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 and put-upon (“this always lands on me”). The Persecutor blames and criticizes (“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 everyone shifts roles mid-conversation. The engineer venting as a Victim becomes a Persecutor of the on-call who pushed the change, while you cast yourself as Rescuer by promising to handle it yourself. 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 the counterpart, David Emerald’s TED, “The Empowerment Dynamic”: each corner has a healthier twin. The Victim becomes a Creator (what do I actually want here?). The Persecutor becomes a Challenger (what’s the real constraint, stated as a problem to solve?). The Rescuer becomes a Coach (asking questions instead of taking the work). It maps almost perfectly onto staying in your Adult state instead of sliding into Parent or Child.
I started watching for it in incident channels. The shift from “who broke this” (Persecutor) to “what do we want true in an hour” (Challenger to Creator) is the same sentence I keep relearning is the senior move.
Additional Resources#
- Ego states: the Transactional Analysis backdrop
- The Karpman Drama Triangle: Stephen Karpman’s own overview
- David Emerald, The Power of TED: the empowerment counterpart to the triangle
