The Victim Persecutor Rescuer Game

The Victim-Persecutor-Rescuer Game is a triangle and the players scramble for a corner.

The roles can change but usually a person falls into one role most of the time.

Battered women are classic Victims. Batterers or abusive men are classic Persecutors.

Here’s a typical scene:

The abuser (persecutor) beats the woman (victim). She (victim) calls the police (rescuers) who come and stop him.

Suddenly everyone scrambles for new corners! Now the man perceives the police as persecutors. He’s in jail and he’s the victim! When he’s in jail he may re-interpret the scene and believe that the woman is the persecutor because she called the police. The woman decides to drop the charges, so she becomes the rescuer.

Sometimes the children try to stop the abuse and get hit (victims). Other times they distract the abuser effectively and become the rescuers). Children learn abusive behavior from their abusive parent and may also abuse the victim and become persecutors.

TO GET HEALTHY AGAIN
YOU NEED TO STOP PLAYING THE GAME.

(Adapted from what is often called the “Drama triangle”. It was developed by American psychotherapist
Stephen Karpman and was originally published in the Transactional Analysis Bulletin, Vol. 7, 1968 under the title “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis”.)