality most of the time (perhaps even none of the time, but that’s subject to debate).
For the rest of this video, I’m going to cover five ways that the drama triangle distorts reality.
Subjectivity
The first reason for the drama triangle’s inaccuracy is that the roles of “victim”, “villain”, and “hero” are not objective.
One tribe’s hero is another tribe’s villain, and vice versa. The warrior who slays legions of foes is both a defender-savior, and a barbarian-nemesis, depending on which which side of the battlefield one is looking from. Similarly, one tribe’s victim can be another tribe’s villain or hero. In tribal conflict, both groups see a drama triangle, but they see different people playing the three roles.
Turn on two different news networks covering the same conflict, and they’ll very often have cast the different players into opposite roles. The person or party that one network is calling the villain, the other is calling the victim, and vice versa.
Moral psychology has demonstrated that we don’t make our moral judgments based on reasoning, let alone objective reasoning. Instead, we make “intuitive” moral judgments instinctively and emotionally and then we rationalize them afterward. You can see this in any highly intelligent political commentator who has inevitable and obvious bias, as they use their intellectual brilliance to defend what is, at the end of the day, a fundamentally subjective “sacred value” that seems to emerge from a primal place in their DNA or pre-verbal childhood conditioning, not from their adult, rational mind. Jonathan Haidt called this “the emotional dog wagging it’s rational tail.”
What do we do with the fact that for every vast group of people who believe one thing is right, that there’s another vast group of people who believe that the exact opposite thing is right? Well, the most common response is probably to assume that there’s a battle of good against evil going on, the evil side obviously being the side that holds the view that we don’t like. So, basically, the north star criterion for who is evil is who doesn’t want what we want.
To me, that seems inconvenient if we’re looking for moral truth. To believe that our own moral judgments are the objectively correct ones across all situations is a kind of moral solipsism that says, “I am the center of the solar system when it comes to morality. The planets of right and wrong revolve around me. Something is morally correct when I believe in it, and when I believe in it, it is morally correct. When others see morality differently, they are, by definition incorrect, because I, after all, can clearly see what is going on here.”
When we do this, I imagine a single arrogant neuron who tells the giant 86-billion neuron brain, “you are wrong, brain, because my signal that I fired isn’t in line with the ultimate choice you made. You should have ignored the signals from the 86-billion other neurons and just listened to me and my signals.” It’s really is, if we’re thinking about it deeply and honestly, nothing short of hubris — like telling the all powerful God of the universe that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
When we look at what appears to be a solid drama triangle, we are not seeing an objective reality that everyone else is also seeing. We are seeing something, and that something is informed in some ways by an objective reality. But what we’re seeing is highly distorted by our own very limited subjectivity.
What are the odds that what is morally best for the greater good just so happens to always coincide with how I – this one little neuron in the collective brain with an infinitesimally small slice of all the experience there is to have had – happens to feel about a given conflict?
Linearity
The second way the drama triangle distorts reality is that it ignores the continuous feedback of circular causality in relationships, instead seeing them through a lens of linearity. It offers shallow explanations, by narrowing in on single, one-way transactions, and ignoring the cycle — the “dance” between the dancers — the “game” between the players.
With the drama triangle, responsibility flows only in one direction — “you harmed me” or “you are a burden on me”, or “you made me punish you”. In all instances, the subtext is, “my pain and my needs are all that matter here, and I’m only reacting justifiably to what you’ve done”.
We’re pretty good at flattening social reality when we don’t want to deal with the complexity of morally ambiguous systemic thinking. Have you ever heard someone say, “you’re the one with the problem”? Or how about “this all could have been avoided if you’d simply…”. Or how about, “why are you creating all this drama?” These are the words of someone who sees themselves as the victim — but listen to the simultaneous energy of the words — they are persecutory, shaming, and aggressive. They isolate blame into the other person, whose needs, feelings, and intentions are wiped off the table of discussion. They don’t clarify what is actually happening. Instead, they protect ego and vent unprocessed emotion. Hence the “drama” in “drama triangle”.
Or take the statements, “someone has to be the adult here” or “I wouldn’t have do this if you were more responsible”. The person here sees themselves as the rescuer, but the statements have both the victim energy and persecutor energy of someone who controls others and is simultaneously hurt by being “forced” to do so. There’s no acknowledgement of the circular cycle of co-dependency and enabling behavior typical of an overfunctioner/underfunctioner dynamic, in which pathology exists on both sides. With this lens, the linear causality flows in one single direction: you were derelict in your duties and forced me to pick up the slack. The omitted but very real direction of causality is, I feel the need to take too much control because it makes me feel safer, and that leaves you with almost no agency or responsibility. Leaving out half of the circular dynamic makes for a linearly dramatic narrative.
Finally, take statements like, “You brought this on yourself,” “this is the only way you’ll learn,” or “I warned you — now deal with the consequences.” These words come from an implicit villain, but are delivered with a framing that the harm is justified. The causality again is linear: you acted badly, therefore I’m obligated to punish you. What’s the other side of the circularity here? Likely a breakdown in communication, an escalation of resentment, or the persecutor’s own rigidity and control. The missing side of the circle here could be something like, my intolerance and harshness makes you defensive, which leads to you withdraw or become passive-aggressively negligent.
In all three of these examples, the pushed story is not that something is happening between us, but that something is being done by you to me, and I’m simply reacting to that. Therefore, you are responsible for all this trouble, not me.
In this light, drama triangle narratives are all, in a way, inherently victim narratives. The other person — whether they are the victim, the villain, or the hero — is ultimately determining my fate. I am but a mere domino in a linear domino chain, being knocked down by you.
The drama triangle ignores feedback loops — loops of retaliation causing more retaliation, protection becoming oppressive control as it engenders learned helplessness, and punishment that foments anger or misplaced sympathy. It can never represent social reality well, because social systems are circular and not linear.
Amnesia
The third distortion of the drama triangle is discounting history. It overweights the present and doesn’t do a good job of tracking how people move through different roles as circumstances, power, and vulnerability shift.
It leads us to judge myopically within short timeframes and single transactions. Drama triangle illusions are revealed the more we zoom out in time and look at what happened before and after the thin slice of transactional data that most people are focusing on.
When we look far back enough before a villain’s harmful act, we tend to see that they were previously victimized, sometimes even by the very person or group that they are now harming. And what hero or victim doesn’t have at least some villain skeletons in their closet?
A drama triangle view of the world tends to result in cyclical swings of moral overgeneralization which is not kind to anyone. Victims who retaliate disproportionately become villains, heroes who accumulate power become oppressive, and persecutors who are punished excessively become victims. So rather than having dignified consistent identities, we’re jerked around from one caricature to another due to lack of applied memory.
Within families and societies, blame, fame, and virtue have a way of shifting around superficially, overly skewed by the “recency effect” — our bias that overweights recent events and unsettled emotions. We selectively filter out earlier context and cumulative interactions for expedient and comfortable conclusions. It’s is an amnesiac story told with the false certainty of reactive moments in compressed time.
While people and groups do sometimes tend toward heroism, villainy, and victimhood over some time period, even those tendencies have the inertia of lifetimes or generations of societal and family conditioning behind them. That’s another form of circular causality that plays out collectively on the scale of centuries rather than years — over historical periods rather than individual life journeys.
Fossilized identity
The fourth way that the drama triangle distorts reality is by fossilizing our identity.
Actions that emerge under specific conditions are treated as who someone fundamentally is. A person who harms becomes a villain. A person who suffers becomes a victim. A person who intervenes becomes a hero. Absent situational context and history, we’re misrepresented as unidimensional caricatures who act without regards to what we’re experiencing moment to moment, place to place.
You might ask, “why shouldn’t our identity be tied to what we do?” Putting aside the problems associated carrying too much identity in the first place, and assuming that we should have an identity at all, I’m not saying that our behavior shouldn’t be related at all to who we’re seen as. But the more context and history are dismissed, the less our behavior really says about us.
Worse yet, fixed socially constructed identities tend to become performative, self-fulfilling prophecies. There is a saying, “be careful which stories you tell about yourself and that others tell about you, because we tend to live those stories.”
Once assigned a role by a family or group, people are interacted with through that lens, which has a powerful effect on us. Behavior that previously may have been understood with nuance and an open-mind is interpreted in a preconceived way that fits with our assigned role. Contradictory evidence is selectively filtered out to maintain the triangle. The roles then shape and overpower the “facts” and complexity, rather than the other way around. Villains are stripped of the actual goodness and compassion that they exhibit. The agency, power, and responsibility of victims goes unnoticed. When a hero shows need, fallibility, or vulnerability, few pay any attention. None of these identities are large enough to contain a real person, but once they’re assigned, they exert pressure on us to act in ways that confirm how we’re seen, so that we stay in our small little corners.
When we form identities out of incomplete sets of actions that taken out of context, it rescues us from the discomfort of moral humility and agnosticism, but it also turns us into classified, rigid, and fundamentally misunderstood moral symbols.
Comfort
Finally, we subconsciously evoke the drama triangle for our sensemaking not because it’s accurate, but because it’s emotionally comfortable to have moral certainty over ambiguously complex reality.
The fact that victimhood, villainy, and heroism lie in every last one of us, is unsettling. How do you predict who is going to hurt you if you don’t expose all the villains? How are you going to protect those who need protection, and make sure help and care go where they’re most needed, if you don’t find all the victims? And how will injustices be corrected and power go to right people if we don’t designate all the heroes? The drama triangle instantly gives us all these answers.
We might hear about a tragedy, and use the drama triangle to circumvent our grief. We make our quick judgement, or maybe we’re even told what to conclude before we’re given the information. He’s at fault. She’s innocent. He’s justified. Open and shut case — the tension drops. No grief or angst necessary, because we’ve settled it. The drama triangle faithfully and confidently told us who’s dangerous, who’s helpless, and who’s virtuous. We can now confidently stand up for what’s right. Our individual or group response is now oriented and coordinated. Order is restored, regardless of what is actually happening.
Whether we’re on the outside or the inside of a drama triangle, each corner of it offers emotional shelter. We’re safe from responsibility and agency in the victim corner. Vulnerability and powerlessness can’t touch us in the villain corner. And heroes never have to feel weak or uncertain. All three roles partially anesthetize us to the full spectrum of challenging human experiences that we’re all susceptible to. We can even “choose” our favorite role based on which feelings we’re more scared of.
And we don’t easily leave our moral comfort zone. New information that complicates the story is irritating and sounds like victim-blaming, excusing harm, or discrediting courage. Asking questions sound like agitation and disloyalty. No one wants to leave the emotional cocoon of the narrative, because it feels good, and we don’t want to let a little thing like accuracy get in the way of that. The harder the open sky of the real situation is to face, the more irresistible it is to burrow into certainty at the expense of truth.
The drama triangle soothes us with the candy flavored painkillers of simplicity and conviction. We might have a cartoonish map of the world and a broken compass, but as long we believe that they’re correct, we can walk our moral path with confidence. If we wind up far away from connection, fulfillment, and true inner peace, we’ll deal with that later, because right now, it feels good to be right.
Thank you for listening. In the next part of this series, I’ll share some thoughts on how to step outside of and ascend above the drama triangle so we can hold on to truth, which ultimately leads to less fear and far more freedom.
Next: Rising Above The Drama Triangle
In the next part of this series, I’ll share some thoughts on how to step outside of and ascend above the drama triangle so we can hold on to truth, which ultimately leads to less fear and far more freedom.