TIL: most stuck conflicts at work are people unconsciously rotating through three roles, and there’s a name for it. Karpman’s drama triangle: Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer.
The Victim feels powerless (“this always lands on me”). The Persecutor blames (“who approved this?”). The Rescuer swoops in to fix it for everyone, which feels generous but quietly keeps the Victim a victim. The trap is that people swap corners mid-conversation: the engineer venting as a Victim turns Persecutor toward the on-call who shipped the change, while you cast yourself as Rescuer by promising to handle it. Round and round, and nothing structural moves.
Naming it is half the fix. Once you can see the triangle, you can feel which corner you’re standing in, and that’s usually enough to step off.
The other half is realizing each corner is a protector doing a job. Internal Family Systems sorts protectors into two kinds: managers, who control pain before it lands (the Rescuer, fixing so nothing can break), and firefighters, who react once it has (the Persecutor, lashing out to discharge the threat). Both guard the same tender spot, usually a fear of being blamed or found wanting. You don’t argue a protector out of its corner; you unblend from it and ask what it’s protecting.
I watch for it in incident channels now. Moving the room from “who broke this” to “what do we want true in an hour” is most of the job.
