Name the corner you are standing in

Lay out a recent conflict move by move and mark which of your moves were Persecutor, Rescuer or Victim.

Por qué funciona

Karpman separated action roles from identity: Persecutor, Rescuer and Victim are positions a person moves into during a sequence, and anyone can occupy each of them. A move made automatically cannot be declined; a move that has a name can be caught. In his 2007 lecture Karpman names knowledge of the roles and switches as one place to start getting out, because with that knowledge a person who senses an invitation to a new drama can say no to it.

Cómo hacerlo

1. Pick a recent conflict that left you drained or unsure how it got so heated.
2. Write down, in a few plain lines, who said or did what, in order.
3. Mark each of your own moves: P for blaming, correcting or punishing; R for fixing, advising or taking over unasked; V for feeling helpless or waiting to be saved.
4. Notice which corner you usually start from, and which one you tend to end in.

Evidencia

The three action roles and the rule that they are interchangeable come from Karpman's 1968 article; his 2007 lecture names knowledge of the roles and switches as one place to start getting out. The roles themselves have been measured: a questionnaire developed across three adult samples (326, 342 and 301 people) found three distinct factors matching Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor, and the Victim scale was most strongly linked with undesirable outcomes such as higher stress and negative emotion. Transactional analysis as a whole has a research base of its own, reviewed by Vos and van Rijn. (anecdotal)

The scale study is correlational: it shows the roles can be measured, not that naming them helps. The transactional analysis review covers the therapy in general, not this practice, so it is evidence by analogy only. The roles describe moves in a conflict, not people who are genuinely being harmed.

Fuentes

• Karpman, S. B. (1968). Fairy tales and script drama analysis. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7(26), 39-43.
• Karpman, S. B. (2007). The New Drama Triangles. USATAA/ITAA conference lecture, August 11, 2007 (worksheet published on the author's site).
• 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.
• Vos, J., & van Rijn, B. (2021). The evidence-based conceptual model of transactional analysis: A focused review of the research literature. Transactional Analysis Journal, 51(2), 160-201.

Error común

Naming the other person's corner out loud ("you are playing the Victim again"). Labelling someone else can land as a Persecutor move and starts a new round; the practice is to name your own corner first.