What is the Karpman Drama Triangle?

Hello are you fed up with drama in the workplace the constant infighting? The backstabbing, the complaints, the excuses, the blame, the list goes on and on. If you can’t stand it any longer then knowing about the Karpman Triangle is your first step to changing things.

My name is Fiona Spence I am an Excuse Eliminator, I’m also a Transformation Specialist and I’m the creator of CHARGED, which is a seven step system to help people, leaders, managers, and team players to take charge of their careers. And today I’d like to share with you the Karpman Triangle.

The Karpman Triangle was written about first in 1968 by Stephen Karpman an American psychiatrist. He published a paper all about Little Red Riding Hood. You may have heard that story in your childhood.

In Little Red Riding Hood there are three key characters. You have the Persecutor the Big Bad Wolf. You have the Rescuer who’s the Wood Chopper or axeman, and of course, whenever you have a Persecutor and a Rescuer you have to have a Victim – Little Red Riding Hood. I guess we have two because we’ve got granny but the one we’re interested here is probably Little Red herself.

Very often if you look in your workplace you will see these three characters at play, and the interesting thing is, and I’ll share a little bit more with this about this another time with you, is actually if you look in your own head quite often you’ll see these characters at play in your own head as well, but right now let’s look at other people. Let’s imagine there’s three different roles. There’s that Persecutor. The Persecutor can get quite angry and aggressive in the workplace they can be extremely critical. They can always be telling other people that they’re doing things wrong and they’re the sort of person that creates Victims just in the way that they look and speak to their colleagues.

The interesting thing about victims is some people are actually what I call a professional victim they sit there needing to be a victim so much with the “I can’t do it, I don’t know how, oh I need help, it’s too difficult, it’s too much, I haven’t got the time” they’re so good with all these excuses they make themselves a permanent victim and needing rescuing the rescuer loves to rescue. Actually you know what if they don’t rescue very often they’ll actually feel guilty. The trouble is they spend so much time rescuing the victim that very often they fail to look after their own issues that they need to be addressing. Perhaps there’s really a difficult project that need to be done that they’re not completing because they’re so busy helping other people with their work.

Stopping Workplace Drama

So once you start to look at these roles you’ll see them happening not just at work but you’ll see them happening in your private life, in your social life as well. Now the great news is that once you know how to recognise these roles you can start to do something about them. learn about stopping workplace drama in my next video. If you’d like to know how to flip this Dreaded Drama Triangle on its head into an Empowerment Triangle please tune in to my next video. Jump onto YouTube to Subscribe to be sure you don’t miss it. Or book a free Clarity Call with me.