You are two hours into the drive home from the family holiday and all you can think about is the conversation you had with your mother. Not the conversation you wanted to have. It was the one you have every time you see her, the one that starts somewhere harmless and ends with you saying the thing you had promised yourself you would not say this year.
What was happening at that table is likely called the Drama Triangle: three roles, victim, persecutor and rescuer, that people drop into with each other when a relationship keeps running the same loop. You were in one of them. So was she.
You already know how the drive home feels. Disappointed with yourself, mostly, and frustrated, and underneath it a quiet insistence that none of this is your fault and that it always happens to you. And you were not entirely the age you actually are while it was going on.
That last part is the strange one, because you have had considerably harder conversations this year with people who report to you, and you have made decisions that other people are still living with. At that table none of it was available to you.
Victim, persecutor, rescuer
The Drama Triangle comes out of transactional analysis. It was invented in the late 1960s and built for exactly this: helping people step out of the dynamics between them and the people around them, once those dynamics had stopped serving anyone. The reason I use it rather than something more sophisticated is that once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It takes about a minute to learn and then it runs quietly in the background of every relationship you have.
The victim is the one who believes the world is happening to her. Something is being done to her, somebody is attacking her, it always lands on her, and none of the choices in front of her are ones she made.
The rescuer is the one who jumps in to help somebody who never asked to be helped.
The persecutor is the one doing the blaming. You always get this wrong. You never listen. You should have known better by now.
The whole point of any of this is that being in any role, and in particular, being in the victim role, gives away your agency. It gives away your ability to take control of your own life and move it in the direction you actually want it to go.
The rescuer is the uncomfortable one
Almost nobody volunteers for rescuer, because rescuing does not feel like a role at all. It feels like being a good person.
A lot of people think that offering help is a good thing. Jumping in to help somebody is honourable. We think it is going to help them, and a lot of the time what it actually does is take their agency away, because the arrangement only holds for as long as they are the one who cannot manage alone. It takes their power in an attempt to hand you power as the rescuer.
There is a test for it and it is a single question. Did they ask you for help? If they did not ask, then you are almost invariably rescuing, whatever your intent was on the way in.
That question gets more uncomfortable in proportion to how much of your life is organised around being the capable one.
Ask it about the person you have been helping the longest.
How to hear which role you are in
You can catch the role you are in without any introspection.
Listen to how you describe her afterwards. It sounds like this.
She always says that.
My mum always does that.
My mum always criticises me.
My mum always makes a comment about my child.
When every sentence you say about a relationship starts with her, or him, or they, and you're making a complaint, you are in the victim role regardless of your tone of voice. The same thing happens on a wider scale, when the complaint becomes that the world is against you.
I interrupt clients when those sentences turn up, and not because I am defending whoever they are describing, who has quite often behaved badly. I interrupt because of what the sentence hands over: agency. Put the blame outside the room and you put your own ability to act outside it too.
The swap
The swap is smaller and harder than it sounds. Harder, as you lose the ability to point the finger at somebody else, and you sit with the very temporary discomfort of, okay, this is mine. That is the entire move. It is uncomfortable for about as long as it takes to say, and from there you can find a way through you could not see before, because for the first time in the story there is something in front of you that you are actually allowed to change. The same swap works with a colleague who keeps missing deadlines, or a partner who never quite follows through.
Nobody does this cleanly the first time. It does not arrive as a decision, it arrives as a delay, half a second of hearing your own sentence before it has finished, in your own actual voice at your own actual age, and the delay is where the choice sits.
You can skip the reading and find out which corner is yours: take the short questions tool.
What it looks like when it lands
A client of mine, capable and decisive by any measure anybody would apply to her at work, found she had lost hold of her own authority as a parent during a long stay at her parents' house. Her mother overruled her in front of her daughter, repeatedly. She arrived at the session exhausted and counting the days until she could leave.
What she left with was agency and a sentence. "I'm going to ask you to do something: I need you to back me up and not overrule me." Said to her mother, out loud, during that same stay.
Nothing about her mother changed. What changed is that by the end of the session she had stopped describing the days left as something to survive and had started describing the whole stay as something she had needed, and had committed to three specific things before she got off the call.
What actually changes
You are not going to blow anything up. You are not going to stop seeing your mother, there is no version of this where you make a scene at the table. You also already know you cannot keep doing this for another ten years.
What changes is smaller than that and it compounds. When people realise they do not have to take the victim role, they start having the conversations they have been meaning to have for years. Then they start taking back the micro moments, the ones nobody else in the room notices, and each one is a piece of evidence they hand to themselves that they are running their own life. That is the part that compounds, and it does not require anybody else to agree.
That is what the Drama Triangle is for. Spotting it in the moment, at a real table, with a real person in front of you, in time to do something other than what you have done to date.
The questions take a few minutes, and name the role you reach for first, and where you reach for it most often. Want the longer version of your result? I will send it. And if what it turns up runs deeper than a short set of questions can reach, there is a free 45-minute call in the diary most weeks.
The drama triangle needs all three corners. One person stepping out of hers collapses the shape, which is why this rarely stays about only you. You have to notice the role first. Only then can you choose to leave it. So, are you willing to be the one who notices first, and the one who steps out? I think you can be.