The Drama Triangle, explained. Part of the Don’t Do That series.

Transactional analysis, the work of Eric Berne, describes how we interact with other people as a series of transactions. You pass someone in the street and say hi. They say hi back, or they don’t. Either way you take something from that exchange, and so do they. Berne called it the games people play. I’m okay, you’re okay. I’m not okay, you’re okay. That’s okay, that’s not okay. A whole quiet economy of approval running underneath ordinary contact.

Here’s what I’ve done with it in my own work. I’ve taken that transaction and turned it inward. Because long before you’re negotiating okay-ness with the person in front of you, you’re running the same transaction with yourself. You have your own Drama Triangle internalised, playing out in your internal dialogue, long before it ever reaches another person.

This isn’t just an exchange of pleasantries or ideas. It’s an exchange of nervous system. Paul Gilbert’s model of the old brain, the new brain, and the tricky brain in between describes a mind that is constantly trying to get itself to okay. So the transaction isn’t only with the world. It’s with your own emotions, thoughts, and behaviour, all trying to reach the same place. Fill up to feel up.

So why do you rescue?

If you live primarily in the rescuer corner of the triangle, here is the question worth sitting with. Why are you rescuing everyone except yourself?

It comes down to conditions of worth. Somewhere along the way, you learned that you were only as worthy as the validation you could earn by being needed. Being who you thought people wanted you to be became more important than simply being who you are. It stopped being about who you are and became about what you do, based on what you believe people think of you.

You think people see you as reliable, capable, the one who fixes things. So you rescue, because it means you’re in control. Because it means people will want you. Because it gives you something to do and somewhere to put yourself. Some of you rescue because you weren’t rescued yourself, and some part of you is still trying to give the thing you never received.

I’ll be honest with you, because I ask my clients to be honest with me. I’m a therapist because when I was younger, I really wish I’d had one. It was almost understood that I wouldn’t. So now, when I help, listen, and support, I feel connected to people in the exact place I once went without. It comes back to you, every time.

You rescue because you think it’s your job. It makes you feel good, and it makes you feel good because it satisfies a rule you didn’t choose, and have never questioned. So ask yourself plainly, what is the cost benefit of me rescuing people? There is an unhealthy cost benefit you’ve been buying into for years without noticing. And there is very likely another one you’ve never even considered.

Don’t rescue that

Who told you that rescuing was your job? Think about how many times you’ve stepped in to help and the other person walked away disempowered, or quietly unhappy with how you did it, while you told yourself, I was just trying to help. That sentence is doing a lot of work. Because underneath it, it was never really about them. It was about you, and what rescuing them was doing for your own nervous system.

This is the same pattern that runs through Don’t Eat That, and it’s the same pattern the wider Don’t Do That series keeps returning to. The question is never really about the food, or the drink, or the relationship, or the rescuing. It’s about the belief underneath it, and the self you’re trying to keep okay.