Getting Untangled When Both of Us Feel Hurt
It can feel disorienting to bring up a relational injury to someone who has hurt you, and they shift the focus of the conversation to how you’ve hurt them. This happens because, for most of us, it is difficult to hear that we have hurt someone without becoming overwhelmed by painful feelings such as shame or hopelessness and reacting with defensiveness or retaliation. In addition, sometimes the person who is hearing the concern has a lot of bottled resentment, and when their partner brings up something important, these bottled feelings spill out, and the conversation shifts from your experience to theirs.
It’s tempting to get into a tug of war about whose hurt matters more. Oftentimes, this tug of war recruits a third person to rescue the perceived victim. This three-person tangle is what Karpman (1968) called the drama triangle, with its revolving roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer. The hallmark of a drama triangle is confusing role switches, role misattributions, and sudden reversals, with the “victim” and “persecutor” both believing they are the victim while often occupying both roles simultaneously and recruiting a “rescuer” (L’Abate, 2009; Lac & Donaldson, 2022). To thicken the plot, the rescuer may begin to feel victimized while becoming persecutory (“I’m just trying to help--you’re so ungrateful”). Participants in a drama triangle usually feel powerless, frustrated, and confused.
An important caveat: relational injury is real, and repair is healing for both the injured and the injuring party. Bringing up a hurt for repair is not the same thing as becoming stuck in a drama triangle. The drama triangle is a relational process that causes the focus to shift from helpful repair (acknowledgement and ownership of action and impact; offer of remedy) to a demoralizing dead-end of proving right/wrong, innocence/guilt and organizing around these categories as identity labels rather than situational artifacts. Repairing relational injury is a beautiful thing when it happens well, but people in a relationship can become trapped in a tangle that makes repair and forward movement impossible.
Here are some tells that a relationship has entered this demoralizing territory:
· Role switches and sudden reversals (“I’m the one being hurt here”)
· Confusion: you walk away saying, “what just happened?”
· Feelings of powerlessness or helplessness
· Feeling oppressed while inadvertently oppressing (or, “offending from the victim position”; as cited in Real, 2022)
· A stance of “look at what you made me do” rather than clean ownership of actions
· Inflexible categorization of self and others into good/bad categories
· Shame of self/other (Stewart & Joines, 2012)
o I’m not ok/you’re ok (victim)
o I’m not ok/you’re not ok (sometimes victim)
o I’m ok/you’re not ok (persecutor; rescuer)
When you find yourself in this disorienting tangle, your best move is to stop playing the game rather than trying to unravel it. While it makes sense there will be a strong pull to figure out who is playing what role, I think it’s less effective to spend energy untangling this question because of the sudden switches involved in a drama triangle and the fact that oftentimes people are (or are perceived to be) playing more than one role at the same time. David Emerald (2015) talked about a paradigm shift into the empowerment triangle, where the victim becomes creator, the persecutor becomes challenger, and the rescuer becomes coach. While the “empowerment triangle” is not a formally researched model, it reflects a broader body of evidence-based approaches in therapy that emphasize agency, responsibility, and effective action. My version of the empowerment triangle reimagines the victim as creator, the rescuer as liberator, and the persecutor as space holder.
Some signs that a relationship has shifted to the empowerment triangle include:
· Freedom from shame: no one is one up or one down, better or worse, or “not okay” (instead, I’m okay: You’re okay)
· Direct asks with reciprocal freedom to respond authentically
· Mutual influence
· Flexible thinking: recognizing that people (self/other) are neither all good nor all bad
· Clean, clear interactions with defined roles
· Clean ownership of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and actions
· Flexible movement between roles through intentional, consensual turn-taking
· Playfulness and imagination
Since each person in a drama triangle becomes caught in this disorienting and demoralizing process, shifting into the role of creator is the first step toward liberation, no matter which role you happen to be playing in the moment. In creator energy, your prefrontal cortex comes back online, you are in an integrated brain state, and you can think imaginatively and playfully about which role you want to inhabit next (creator, liberator, space holder). Creator energy is attention directed inward. In this energy, you become curious about yourself: what you think, feel, and desire.
Here is how to become a creator:
1. Take a breath, a pause, or a skillful timeout
2. Ask yourself, “where do I want to get with this?”
3. Then ask yourself, “what’s in my power to do to move toward this?” and “which role do I want to inhabit next?”
From this place, you may decide you prefer to stay in creator energy or instead move your attention outward to space holder or liberator, as both of these roles are more focused outward on another person. The space holder gives the courageous gift of offering a container for the other’s inner exploration while reminding themselves that this is about the other and trusting that they will also have a turn to be held. Or you might decide to move toward the liberator role, supporting others in finding the answers that are already within them. The concepts of “attention in” and “attention out” are adapted from the work of Kasia Urbaniak (2022), whose writing and teaching emphasize the importance of consciously directing attention as a source of relational influence and authentic connection. An important caveat: the capacity to shift to creator assumes a reasonable sense of safety, equitable balance of power, and mutual access to resources. However, some relationship dynamics involve a profound imbalance in power and access to resources. In these cases, there may be a lack of actual or perceived safety to easily make this shift to creator.
The energy of the creator role is brave vulnerability and openness to share yourself more deeply. In creator role, you might:
· List things that bring you joy
· Practice self-compassion
· Ask for the focus to return to you so that you can talk about something important to you
· Ask for repair
· Offer a repair
· Make a clear, kind, direct ask
· Open up with more vulnerability about something that matters to you
· Share what’s not working for you without blame
· Take space from a relationship that is feeling challenging or not good for you
The energy of the space holder role is curiosity and generosity, with the focus not on yourself but on the other. In space holder role, you might:
· Approach the other with curiosity about their experience
· Practice active listening
· Validate the other while reminding yourself that validation is not agreement
· Remind yourself that the other’s experience is about them, and you have the capacity to stay with their experience
· Offer a repair
· Offer compassion, inwardly for self, outwardly for other
· Notice when you don’t have capacity for this role
The energy of the liberator role is outward focused and about igniting others’ power to solve their own problems. In this role, you might:
· Remind yourself that each person has an inner wise self that is capable of making good decisions for themselves
· Offer compassion, inwardly for self, outwardly for other
· Ask the other person what they want to do or create next, and what needs to happen so they can create this
· Remain curious rather than jumping in to offer solutions
· Notice when you don’t have capacity for this role
An important feature of the empowerment triangle is that no one is confined to a single role, and there aren’t sudden, confusing role switches. Instead, people move between creator, space holder, and liberator roles through intentional turn-taking. In the empowerment triangle, these shifts are conscious, collaborative, and consensual rather than reactive and sudden. Here are some ways to move intentionally and collaboratively between roles:
· If you’ve decided you want to remain in creator role for awhile, ask if the other has space to listen or is able to offer a repair.
· If you’ve decided you want to offer the gift of space holder, ask if your partner would like to be heard by you.
· If you'd like to move into liberator role, ask whether the other person would like help exploring where they want to get with their challenge and what they could do about it.
· If a role you are holding begins to feel overwhelming, advocate for a timeout or ask for the focus of attention to shift (i.e. to your experience; to the other’s experience).
These options will feel more available to you when you’ve moved out of the tangle and into the integrated brain state of the creator role, and from there to the empowerment triangle. Moving out of drama and into empowerment is a consciousness shift, and from this new paradigm, new paths will open for you.
References
Emerald, D. (2015). The power of TED (*The empowerment dynamic) (10th anniversary ed.). Polaris Publishing.
Karpman, S. (1968). Fairy tales and script drama analysis. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7(26), 39–43.
L’Abate, L. (2009). The drama triangle: An attempt to resurrect a neglected pathogenic model in family therapy theory and practice. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 37(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926180701870163
Lac, A., & Donaldson, C. D. (2022). Development and validation of the drama triangle scale: Are you a victim, rescuer, or persecutor? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(7–8), NP4057–NP4081. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520957696
Real, T. (2022). Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Rodale Books.
Stewart, I., & Joines, V. (2012). TA today: A new introduction to transactional analysis (2nd ed.). Lifespace Publishing.
Urbaniak, K. (2022). Unbound: A woman’s guide to power. TarcherPerigee.