The Drama Triangle Reconfigured: Adding gender and stirring

Welcome to the second in a series of practical tools for navigating everyday work challenges. Concepts and frameworks – or mental models - are really useful for providing the building blocks for us to reason through a conundrum or concern.  They enable us to go beyond our immediate responses to recognise patterns, develop new perspectives and challenge our own assumptions and actions.  This blog looks at the Drama Triangle developed by Stephen Karpman. But it adds a twist. It reflects the reality for many women who find themselves pushed into the Rescuer role because the systems - and rewards - of work productivity in universities do not support all the necessary labour of service - to students and to colleagues - that enable universities to thrive.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't show up in workload models or wellbeing surveys.  It's the exhaustion of being the person who holds things together — quietly, reliably, often invisibly — while somehow still feeling like you're falling behind.

If you've found yourself asking:

• Why am I always the one carrying this?

• Why does this feel so much harder for me than it seems to for others?

• Why am I depleted when, by most measures, I'm succeeding?

… you're not alone. And you're not imagining it.

One framework that can help make sense of this experience is the Drama Triangle, developed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. Though originally conceived as a model of interpersonal conflict, it maps with uncomfortable precision onto the dynamics of academic life — supervision relationships, committee structures, departmental politics, the unspoken economies of who does what and why.

The triangle describes three roles that people unconsciously move between:

• Victim — the one who feels stuck, overlooked, or overwhelmed

• Persecutor — the one who criticises, controls, or sets hard limits

• Rescuer — the one who steps in, smooths over, and holds it all together

For many women in universities, one corner of this triangle will feel immediately, almost uncomfortably, familiar.

The Rescuer: When Competence Becomes Currency

In academic settings, rescuing rarely looks dramatic. It looks like professionalism.

It looks like taking on the PhD student no one else has bandwidth for.  Quietly improving a colleague's grant application at midnight.  Volunteering for the pastoral role because the alternative — someone less careful doing it — feels worse.  Steering a meeting away from conflict so the work can continue.

These are not trivial things. They reflect genuine care, intellectual investment, and a deep commitment to institutional life.  But they also reflect something else: this is what happens when competence becomes the primary way of establishing value in a system that doesn't consistently reward intellectual authority on its own terms.

When recognition is inconsistent — when promotions feel opaque, when visibility is unevenly distributed, when the criteria seem to shift — contribution becomes a key currency of value.   So you contribute more. You demonstrate your worth through your usefulness. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you become indispensable and maybe even invisible at the same time.

The cumulative cost is significant:

• Promotion-focused work is displaced by service work

• Research time dissolves into emotional labour

• Your reputation becomes "reliable" rather than "visionary"

• A quiet resentment builds that you don't quite feel entitled to name

Rescuing feels generous. And in isolated instances, it often is. But if this is a chronic pattern, it can become over-functioning — and over-functioning, however nobly motivated, quietly sustains the very inequities that make it feel necessary.

The Victim: The Hidden Experience of High Achievers

Many senior women resist identifying with the Victim role. It sounds passive. Diminished. Not reflective of who they know themselves to be.

But in Karpman's model, the Victim position isn't about incompetence or fragility. It's about the internal experience of feeling trapped — of carrying more than your share and finding no obvious way to set it down.

It sounds like:

• "If I don't step in, this will collapse."

• "I work twice as hard and still feel like I'm behind."

• "No one seems to notice how much I'm absorbing."

This isn't helplessness. It's depletion and often found in someone who is outwardly functioning at a very high level. What's particularly disorienting about this position is the paradox at its centre: you can fix almost anything, but you cannot seem to change the conditions that require you to keep fixing. You feel simultaneously capable and powerless.

From here, it's easy to oscillate between over-giving and a private, low-level resentment.  The danger is that this resentment can occasionally surface as sharpness, and you find yourself briefly inhabiting the third corner of the triangle.

The Persecutor: The Edge You've Learned to Suppress

In universities, as in many institutions, directness tends to be read differently depending on who delivers it.

Generally - when male colleagues hold a firm line, it often reads as confidence. When women do the same, it can register as difficult, cold, or unreasonable. This is well-documented, deeply frustrating, and — importantly — something many women have already internalised long before they reach senior positions.

This is why so many capable women find it hard to inhabit a mode of doing that might be called healthy challenge. The social penalties are real enough, and often enough, that the instinct is to soften, accommodate, or absorb rather than hold ground.

The thing is healthy authority is not persecution.

Saying "I'm not available for that," or “That falls within the programme lead's remit, not mine," or "I'm happy to offer feedback, but I won't be taking this on" is not aggression. It's leadership. It's the kind of clarity that, in a well-functioning institution, would be unremarkable.

When women deny themselves this register, the triangle tightens. They stay in Rescuer longer than is sustainable. They feel taken for granted. Eventually they either burn out, or they snap. And, sadly but inevitably – and I speak from experience here - the snap is used as evidence of exactly the accusations of volatility they were trying to avoid.

How the Triangle Moves

Consider this scenario:

A senior colleague delivers a pointed, dismissive critique of an assistant lecturer's curriculum proposal in an open meeting.

The assistant lecturer moves into Victim — over-explaining, defending, visibly rattled. You step in to soften the exchange, redirect the conversation, and later offer to help revise the proposal.

You leave the meeting with more work. The senior colleague is unchanged. The assistant lecturer is grateful but no more equipped to handle it next time. And you are "wonderful."

The triangle has rotated. Nothing structural has shifted.

Or:

A student is chronically disorganised. You extend deadlines. You offer additional meetings. You absorb the anxiety that should, appropriately, remain with them. Eventually, worn down, you tighten your tone and find yourself positioned as harsh by the very person whose growth you've been carrying.

Without awareness of the pattern, these dynamics repeat across months and years. The roles feel inevitable rather than chosen.

From Drama to Authority

The counterpart to the Drama Triangle is sometimes called the Empowerment Triangle.  This represents a shift from reactive role-playing to conscious, grounded engagement.

Rather than Rescuer think of being a Coach.   Rather than Victim think of being a  Creator.  Rather than Persecutor think of being a Challenger.

What does this look like in the lived reality of academic work?

From Rescuer to Coach

Coaching means investing in another’s' capacity rather than compensating for its absence. It asks:

"What do you think the next step is?" rather than providing the answer. 

Or:

"I'm glad to advise, but I won't be taking this on.” rather than silently doing the work for others.

It means being willing to name, clearly and without apology, that your contribution will be strategic rather than sacrificial and knowing that this is not a failure of generosity but an expression of professional integrity.

From Victim to Creator

The shift from Victim to Creator isn't about denying the real structural constraints you're working within. It's about reclaiming agency within them, usually incrementally, ad certainly deliberately.

Rather than "Why does this always fall to me?" ask "What am I currently saying yes to that. I need to reconsider?"

Sometimes the first act of authority is simply declining one committee, protecting one morning for writing, or delegating one task that doesn't actually require you. Authority is rarely claimed in a single dramatic moment. It's built in small, repeated choices.

From Persecutor to Challenger

Healthy challenge is principled, not punitive. It sounds like:

"That distribution of work isn't equitable, and I'd like to address it." 

"I'm not in a position to take that on this year." 

"This expectation needs to be made explicit before I can respond to it."

For many women in academic leadership, this is the genuine developmental edge: learning to hold standards for your own work, for institutional fairness, for what you will and won't absorb without also having to manage everyone else's emotional response to your doing so.

The Deeper Invitation

If you are the capable one, the steady one, the person the system quietly depends on your growth edge is not to give more.

It's to recalibrate.

The Drama Triangle operates most powerfully in the unconscious. Once you can see the pattern whether in a meeting, in a supervision, in the moment you feel that familiar pull to step in, you have a choice that simply didn't exist before.

You can ask:

• Am I supporting here, or over-functioning?

• Is this genuinely mine to carry?

• What would it look like to show up with authority rather than utility?

Universities need leaders who are rigorous, relationally intelligent, and willing to hold institutional life to account. What they do not need, and indeed what no one benefits from, is women burning themselves out in service of systems that were not designed with them in mind.

Stepping out of the triangle is not a withdrawal of care.

It is, perhaps, its most mature expression.

Professor Christina Hughes

Founder and CEO of Women-Space Leadership Limited

Our purpose at Women-Space is to enable women to thrive in their careers. If this interests you, please get in touch christina@women-space.co.uk.