You’ve seen it before: someone you know is being a “drama queen.” You might be told that you yourself are being melodramatic, and often enough the feedback isn’t very polite: “Save the drama for your mama!” So here’s a quick introduction to the “drama triangle,” a concept from Transactional Analysis.

Here’s how it works: if you are being a so-called “drama queen,” you are playing one of three roles. You’re either the victim, the persecutor, or the rescuer. The thing is, if you are playing one of these roles, soon enough you’ll end up playing one of the other two. A victim might over-identify with his victim status and end up persecuting those who are trying to help him. You’ve seen this before. Someone has been hurt or wronged, and instead of healing and moving forward with life, she acts out in her relationships and can’t seem to stop hurting others with her unresolved anger.

If you find yourself in the role of rescuer, you’re not off the hook. In the drama triangle, rescuers aren’t the wonderful, altruistic saviors they might appear to be. They have mixed motives. Their rescuing behaviors are to some extent self-serving. In their effort to help the victim, they could start playing the persecutor role by overprotecting and hovering over the victim, or attacking the original persecutor in acts of revenge. Overprotecting a victim prevents the victim from recovering from the injury and letting go of the victim role, so if you’re the rescuer, you’re now harming the victim by getting in the way of his recovery. And teaming up with the victim to get revenge on the persecutor…well, it’s easy to see how you yourself can become the person you say you hate.

The drama triangle helps us see how one person’s dramatic behavior is actually part of a larger system. Sometimes I say it this way: “everybody is bringing the crazy!” Even if only one person has serious emotional or behavioral problems, family and friends around that person can get caught up in the crisis. It’s helpful to see it this way because it gives us a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on, and that means we can come up with more possible solutions. Let’s say you see yourself as the only sane person in your family. (And who knows? Maybe you are!) Well, if that’s true, then begin noticing how you get caught in the triangle, and experiment with your own behaviors. If you’re the rescuer, for example, you can practice stepping back from the victim and allowing him to cope with his problems as an adult. You can still be loving and nurturing with the victim, but start setting up some healthy boundaries. Even if you’re not thanked for it (and you won’t be–people in the drama triangle don’t like it when you stop playing along), you are blazing a trail away from the triangle, and others might choose to follow you.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Being Your Best Self, Couples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.