In families with blurred roles and long-held loyalties, estrangement isn’t always sudden — and the Drama Triangle isn’t just a theory. This piece offers a trauma-informed look at how parentified children, boundary-setting adults, and enmeshed dynamics often collapse into blame, shame, and role confusion — and what it takes to step out.
“Stepping out of the triangle isn’t just about distance or disconnection. It’s not simply setting a boundary or shutting a door. It’s an internal departure. A symbolic reorganisation. A structural shift that must be integrated across every level of your system: body, mind, lineage, psyche, and self.”
And so the work begins - life beyond what I call ‘the trauma vortex'.
For me, stepping out took years, but ultimately was a refusal to collude with a system of abuse, and the associated self-negation it demanded.
Thank you Paul, I really appreciate you sharing your experience here. Stepping out of the triangle is exactly what you describe: a refusal to keep colluding with self-negation, self-abandonment, or the roles one had to play to stay connected.
It’s one of the hardest moves a person can make. Because it asks you to disappoint the system in order to stop disappointing yourself. And there’s no neat or painless way through it. It’s a profound and often brutal process of individuation. And for many, it’s the first time their sense of self is allowed to take up any space at all.
I’d say, and perhaps this is due to my insider knowledge, that the process of stepping out wasn’t that hard, but more of a natural consequence of my own growth and development and actually realising I was never really ‘in’…if I stopped investing, the system worked just fine without me, it simply moved on and reorganised to defend and further justify it’s ideology, protecting what was no doubt a deep transgenerational wound - one it understandably refused to tend.
I also didn’t go no-contact for years, I remained present at a distance, still went to various family events but with each encounter my sense of differentiation grew until I grew beyond it. It wasn't a big drama, more a polite but firm refusal, one boundary after another, one self-orienting negotiation after another until it made no sense to invest time and energy in a situation that was (for me) deeply regressive and often bizarre - but non-the-less unable or unwilling to look at or beyond its issues.
I agree with your assertions that the psychological / somatic distortions we might encounter in a dynamic such as the drama triangle - (a model I love for so many reasons - it’s reasonably simple at first pass, and therefore accessible for most, at least rationally - am grateful for your clarity in presenting) are often deep and pervasive and certainly demand attention. And, I would also add that the right kind support; consistent, patient, calm, affirming depth awareness over time - as your approach clearly does - will very likely help someone reorient to their own natural inner sense of order, value, space etc.
That deep wisdom is the default setting of the psyche - wholeness - realised through generative, reciprocal connection and relational attunement.
I see the therapeutic task in these terms - to nurture and complement a persons authentic, innate sense of goodness and be a fierce ally to that..no more, no less.
Affirming by any and every possible means that wholeness is innate - we can’t not have it, and whilst it might seem lost and terribly damaged when we first dare look, we can know that initial shock and confusion is in fact the deeper wisdom of the Self (i’ve no time for the notion the Self is a fantasy) calling out, inviting us to pay attention, to reorient, not to the wound, but to the sense of wholeness that lives beneath and before that wound, awaiting our courage to give it fuller participation and expression.
I think without at least a brief encounter with our innate, deep, wise, life-affirming wholeness - even if that encounter is with that living essence in another, it’s hard to proceed through the fire, and more likely that as we approach the various thresholds of transformation, instead of pushing through, we’ll recapitulate our own self-negation.
In short, wholeness is our default setting.
Affirming and amplifying that message every step of the healing and recovery journey is at least as important as tending to the particular symptoms and scenarios in which the false-self / provisional identity constellates.
“Stepping out of the triangle isn’t just about distance or disconnection. It’s not simply setting a boundary or shutting a door. It’s an internal departure. A symbolic reorganisation. A structural shift that must be integrated across every level of your system: body, mind, lineage, psyche, and self.”
And so the work begins - life beyond what I call ‘the trauma vortex'.
For me, stepping out took years, but ultimately was a refusal to collude with a system of abuse, and the associated self-negation it demanded.
Brilliant article, Tanja.
Thank you Paul, I really appreciate you sharing your experience here. Stepping out of the triangle is exactly what you describe: a refusal to keep colluding with self-negation, self-abandonment, or the roles one had to play to stay connected.
It’s one of the hardest moves a person can make. Because it asks you to disappoint the system in order to stop disappointing yourself. And there’s no neat or painless way through it. It’s a profound and often brutal process of individuation. And for many, it’s the first time their sense of self is allowed to take up any space at all.
Thinking out loud here...
I’d say, and perhaps this is due to my insider knowledge, that the process of stepping out wasn’t that hard, but more of a natural consequence of my own growth and development and actually realising I was never really ‘in’…if I stopped investing, the system worked just fine without me, it simply moved on and reorganised to defend and further justify it’s ideology, protecting what was no doubt a deep transgenerational wound - one it understandably refused to tend.
I also didn’t go no-contact for years, I remained present at a distance, still went to various family events but with each encounter my sense of differentiation grew until I grew beyond it. It wasn't a big drama, more a polite but firm refusal, one boundary after another, one self-orienting negotiation after another until it made no sense to invest time and energy in a situation that was (for me) deeply regressive and often bizarre - but non-the-less unable or unwilling to look at or beyond its issues.
I agree with your assertions that the psychological / somatic distortions we might encounter in a dynamic such as the drama triangle - (a model I love for so many reasons - it’s reasonably simple at first pass, and therefore accessible for most, at least rationally - am grateful for your clarity in presenting) are often deep and pervasive and certainly demand attention. And, I would also add that the right kind support; consistent, patient, calm, affirming depth awareness over time - as your approach clearly does - will very likely help someone reorient to their own natural inner sense of order, value, space etc.
That deep wisdom is the default setting of the psyche - wholeness - realised through generative, reciprocal connection and relational attunement.
I see the therapeutic task in these terms - to nurture and complement a persons authentic, innate sense of goodness and be a fierce ally to that..no more, no less.
Affirming by any and every possible means that wholeness is innate - we can’t not have it, and whilst it might seem lost and terribly damaged when we first dare look, we can know that initial shock and confusion is in fact the deeper wisdom of the Self (i’ve no time for the notion the Self is a fantasy) calling out, inviting us to pay attention, to reorient, not to the wound, but to the sense of wholeness that lives beneath and before that wound, awaiting our courage to give it fuller participation and expression.
I think without at least a brief encounter with our innate, deep, wise, life-affirming wholeness - even if that encounter is with that living essence in another, it’s hard to proceed through the fire, and more likely that as we approach the various thresholds of transformation, instead of pushing through, we’ll recapitulate our own self-negation.
In short, wholeness is our default setting.
Affirming and amplifying that message every step of the healing and recovery journey is at least as important as tending to the particular symptoms and scenarios in which the false-self / provisional identity constellates.