The Triangle You Didn’t Know You Were In

A leader I coach had just stepped into a senior role. His boss used a phrase that stuck with him: “Your job now is to be a force multiplier.” He understood the concept. He’d been promoted because he was excellent at his work. Now the work was to make others excellent at it.

In practice, it looked nothing like the concept.

The work his team handled was genuinely complex. Details mattered. Mistakes had consequences. So he reviewed their deliverables carefully. When something wasn’t right, he revised it himself, often late in the evening, because sending it back with notes would take longer than fixing it. When a direct report struggled with a client relationship, he stepped in to smooth things over. He told himself this was temporary. He was building the team’s capacity. He would step back once they were ready.

Three months in, he was working more hours than before the promotion, his team wasn’t growing, and he came to our session with a familiar frustration: “I have people who just won’t step up.”

We spent the first part of that conversation where you’d expect: delegation strategy, development plans, and accountability structures. Useful territory. But the conversation kept circling back to the same place. I asked him what happened in his body when he imagined sending a deliverable to his boss without reviewing it himself first.

He paused. Then: “My chest tightens. I hear a voice that says, if this goes wrong, it’s on you.“

That was the moment the conversation shifted from what was happening on his team to what was happening inside him.

What if the Drama Triangle isn’t just playing out between you and your team, but inside you?

The triangle inside

Most people encounter the Drama Triangle as an interpersonal model. Karpman described three roles that show up in conflict between people: Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim. It’s useful. It’s well-known. And for most people, that’s where it stops, because they are not aware that the same three roles also run in a place we rarely think to look: inside a single person. They don’t need a team meeting or a difficult colleague to activate. They run in the space between one thought and the next.

For this leader, the inner Persecutor was the voice that said: If this goes wrong, it’s on you. You should have caught that. A real leader would have built a team that didn’t need this much oversight. It sounded like high standards. It felt like a whip.

The inner Victim followed close behind: I can’t trust anyone to get this right. No matter how much I invest in developing them, it doesn’t change. I’m stuck doing the work and managing the work. Not self-pity. Something closer to exhaustion, the kind that comes from believing the situation can’t be different.

And the inner Rescuer was the one who ended the spiral: I’ll just fix it myself. At least then I know it’s done. Relief. Momentary competence. The comforting illusion of control. He wasn’t rescuing his team. He was rescuing himself from the discomfort of the first two voices.

The three roles cycled in seconds. The inner critic attacked, the collapsed self absorbed it, and the soothing part stepped in to end the pain by taking action. By the time he opened his laptop at 9 PM to rework a deliverable, the whole loop had already run. The decision to fix it himself didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like the only option.

The mirror

Once this leader saw the inner triangle, he began to see it everywhere. The pattern had been running for months. Naming it didn’t create it. Naming it made it visible.

The direct report who “wouldn’t step up” was real. The performance gap was real. But his response to it was being shaped by something other than the situation itself. When he reviewed her work and found errors, his inner Persecutor activated first: You promoted her too early. This reflects on you. The inner Victim followed: You’re going to be the one who pays for this. And the inner Rescuer closed the loop: Just fix it. At least it’ll be right.

By the time he gave her feedback, the frustration had already been filtered through all three roles. What he intended as accountability came out distorted, because the driving force behind the conversation was self-protection.

This is what I want to add to the conversation about the Drama Triangle. The interpersonal version, the one between a leader and their team, gets all the attention. But the interpersonal triangle is often a downstream effect of the internal one. The drama you see in the room is frequently the drama you haven’t addressed in yourself.

A leader who is harsh with a team member is sometimes externalizing their inner critic. A leader who takes over someone’s work is sometimes rescuing themselves from the anxiety of watching someone struggle. A leader who feels helpless about their team’s performance is sometimes letting the inner Victim set the terms.

None of this means the external situation doesn’t matter. The performance problem was real. The complexity of the work was real. But the inner triangle was deciding how this leader responded to all of it, long before strategy or management skill had a chance to show up.

Why the pattern persists

A question I hear from leaders when they first recognize the inner triangle: “Why do I keep doing this?” It’s usually asked with frustration, sometimes with shame. As if awareness alone should have been enough to stop it.

It isn’t, and there’s a reason. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion offers a useful frame here. The brain is a prediction machine. It doesn’t wait for the world to happen and then react. It runs constantly on predictions built from everything it has learned before. Those predictions shape what you notice, how you feel, and which actions seem available to you, often before conscious thought has a chance to intervene.

The inner triangle persists because the brain has learned it as a default sequence. Inner critic fires, collapse follows, soothing behavior resolves. The cycle has run so many times that it operates as a prediction, not a decision. The brain isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it learned to do, based on years of experience.

This matters because it replaces shame with something more useful: understanding. You don’t keep falling into the triangle because you’re weak or insufficiently self-aware. You keep falling into it because your brain is very good at running patterns it has practiced.

What it looks like to see it

This leader didn’t fix his inner triangle in a coaching session. That’s not how this works. What changed was that he started catching the sequence while it was running.

One evening, he found himself opening a team member’s deliverable. He noticed the familiar tightness, the pull to review every line, the certainty that if he didn’t, something would slip through. Instead of starting to edit, he paused. He asked himself: is this about the quality of her work, or is this about what happens inside me if something goes wrong?

The answer wasn’t clean. It was both. The deliverable did have issues. And his nervous system was responding to something older than this particular document. He could hold both of those truths at the same time, which is something he couldn’t have done three months earlier, because three months earlier, he didn’t know there were two things happening.

He sent the deliverable back with notes. It took longer than fixing it himself. His inner critic told him he was wasting time. His inner Victim told him she’d probably get it wrong again anyway. His inner Rescuer offered the familiar exit: just do it yourself. He let all three voices speak, and then he did what he’d decided to do.

That’s not a dramatic transformation story. It’s a Tuesday. And that’s the point. The inner triangle doesn’t require a breakthrough to shift. It requires noticing, over and over, with less self-punishment each time. The leader who starts to see the inner triangle doesn’t become a different person. They become the same person with more information about what’s driving their choices.

And with that information, the choices start to change. Not all at once. Not permanently. But enough to feel the difference.

The triangle you can actually change

You may not be able to control how the people around you show up. You can’t stop a direct report from underperforming or a peer from being difficult. But the inner triangle is yours. It runs on your predictions, your history, and your learned defaults. And because it’s yours, it’s the one you have the most leverage to change.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It means it’s possible.

In a companion piece, Stepping Out of the Drama Triangle: What Actually Happens, I wrote about how coaches encounter this same pattern in their own practice. We are professionals who specialize in developmental work, and we are works in progress too. The inner triangle doesn’t spare anyone based on expertise. The difference isn’t avoiding it. It’s learning to see it.

Join the conversation

If this stirred something for you, I’m hosting two free live discussions this month: Stepping Out of the Drama Triangle: The Messy Middle.

We’ll explore the payoff vacuum, the identity wobble, how your nervous system pulls you back into familiar roles, and what it looks like to exit the triangle in the middle of real relationships.

Both sessions have the same structure and agenda. Choose the time that works for your schedule. At least a few participants will leave with a small gift from me, as a thank-you for being willing to sit in the messy middle together.

This space is for executive coaches and corporate leaders who are ready for the honest version of the conversation.

Warmly,

Maria Wade

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