When I was in high school, our maths teacher showed us a circle. Not that he introduced us to the shape; we were, thank goodness, more advanced than that as teens. The circle was used to depict a model explaining extremes and the golden mean. Not exactly the one we used to use for ourselves when thinking about our own behaviour…
The reason it was such a revelation was that we are taught practically from birth to think that human traits, tendencies, or even mechanisms, like morality, are a flat line with very black-and-white categorical separation. In case of the duality of interest today, i.e., victims and perpetrators, the victim sits on one end of it and the perpetrator on the other end of the spectrum.
We prefer to believe that the victim and the perpetrator live in entirely different moral universes separated by this vast impenetrable distance. But what our teacher showed us was that any extremes in human psychology, including the victim and perpetrator duality, are actually next-door neighbours. The circular model explains pretty well why it is easy to jump from one extreme to the other and why the golden mean is the most difficult place to get to.
So if extremes are not opposites sitting far apart but structurally adjacent, should we change everything about how we think about morality and behaviour?
The Virtue of Suffering
We want clean lines. We want to know exactly who the victim is and who the villain is so we can sleep soundly knowing we are on the right side. And the flatline model gives us this false sense of security – it allows us to categorise people neatly.
It basically tells us that as long as we identify with the ‘good side of the line’, i.e, the victim side, we are entirely free from the behaviours of the bad side. Whatever we do as victims is justified and morally safe. A victim cannot harm another human being. Becoming a perpetrator would be such a giant step to make for a victim that it’s not even possible on the flat line.
This is where the circular model is actually more accurate.
The reality is that when you are standing at the extreme pole of the helpless victim, your worldview has already been heavily polarised. Through the unpleasantness or even trauma that was inflicted upon you, you accept a reality where power is a currency that matters. You’ve been taught that the world operates on force, inequality, lack of partnership, harmful communication, or dominance and submission. The longer periods of unpleasantness in life, the more the belief sinks in. The model in your head is solid and divides the world in two (or three – we’ll get there in a moment).
This is not just a theoretical model. It has also shown in the replication of the obedience studies by Akyüz et al. (2024). The learner turned teacher administered significantly more shocks and more severe shocks to their former tormentor if they themselves had received more shocks prior. But this was not a conscious retaliation. And it’s not the frustration-aggression link. (Breuer & Elson, 2017; Dugré & Potvin, 2023) The data, particularly the neurological data, suggests it is neurological normalisation, meaning the brain essentially rewrites the rules of engagement based on the environment it’s currently in.
If you are placed in a novel hostile environment where you are repeatedly shocked, your brain’s primary job is to figure out the rules of this new world so you can survive it. So it quickly recalibrates. It observes the data and concludes, ‘OK, in this specific ecosystem, physical pain, shocking, is simply the standard language of interaction.’
So the movement from victim to perpetrator is not necessarily a conscious moral decision. It is often a system-level adaptation. The rules change first, and the behaviour follows.
And because you are on that extreme edge, you really only have to take one small step backward to wrap right around into the territory of the perpetrator. These are the rules of the game you’ve already internalised. The only thing that changes is your position on the board. And that is the dangerous part. Because if the rules stay the same, changing position does not restore conscious choice and agency. It only reverses roles within the same system.
What is important here is that switching from the one being acted upon to the one acting requires less thinking and no real agency, only reactivity. It’s a true no-brainer, almost like a reflex for many. In fact, a lot of us oscillate between those two states, penduluming from one extreme to another even within a single conversation, without even noticing. Or noticing but doing a lot of rationalisation instead of stopping.
Rationalising the change
When an individual or even a group experiences an ordeal, it doesn’t just leave a scar. When we are severely victimised, our internal ledger is thrown into the world’s debt and significant unfairness, making us feel like the world ‘owns us’ in return for what happened. This is when the brain often creates a twisted form of moral credit.
The internal logic dictates that having suffered grants us a special status. We earn the right to bypass standard empathy. We become exempt from the normal rules of societal conduct because, in our own mind, we are just collecting a debt and – more importantly – preventing future harm. So the narrative shifts from ‘I was harmed’ to, ‘because I was powerless then, I must be overpowerful now to ensure it never, ever happens again.’ This is called ‘preemptive defence’. (Stavrova et al., 2020)
This internal logic doesn’t stay at the level of personal feeling. It scales into entire moral frameworks we use to justify action. Sounds exaggerated? Then it may surprise you that this “giving people back what they deserve” and that people who wronged others “morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment” are deeply entwined with what we call “retributive justice” in a philosophical and legal sense. (Walen, 2015)
The concept requires three very strict conditions. First, someone who committed a wrongdoing who actually deserves to suffer. Second, a legitimate impartial authority needs to inflict that suffering (not a vigilante). And third, the punishment must be strictly and mathematically proportionate to the crime.
For communities and individuals with a history of trauma, the line between seeking justice and seeking revenge often becomes blurred. Revenge is a unilateral act of aggression, whereas retributive justice requires a legitimate punisher and a proportionate response. When victims adopt the role of the perpetrator, they often justify their aggression as “necessary retribution or self-defence”, utilising the collective memory of their own trauma to rally support for violent policies.
This “narrative of victimhood” can reinforce a sense of moral immunity, where the group believes its historical suffering exempts it from the universal principles of human rights. (McAdams, 1993; Youvan, 2024; Zitek et al., 2010)
Enters the triangle
Did you notice that there are three parties in the retributive justice notion? The victim, the perpetrator, and the one who administers the justice, who, as such, stands on the side of the victim, protecting them.
Could it be that the same social hierarchy we live by makes us externalise not only someone to guide us, to save us, and also someone to harm us? What if the hierarchical roles to which we hand over decisions, safety, and agency are rooted so deeply in us that they appear both on the micro and macro levels?
To map the interpersonal dynamics of this, we have to turn to a framework developed in the 1960s within a field called transactional analysis. The framework was created by Steven Karpman, and it is universally known as the Karpman Drama Triangle. (Karpman, 2007) It maps out three specific destructive roles that people subconsciously adopt whenever conflict arises: the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer. Let’s break each of them down
It is, however, important to understand that the victim in the drama triangle is not necessarily an actual objective victim of a crime or a natural disaster. It is someone adopting the stance or the identity of a victim. Their internal catchphrase, their broadcast to the world, is ‘poor me’. Or it is ‘something was done to me.’
In terms of agency, they claim that their agency was forcibly taken away. They had no choice. They feel chronically oppressed, hopeless, and helpless. They actively seek to convince themselves and everyone around them that they are powerless and cannot change their circumstances or their behaviour. And there is a hidden payoff for that. By loudly declaring their powerlessness, they successfully avoid taking any real, terrifying responsibility for their own lives. If I can’t do anything, you can’t blame me for doing nothing. I also can’t do wrong…
Then you have the persecutor. The Karpman’s persecutor’s catchphrase is, ‘it’s all your fault’. They are critical, controlling, rigid, and often superior. They constantly blame the victim for everything that goes wrong. But psychologically, the persecutor is not operating from a place of true strength. They are often acting out of their own hidden shame, inadequacy, or profound fear of being victimised themselves. They dominate to aggressively protect their own vulnerabilities. They strike first so they don’t get struck.
And finally, the rescuer. This is the role that often trips people up because rescuing is usually a noble thing to do. It does sound positive, but in the context of the drama triangle, the rescuer is also toxic. Their catchphrase is, ‘let me help you.’ They are the classic enabler. They intervene to fix the victim’s problems, often completely ignoring their own boundaries and needs to do so.
Even though it sounds noble, the drama triangle rescuer doesn’t actually want to empower the victim. They don’t want the victim to get better and walk away. The rescuer derives their entire sense of self-worth from being needed. If the victim suddenly becomes independent, capable, and healthy, the rescuer loses their role. They lose their value. The rescuer’s help is actually designed to keep the victim dependent, helpless, and tethered to them. It often undermines the victim’s personal autonomy. It is a relationship based on control, cleverly disguised as care and martyrdom.
The rescuer needs the victim to stay weak just as much as the persecutor needs the victim to stay submissive. So although the roles look different on the surface, they are all built on the same foundation: avoidance of real agency through imbalance.
Interestingly though, people do not stay in one corner of Karpman’s model. They move merrily around. The roles are entirely fluid. They rotate constantly based on situational context, or based on the roles they assume with others (one can be a perpetrator with one person and a victim with another). They can also switch roles as part of the triangle script, keeping the triangle spinning.
The endless spin
A rescuer works tirelessly for the victim, doing things the victim should be doing for themselves. Eventually, the rescuer gets exhausted, feels profoundly unappreciated, and suddenly flips into the persecutor role, getting angry and lashing out at the victim with ‘after all I’ve done for you.’ And the victim, feeling attacked by their saviour, might suddenly find their teeth. They flip into the persecutor role, attacking the former rescuer for being controlling or not helping the right way. Their internal narrative turns from ‘something was done to me’ to ‘I had to do this because of them.’ Which throws the former rescuer right back into the victim role. Now, since the roles of the perpetrator and the victim are taken, there is no option left for the third person in the triangle other than to step in as the rescuer, often doing the mediation in a new conflict. It’s a dizzying, exhausting choreography. What keeps it alive is not conflict itself, but the shared refusal to step out of the system that defines it.
And that is the linchpin of the entire cycle – the denial of power. Inflicting harm may look active and agentic and like a choice. So can acting with all the force of a perpetrator. But the actors in the triangle refuse to take responsibility for their actions and harm and to step into understanding rather than reflexive self-defence. And they still see themselves as passive – they hand over the thinking, choice, and agency to the script.
The triangle also operates on the assumption that all three roles share the exact same underlying premise, which is inequality. None of the roles in the drama triangle operate from a position of true equality, mutual respect, or personal responsibility. There is no partnership in the triangle. They all fundamentally rely on an imbalance of power. Sliding from one imbalance to another requires almost zero psychological effort. You’re just rearranging the hierarchy, not dismantling it. It’s all just different flavours of dysfunction. Different masks for the same refusal of agency.
In fact, there are more unconscious psychological games that people play within this triangle to keep the drama spinning. Eric Byrne, the father of transactional analysis, mapped these out beautifully.
There’s one called SWYMD, which is an acronym for ‘See what you made me do’. It’s such a classic. It is a game where an individual completely avoids responsibility for a mistake or a harmful behaviour by claiming someone else distracted them or provoked them. ‘I wouldn’t have yelled at the kids if you hadn’t asked me that stupid question about the bills.’ Or ‘I only dropped the glass as you walked into the kitchen.’ It’s shifting the blame instantly to collect what T.A. calls blame strokes. It is pure attribution of blame in a domestic setting.
Another one is called ‘Wooden Leg’. It is a game where an individual uses a trauma history, a physical disadvantage, a neurodivergent diagnosis, or a difficult past as an impenetrable, all-purpose excuse for bad behaviour, avoiding responsibility, or as a refusal to progress in life. The internal plea is basically, ‘what can you possibly expect from someone with a history like mine?’ It’s using the past as a weapon against the present. ‘I was victimised as a child; therefore, you cannot hold me accountable for being cruel to you today.’ ‘I have this diagnosis; therefore, I don’t have to try.’ If you pay attention to what people say in such situations, the games are pretty easy to identify.
The vindictive narrative
At this point, the question becomes: how do people maintain a sense of being ‘right’ while participating in this cycle as perpetrators? Let’s then get back to the language of how we justify our actions when they are not morally acceptable, even by ourselves (Bandura et al., 1996; Shuhui et al., 2025).
One way to do it, and something mentioned before, is weighting current harmful actions against the historical harm someone suffered, using the latter to minimise the former. It’s called an ‘advantageous comparison’.
Imagine you work for a massive faceless corporation. You feel exploited, you’re underpaid, and you believe the company is essentially robbing their customers. You feel like a victim of late-stage capitalism. So you decide to embezzle $50,000 from the corporate accounts. If you use an advantageous comparison, you’re likely not telling yourself ‘I’m a thief’. You’re telling yourself, ‘yes, taking this money isn’t ideal. But it is absolutely nothing compared to the massive systemic wage theft and exploitation this corporation inflicts on thousands of people every single day.’ That is a textbook example. You render your own injurious conduct completely benign by contrasting it with a much larger perceived injustice. You use your or other people’s prior negative or traumatic experience as the ultimate baseline. Suddenly, any harm you inflict seems trivial, even justified by comparison. It’s a very slippery slope.
Another example of it is provocation. With attribution of blame, the perpetrator argues that their harmful behaviour was entirely forced upon them by the original provocation of the target. This one is, by the way, often used in sexual assaults. The narrative goes like this:
‘Look what you made me do. I am a faultless victim. I was driven to this extreme action solely by what they did to me or how they provoked me. They brought this suffering upon themselves.‘
So even as perpetrators, they maintain their self-image as innocent victims perfectly intact by shifting the responsibility entirely onto the person they are actively destroying.
When you combine moral justification, which is the belief that your actions serve a high, noble, or divine purpose, with advantageous comparison and victim blaming, you don’t feel guilty. You feel vindicated. You feel like an agent of justice (even though retributive justice requires a third party). It is the refusal of personal agency masking itself as moral superiority or a necessity.
The macro scale
These cognitive bridges of Bandura’s don’t just happen in the isolated minds of single individuals. It’s not just about one bad boss or one toxic relationship. These mechanisms scale up to entire communities, to ethnic groups, and to entire nations. The actors change, but the logic stays.
When moral disengagement goes macro, it becomes institutionalised. It stops being a personal defence mechanism and becomes embedded in national narratives and in foreign policies.
This is called a ‘transgenerational loop’. It’s taking the collective historical memory of a group’s trauma and essentially weaponising it for the present day. (Youvan, 2024; Zitek et al., 2010)
The collective memory of a group’s victimhood becomes a shield which deflects any current criticism or accountability. It creates a societal blind spot where the self, the core identity of the nation or group, is eternally viewed as the victim. Even while the hand of the group is actively operating as a perpetrator on the world stage.
Additionally, the transgenerational memory of victimhood can sometimes be employed as a discursive framework to preemptively neutralise criticism of present-day state actions. So the trauma becomes the lens through which every modern conflict is interpreted, i.e., competitive victimhood. (Young & Sullivan, 2016)
Competitive victimhood treats moral legitimacy as a zero-sum game. The underlying unspoken belief is that for one group to be recognised as the ultimate symbol of oppression, which grants them the moral credit discussed earlier, the historical and present-day victimhood of competing groups must be aggressively minimised, scrutinised, or entirely erased.
So empathy is no longer this universal human capacity. It ceases to be something we feel simply because another human is suffering but gets redirected. It is stripped away from actual victims and granted to perpetrators entirely based on perceived identity labels like oppressed versus coloniser. (Youvan, 2024)
Rather than being based on the actual conduct or the atrocities being committed in the present moment. Universal principles of human rights basically collapse under the weight of identity narratives. And when those universal principles collapse, the vocabulary of violence transforms. Suddenly, deliberate violence, the targeting of civilians or systemic oppression is reframed and sanitised as resistance, liberation or securing the homeland.
I am sure you see actors on multiple sides of geopolitical conflicts utilising this transgenerational loop to justify their actions for decades. It nicely illustrates the wraparound effect of the circle model – the extremes meet and the justification for violence mirrors itself flawlessly, regardless of which flag is flying or which historical trauma is being invoked. Both claim the virtue of suffering. Both claim preemptive defence. It is the ultimate weaponisation of victimhood to demand a perpetual pass from the rules of adult accountability.
But the most vital takeaway from transactional analysis backed by moral disengagement is recognising the illusion of agency within the triangle. Because none of them are actually making choices. Neither the victim, nor the persecutor, nor the rescuer has real agency. They are all just reading from a pre-written script, acting out a predefined role, shifting responsibility toward the system, toward their past traumas, or toward the designated partner they are dancing with. They are endlessly reacting to each other. They are never truly choosing.
How do we actually stop
So how do you step off a triangle you’ve been spinning on your entire life? How do we break the circle? If the system is self-reinforcing, then breaking it cannot come from within its existing roles. It requires a different kind of intervention.
Stepping off the drama triangle, breaking that circular architecture of trauma requires the exercise of what we can call ‘veto’. It implies ultimate executive authority of one’s own life.
The veto is the moment you stand in the centre of your own history, you look directly at your trauma without blinking, you acknowledge the profound unfairness of what was done to you, and you consciously say, ‘I have been wronged, but I will not wrong others. I have been a victim, but I will not be a perpetrator.’
You take the action that was done to you, the energy of that trauma, and you simply refuse to let it dictate your reaction. By breaking the circular architecture entirely, you snap the loop.
This is the first moment in the entire system where behaviour is not dictated by prior conditions but by conscious interruption. The veto moves the entire internal locus of control back inside of you. It shifts the internal conversation away from what happened to you and transforms it into what you are choosing to do with it.
It is the reclamation of power. Because as long as you are using your trauma to justify your harm, as long as you are playing the persecutor because you were once the victim, you are still letting your abuser write your story. You are still dancing to their tune.
The veto is the act of setting yourself free. It is the realisation that true power is not the ability to inflict pain just because you endured it. True power is the ability to absorb the blow and refuse to pass it on. And seeing it as a possibility while inside the system is the first requirement for navigating your way out of the territory. But here is a problem – how do you see that you are part of a script?
The solution to it might be thinking in systems terms, not in single operands. It is a true skill, although mostly associated with business. Looking at the whole system, not just your end of it, recognising the moment to apply that veto requires exactly the skill: the ability to see the system while you are inside it.
Systems thinking is the cognitive shift from observing isolated moments and analysing them from a single perspective to perceiving the entire circular architecture of the feedback loops that sustain them. (Thinker, 2016) It moves us away from a simplified view – where we only see the individual actors or the immediate blow – and forces us to confront the underlying structures and mental models that keep the triangle spinning and the processes long-term.
It can reveal that the victim, rescuer, and persecutor are not independent entities but interconnected parts of a single, self-reinforcing engine. When we think in systems, we recognise that our reactions are often dictated by a “script” written by the system’s design. This perspective provides the necessary distance to apply the veto; by seeing the map of the system, we can identify the high-leverage points where we can snap the loop and reclaim the authority over our own history. It can also show that the drama isn’t just a series of random events but a predictable system that starves when even one person refuses to play their assigned part. Just like it was done by Stroh (2015).
When we apply systems thinking to the relational dynamic, rather than trying to change the other people involved, the focus shifts to redesigning the interaction itself, transforming a reactive habit into a conscious choice to stop the loop from completing its next turn. It gives us back the chance to think about what we do based on existing social or moral consents. Because maybe the ultimate measure of our character isn’t how much we’ve survived. Perhaps the ultimate measure of who we really are is how much power we willingly lay down when it’s finally our turn to strike back.
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Sources:
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