Welcome to the Drama Triangle
It's an excellent fear-based marketing tool—until it falls apart.
Many of you have probably heard of Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle. I’ve written a bit about it here via my friend Courtney Smith, who is an incredible coach (and my co-author on the workbook for On Our Best Behavior that’s coming out this summer—it’s called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness and I can’t wait to share it with you because the core process it’s build around is so, so helpful).
I did a Substack Q&A with Courtney Smith here: “Are you Victim, Villain, or Hero?” I did a podcast episode with her here: “Understanding the Drama Triangle,” along with a follow-on called “Is Fear Driving You?” I also wrote about the Drama Triangle a bit in the context of family dynamics: “Undoing the Drama Triangle”
Today, I wanted to describe the way in which the Drama Triangle is used as a marketing tool—as a go-to story hook, and also by both brands and politicians. Like everything, it has its shadow and light, but today we’re going to mostly talk about its shadow.
As a brief reminder, the three core roles of the Drama Triangle are: Victim, Villain, and Hero.
The reality is that we all play all roles in every conflict, and it’s quite complex and nuanced (see above for Courtney’s take on it), but to keep things really simple, most of us tend to over-identify with one. I love to play the hero and “fix” things, though usually by “fixing” I’m really just trying to make myself feel better.
You can find examples of the (lighter) side of the Drama Triangle with recovery efforts after any natural disaster: The LA fires are an easy one. There are clear Victims, the fire and its impact is the Villain (or the government, or any other entity that is easy to blame), and the Heroes are all the citizens and organizations that immediately came together to offer financial support, shelter, and stuff as people looked to recover. There’s a lot of beauty in this, but as someone who was both victim and hero in this scenario, I recognized that my desire to hero and “fix” things for friends came, in part, so that I could self-soothe and feel like a better person. The reality is, there is no “fixing” things when someone loses everything. (For more: “Yes, there’s Stuff. And then there’s Home.”)
The point of the Drama Triangle is to highlight our overly simplified, reductive thinking, because this is how we’re built. We want to assume that every situation has a clear villain, a perfect victim, and a ravishing hero. We love this dynamic and we’ve been drunk on it for millennia. It’s so certain and clear and most importantly, it offers us control: When we can identify the contaminating element, the problem, than we can eradicate it and all will be well. (This is the Scapegoat Mechanism, which René Girard defines so beautifully. His work deserves more than one newsletter so I’ll come back to it, though I wrote a bit about it here: “The Scapegoat.”)
The other problem with the Drama Triangle is that it employs fear to drive us “below-the-line,” into a place where we feel victimized by the world. In fact, as soon as you recognize you’re in the Drama Triangle, looking for the Villains, the Victims, and the Heroes, you know that fear is present: It’s generally fear of loss of safety and security, connected to a fear of loss of control, or a fear of loss of approval.
As mentioned, fear—and the Drama Triangle—are readily used as marketing tactics by brands and politicians. #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain is a good example: We are the Victims. “Big Ag,” “Big Pharma,” “Mainstream Medicine,” “Government Scientists” are the Villains, as they are apparently plotting to try to kill us all. And RFK Jr. and his army of wellness influencers (who are, for the most part, highly financially incentivized via their own med-tech start-ups like Levels and Function Health) are the Heroes. They are going to resolve all of our entrenched public health issues, not by contending with environmental devastation, income inequality, food deserts, deregulation, lack of access to healthcare, and ultra processed foods (which are not a conspiracy, they’re just highly palatable and cheap), but by…making measles a thing again. At least we’ll all get our own continuous glucose monitor. (I highly recommend following
on Instagram (@drjessicaknurick) for an education on public health and nutrition. I’ve learned so much from her, I recommend going deep into her feed.)There’s a lighter side of the Drama Triangle that’s adjacent to this, which is the push for clean beauty. In this marketing scenario, the Victims are us, the Villains are companies who use ingredients that are known to be carcinogenic or harmful to human health, and the Heroes are a (now) wealth of brands that employ cleaner formulations. The upside of this movement is that almost all brands significantly tidied up their formulas in response to consumer demand and interest. Legislative progress was made. We all win.
This also underlines why the Drama Triangle works for a short-term movement, but is not a winning strategy in the long-run: At some point, if you’re delivering on your promise, you’ve resolved the issue. And then you’ll either need a new reason for being or you’ve put yourself out of business. This doesn’t just hold for brands as almost every NGO or non-profit is engaged in the Drama Triangle to some extent, too. Ultimately, there’s a Hero move to play where the Villain is stopped and the Victim gets saved. (Otherwise you’re not a very good Hero.)
But it’s easy to get drunk on the Drama Triangle as its early days are intoxicating and hit that core, human need for a scapegoat—and the cathartic rush that comes when you eradicate it and that scapegoat, i.e. Villain, gets what they deserve. Companies, influencers, politicians who get hooked on the Drama Triangle can’t step out of it: They get ever more entrenched, looking for more problems/illnesses/conspiracies to diagnose, more villains, more victims, rinse and repeat. There’s evidence of this all over our current political landscape. For example, one of the most fascinating things about Trump is that even though he is the government, he continues to define it as outside of himself—and is currently attacked the bureaucracy as though it’s the Villain in his Drama Triangle. There are admittedly a lot of Villains in Trump World, like immigrants. But, as above, a failure to actually be the “Hero” and resolve the Drama Triangle starts to get old fast—it can be exhilarating for people at the beginning and then it wears thin in the absence of resolution. The stakes get very high.
And we all know that the world is not so simple or binary, that our problems are difficult and entrenched and complex and not a function of some evil people around conference room tables plotting to poison us all. We don’t live in a Hollywood blockbuster.
The most important thing to remember is that the Drama Triangle survives and thrives on fear: It collapses in its absence. When we are scared, we look to offload our fright, which is what makes the idea of a clear Villain and a Hero to is going to save us so compelling. Getting out of the Drama Triangle and “above the line,” where we feel like creators in our own lives, can only really happen when we realize what’s happening to us. And when we become conscious about what we’re perpetuating by keeping the Drama Triangle alive in our own lives—and how we’re feeding it in the broader culture.
Here’s Richard Rohr in The Wisdom Pattern: “If the small ego is not transformed, one other pattern is inevitable. The fear is too destabilizing and unsettling for the small self to bear alone, so it must either be denied or projected elsewhere. The process of both denying and projecting our fears and hatreds is called ‘scapegoating,’ from the Jewish ritual of putting our faults on a goat that was whipped out into the desert (Leviticus 16). The object of our wrath, like the poor ‘escaping goat,’ is completely arbitrary and artificial. It has nothing to do with truth or reason. It has to do with fear. With a scapegoat, a plausible and much-needed projection screen will always be found for our little drama.”
We know that scapegoating might provide catharsis in the moment, but it resolves nothing long-term. The Drama Triangle is no different. But once you see it, you can begin to step out of it.
See you next week friends.
This was an excellent application of a framework I also really like. Thank you! I often wonder, though, how to make the tactics and frameworks clearer to people that are “buying” the message. Yes it’s a great way to sell something, but if the goal is to see the world more clearly, how do we go about doing that? Is it only by removing fear?
Thanks for writing this Elise. I’m a coach and coaching supervisor, and find the drama triangle incredibly useful to help my clients recognise their relationship dynamics. Equally valuable is a positively oriented version, The Winner’s Triangle, which I believe was first developed by Acey Choy (DOI: 10.1177/036215379002000105).
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can apply the roles of Assertive, Caring and Vulnerable Choy identities… although I personally prefer the language of Proactive, Vulnerable and Resourceful to match the initials of the drama triangle.
Thank you for your writing and podcast, I read and listen with great interest and appreciation for your perspectives.