Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle

My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this context I first have to explain a little bit about what I mean when I invoke the concept of a Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It suggests that in circumstances where conflict arises and individuals are reactive to rather than present with that conflict there is a tendency to assign three roles: victim, hero, and villain.The victim role is characterized by fear and helplessness, the hero role is characterized by righteousness and some attempt to act as a saviour for the victim, and the villain role is characterized by blame (of self or others).

What is most important to me about this model is not how it points out that this dynamic often emerges in the context of conflict, but how it reveals that the dynamic is unconscious, volatile, and misleading. When the dynamic arises, it is typically through some invisible collusion that the roles are assigned and they remain implicit rather than being consciously claimed by the individuals involved. As a result of the unconscious nature of the dynamic, the roles are unstable - individuals often end up switching between these three roles as implicitly and unconsciously as the same roles initially emerged. Regardless of how the roles are assigned at any given moment, they obscure something true about each individual involved - victims are actually agentic and accountable for their own experiences, heroes are not moral authorities nor are they responsible for victims' experiences, and villains are not sole causes of the conflicts arising between them and their hero/victim counterparts.

I've explained this concept in the context of a conflict arising between individuals but, when it comes to gender, I am seeing the same dynamic play out in broader cultural conflicts between and within gendered groups. Probably the clearest example I can provide is how conflict between capital W-Women and capital M-Men has given rise to a drama triangle. For longer than I've been around there has been a broad, complex cultural claim that society is structured in such a way that Women are inherently victims and Men are inherently Villains. The specter of a Hero arises from this dynamic in many forms; activist groups are perhaps the clearest examples but it is also interesting to see how women/men may belong to the group role of victim/villain yet act in the role of the hero on an individual level if they can be seen as acting out any sort of protection, vengeance, etc. in reaction to to the Story of Women's Victimhood.

In my own experience relating to men, the cultural phenomenon of this Drama Triangle has been profoundly unhelpful! The dynamic sets a cultural precedent that looms over any conflict that arises between me and a man in my life - as tension emerges in our connection our difference in gender pulls this cultural lens into place such that there is a shared apprehension that I will be assigned the victim role and he will be assigned the villain role. What a mess! As if staying present with tension and orienting toward love and truth isn't enough of a task already! From here there are plenty of ways we squirm together - maybe we both preemptively try to promise we are not the victim/the villain, maybe I'll try to put him in the victim role or he'll try to put me in the villain role, maybe one of us will scramble to be the hero. All unconscious, unhelpful strategies to navigate an unconscious, unhelpful cultural script. I am getting a headache just writing about it.

Trust me, I wish this dynamic only loomed over my connections with men in my life. On the contrary, the way this Drama Triangle twists up my relationships with other women may actually be even more damaging - it's a tough race to call. In my connections with women the cultural precedent of the Drama Triangle still creates a shared apprehension but in this context the apprehension is that we are both victims and that we agree that men are villainous. Now I could gesture at the various ways in which this has been awkward and disconnecting in my relationships with other women but frankly, there is one stand out context which I see as the likely root of my deep resentment motivating this deep take.

I have had difficult situations with bad outcomes (ranging from deep emotional wounds to physical/sexual assaults) arise in my connections with men in my life. From the very earliest of these challenging experiences, it has been very important to me to integrate these experiences in ways that protect and strengthen my capacity to have healthy, loving relationships with men. I faced profound difficulty finding women who were able to support me in integrating my experiences this way rather than imposing the Drama Triangle on my situation, villainizing the men involved, and seeking to either play out the Hero role by saving me or pressuring me to join them in the victim role as a fellow woman. I have severed friendships, fired therapists, and generally opted out of "women's spaces" to protect myself from this because to the extent that I have ever seen myself as the victim of difficult situations with men it has been intolerable! My experience of the victim role was catastrophic for my self esteem, ruinous for my romantic relationships, and completely spiritually backward. I really really hate it.

Obviously I can't say as much about how this dynamic impacts men's relationships with one another but I do see men face pressure from women to take on the hero role by confronting other men as villains in their community. I've also had multiple men open up to me about the way that they've internalized the cultural role of Men as Villains and alienated them from their own sexualities, ambitions, boundaries etc. through a narrative that they are inherently creepy, greedy, controlling, etc. Although I don't seem to attract men who respond by trying to claim the victim role for themselves in my personal life, I am certainly aware of the "Manosphere" where the subcultural norm is to invert the cultural script and see men as the victim of women who perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood as a power grab and manipulation at mens' expense.

Now more than ever before it seems especially clear that gender non-conforming individuals are also deeply impacted by the way the binary gendered experience is captured by the Drama Triangle. While this impact is complex and multi-faceted, I'll offer an over-simplification here which I see as gesturing to a very prominent thread of impact for these communities. Non-binary and Trans people often seem to me to be implicitly collapsed into the same group role as Women or Men so that the existing cultural script can fit them into the Drama Triangle without much modification.

My social circles and information channels tend toward treating gender non-conforming groups as analogous to Women and implicitly assumes that they too are inherently victims of Men and assenting to this categorization puts "Us" (whoever we may be) in the hero role. Given my own impact of internalizing the message that I am a victim of Men, I have a strong projection that gender nonconforming people are actually greatly disadvantaged by the imposition of this lens and in my own relationships with gender non-conforming people in my life, the apprehension that they are victims and I ought to be heroic about it makes me act kinda weird. I feel an inflated sense of responsibility for their feelings and end up walking on egg shells around them in a way that doesn't feel true to me at all. This is something I really wanna work on in these relationships but, just like in my relationships with men and women, I deeply resent the added weight of the Drama Triangle as it shows up for me here.

Similar to the Manosphere example, I don't have much first hand experience of the corresponding culture which collapses gender non-conforming people in with Men but it is on my radar that there are people who see Women as victims of Non-binary and Trans People. This dynamic tends to rigidly impose the existing gender binary against the autonomy of gender non-conforming people and conclude that AMAB gender non-conforming people are trying to cheat their way into Women's Sacred Victimhood and AAFB gender non-conforming people are abandoning their sisters to escape Women's Sacred Victimhood and that whole narrative is unspeakably yucky to me in so so many ways.

There exist at least a couple of "answers" to the Drama Triangle that offer possible healthy responses to this unhealthy dynamic. Choy's "Winner's Triangle" suggests softening the helplessness, righteousness, and blame of the victim, hero, and villain into vulnerability, care, and assertiveness, respectively. Emerald's "Empowerment Dynamic" suggests swapping the victim role for the creator, characterized by a reclaiming of personal power, swapping the hero for the coach, characterized by the facilitation of the creator's self-empowerment, and swapping the villain for the challenger, characterized by the capacity to call others to action.

Imagine me shouting to the sky and shaking my fists when I write how strongly I would prefer a cultural norm that experimented with these approaches (or invented new ones) in context where conflict arises and gendered experiences are implicated. I've been taking my own baby steps in my relationships with men, women, and gender non-conforming folks, but I come to you all hoping for help to foster awareness and openness to new norms in our community. I deeply believe if we could make our great escape from the Drama Triangle and reclaim our experience of life in a world with genders it would be miraculously transformative for our relationships with ourselves, our intimate partners, our friends and family, and the world at large.