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Couples Counseling, Marriage Counseling, Parenting, Relationships, Trauma

Are You in a Drama Triangle?

  • Posted By Summer Greenlee, LPC
  • on June 15,2022

After growing up in a highly dysfunctional household, you may find yourself repeatedly engaging in the same relationship patterns later in life without knowing how you got there.

Dr. Stephen Karpman devised a simple way to understand how these kinds of relationships typically work. He calls it the “Drama Triangle.”

The Drama Triangle consists of 3 roles that each relate dysfunctionally to each other:

1. The Perpetrator:

  • Believes they have all the power and control
  • Bullies and blames to get what they want
  • is aggressive/passive-aggressive
  • Scapegoats the Victim and ropes the Rescuer into covering for them

2. The Victim:

  • Believes they have no control
  • Gives up on making their own choices
  • Feels worthless and helpless
  • Feels powerless against the Perpetrator and dependent on the Rescuer

3. The Rescuer:

  • Focuses only on others’ needs
  • Ignores their own needs
  • Tries to control how others feel
  • enables the Victim and makes excuses for the Perpetrator

Different family members will usually gravitate toward one or two of the roles, but over time the roles can start to flip around too. For example, the rescuer in the family may get so burnt out trying to help the family victim, that they start to feel victimized themselves, and begin to view the victim as a perpetrator.

Or the victim may begin to see the rescuer as a perpetrator if the rescuer gets too drained, leaving the victim feeling abandoned. Sometimes the perpetrator may also play the victim role to try to get someone else to rescue them from the consequences of their own actions.

What do all three roles have in common? Everyone on the triangle neglects to take responsibility for their own emotions. The perpetrator blames others, the victim waits to be rescued, and the rescuer focuses on saving others from their emotions instead of acknowledging their own.

Unless someone else is around to consistently model healthy relationship roles, kids born into highly dysfunctional families can grow up to assume all relationships follow this same unhealthy pattern. Then when they encounter similar relationships as an adult, they easily fall back into old familiar roles. It feels normal. When you don’t know what healthy roles look like, it’s also possible to accidentally assume someone is being a perpetrator, victim, or rescuer when they’re actually relating in a healthy way.

In a future post, I’ll talk about what healthy relationship patterns look like in comparison to the Drama Triangle. Stay tuned!

You can check out this quiz if you’re curious to see which role you fall into most: https://cdn.website-editor.net/848c74c539684751972b4649bf55aae7/files/uploaded/Drama%2520triangle%2520quiz.pdf


Uncategorized

How to have tough conversations with your kids

  • Posted By Kate Miller, LPC
  • on June 6,2022

In light of the horrific events at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, we at EDT wanted to offer some help to parents navigating the difficulty of explaining these events to their own children.

1) Give yourself some time to process your own feelings about all this. Some things you may feel:

-Anger
-Fear
-Sadness
-Anxiety
-Overwhelmed
-Gratitude
-Focused

Or any number of other feelings. This is a horrible loss but as a parent, you may catch yourself wondering what if this were my kid? Or how in the world do I explain that to my kid? Or how in the world do I explain to my kid that schools are sometimes really dangerous places while helping them to trust their world and their people?

You may be ready to tell your kid everything or join in family advocacy. What is best to do in times like these? 

Spend time journaling, walking outside, gardening or talking to a close friend or a therapist to get your feelings (somewhat) sorted through before you try to talk to your child about all this. It’s ok to process some of your emotions together but it is important to process the rawest of your emotions before you try to help your child process theirs. It’s the old oxygen mask on the airplane situation. 

2) Be honest and age appropriate with the information you share with your child or with the info they will overhear.

Be mindful of how you talk about this in front of your children or the media you consume while your children are present. Share with them the facts in developmentally appropriate ways as you are comfortable.

3) Mr. [Fred] Rogers famously said when he was a child and anytime something scary happened on the news, his mother always told him to look for the helpers.

This approach does two things for children: it assures them of safety that even when the scariest things happen there are always kind people who will be there to help. It also teaches kids that when bad things happen if they can find a way to help, they can make things better. 

4) Assure your child of their safety in all the ways that you honestly can.

Explain to them all the ways their school is safe. Also let them know that it is ok to feel worried, sad or mad or any number of big feelings and that you have lots of big feelings too. Make a list of all the people who are there to keep them safe and make a list of all the people they can talk to when their big feelings need to come out like:when their big feelings need to come out like:

1. Mom & Dad
2. School Counselor
3. Teacher
4. Coach
5. Faith leader
6. Special family member or grown up friend like a grandparent, neighbor or favorite aunt or uncle. 

5) Work together to promote social change and/or comfort for the families who lost loved ones:

Maybe you want to attend a family march or write letters to elected officials together for some kind of social reform in light of recent events. Maybe your kids want to hold a lemonade stand to donate to the funeral homes or medical centers in and near Uvalde, TX. 

6) Be gentle and practice gratitude.

In the face of injustice and horrific loss it is hard to be gentle with ourselves but it is what we and our children need most. After a day of dropping your kids off at school (a mundane task that is now much scarier for everyone), working, advocating with government or social agencies, come home and stay present.

Even though it is the end of school and the start of summer you may not want to attend every party or even finish every assignment to the A+ level you usually do. You may want to order dinner from your favorite place (because cooking and clean- up feels like too much and that’s fine) and go for a family walk after dinner or plant some new purple flowers in the backyard just because your kindergartener loves that color and that matters so much more now. Or instead of everyone going to their rooms to watch on their own devices, watch a family favorite all cuddled together on the couch.

Maybe the laundry stays on the stairs instead of going up at bedtime. Maybe you carry your big third grader to bed, which you haven’t done in ages.

Researcher and public advocate Brene Brown said that when she meets with people who have endured great loss she asks them, what do you want from the rest of us? Brown said those people say, “I need to know when you look at your children, you are grateful.” 


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