How to Recognize and Avoid Drama

The best manager I ever had gave me this feedback in my performance review:

“The theme of occasional unnecessary drama is one that came through in your feedback that resonates... You have an amazing resilience that I’ve seen in action. Using this to provide stability to situations will help you apply the truth that things are almost never as amazing or terrible as they first appear.”

The caring response followed by specific examples prompted me to want to change and helped me become hyper-aware of any signs of drama. This is true for me at work especially during stressful times dealing with the unknown or pushing towards a deadline. It’s also true at home where my teen daughters call me on my sighing and dramatic first reactions to a TV show or something they did.

In the workplace, we do want to avoid unnecessary drama and conflict. I’ve recently been teaching corporate clients how to apply restorative justice practices in the workplace with my colleague Jim Herman. One tool that has proved invaluable both for reducing drama and increasing leadership responsibility is Karpman Drama Triangle, developed in the 60s by psychologist Stephen Karpman. I use this for my clients and for myself, both at work and home.

The Drama Triangle

In any situation that raises negative emotions, each person plays a different role that adds to the drama. The Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer roles are all disempowered versions of a non-leader who is reactive and solely responds to the situations around them.

Victim: Thinks that they are powerless and at the mercy of life circumstances or other people’s behavior. Is unwilling to take responsibility for what happens in their own life.
Signature statement: “Poor me”
Persecutor: Thinks that they must win at any cost. Controls others (or self) through blame, criticism, and oppression
Signature statement: “It’s all your fault”
Rescuer: Intervenes on behalf of others to save them from perceived harm, creating temporary, short-term relief. Fosters dependency (from others) and often leads to resentment when others don’t value your contribution.
Signature statement: “I’ll fix it right now”

Let’s see how these drama roles play out in a workplace setting.

Workplace Story

Dao and Susan are peers working on a high-pressure project. Patrice is their boss. Dao misses his deadline by 2 days due to many factors beyond his control. The next day, he’s working hard to try to make up the time when Susan explodes at Dao in a team meeting. She blames him for the project being behind and that she now has to work on the weekend to make up for the lost time. She yells at him that he is unprofessional and a poor communicator.

Dao and Susan both report to Patrice. She tries to make them both happy by giving them an extra day of vacation. It doesn’t help. Dao feels that he was attacked and there was nothing he could do about it. Susan is angry and blames Dao’s lack of professionalism.

Dao plays the victim role. He had no control of missing the deadline. And now he’s yelled at. He doesn’t feel like there’s anything he can do.
Poor me.

Susan plays the persecutor role, attacking Dao, without taking any responsibility.
It’s all your fault.

Patrice doesn’t solve the underlying problem of communication or the missed deadline. Instead, she offers a quick-fix for short-term relief with a vacation day.
A vacation day should make them both feel better.

Role-Cycling

In a typical situation, we cycle between all the roles in the drama triangle. This can happen quickly and often within a 20 minute conversation.

For example, if in the meeting, Dao yells back at Susan that she never offered to help with his deadline or if he blames the other factors beyond his control, he moves from Victim to Persecutor.

Or if Dao reports to HR that he feels harassed by Susan, he also moves from Victim to Persecutor. And Susan moves from Persecutor to Victim.

Your Pattern of Drama

Which one of the three roles — Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer— is your typically pattern of drama?

For me, I often play the Persecutor. I can have terribly high expectations for others and even higher ones for myself. When we all inevitably fail to meet those expectations, a familiar instinct is for me to jump to self-criticism and blame. Many coaches often find themselves in the Rescuer pattern. It feels good to help out and be the problem solver or the hero to fix the issue. Or, we “rescue” ourselves from a problem by distracting with a short-term fix of scrolling instagram or eating chocolate cake without diving deeper into the long term solution.

Naming the Drama and Shifting to Taking Responsibility

The beauty of the drama triangle is that it provides a framework and tools to help us recognize the roles or traps we fall into. Once we are able to start naming the negative drama roles, we can start to shift and get out of this drama triangle.

Since all three roles demonstrate being reactive and passive to what’s happening around you, the leadership shift is to take responsibility.

Victim to Creator: The Victim starts to identify their own needs and finds possibilities / brainstorms ways to get out of the problem.

Persecutor to Challenger: Instead of assigning blame, the Challenger identifies the facts of the issues at hand. They are unafraid to point out what has happened in a manner-of-fact way, allowing for everyone to have a shared understanding and move beyond the conflict.

Rescuer to Coach: Instead of fixing the problem, the Coach asks open-ended questions, holds space, and trusts that the other people will find solutions to their own problems.

Each of these three role shifts moves you out of the Drama Triangle and into The Empowerment Dynamic, coined by David Emerald. All three empowered roles asks: “How can I improve this situation? How do I take responsibility for making things better?”

Bottom-Line

Using the Karpman Drama Triangle helps us recognize the roles we play within conflict situations. We first start by naming the roles. Next, we shift to take responsibility for our actions, helping to resolve the conflict and develop our own leadership skills.