Rescuer

The Rescuer is the soul and the lifeblood of the Drama Triangle. I've been calling it the disempowerment triangle, but I've also seen it labeled the domestic-violence triangle.

The triangle is Victim, Perpetrator, and Rescuer.

The Rescuer is the secret star of this triangle because it's the role everyone wants to have. Everyone in the triangle wants to see themselves as a Rescuer—both Victim and Perpetrator see themselves as rescuers.

Victims often see themselves as a Perpetrator's rescuer and continue to move toward their violence in order to "help them" or "heal them."

Perpetrators see themselves as their own rescuer, or the rescuer of another, enacting their violence against victims righteously, as self-protection and punishment for what they perceive as wrongs in the world.

Rescuers see the world in a binary of Victims and Perpetrators, casting others in these roles, disempowering those they see as Victims by "saving" them and perpetrating violence against those they see as Perpetrators.

Around and around it goes; truly, to be in the triangle is to be in every place, but the sanctimonious self-image of the Rescuer drives it all.

Until we heal our impulse to rescue others, to control their experience, to take responsibility for their experience, we are perpetuating harm in the world.

Oh, this one is gonna hurt those who adore their rescuer role, who think that they are doing good in the world, who are loath to see harm, yet see it everywhere they look. To rescue is to be invested, body, soul, and identity, in the existence of harm in the world. To invest in harm is to perpetuate it.

As I am not a Rescuer, I'm not at war with harm nor evaluating those who cause it. Harm in this world IS. Rescuers might take this as a sharp accusation of wrongdoing, to be invested in harm, but that is not a value-judgment I endorse.

Harm is. We ALL participate in harm. We participate righteously, sanctimoniously, or neutrally. Neutrality toward harm in the world is the worst thing a Rescuer can imagine, yet it's the only thing that could save them from being harm's willing agent, from enacting harm righteously and sanctimoniously, eagerly and liberally, from seeing, as clearly as a blinking neon sign, the harm available anywhere and everywhere they look.

Like anyone, though, the Rescuer does not require saving.

The empowerment triangle is Anything, Everything, Nothing.

Victim, Perpetrator, and Rescuer are the disempowered agents of Anything, and therefore agents of harm, sometimes.

The only alternative is to be the empowered agent of Anything, including harm, sometimes.

Empowerment and disempowerment are part of the Everything available now to each of us in this human experience. Those who are empowered experience that they are working with a world working for them. Those who are disempowered experience that they are working against a reality which is happening to them.

It's neutral, whatever we choose, it simply creates the experience we have right here right now, which can only be sacred. This experience is all we have, and we each align it to our preferences, moment by moment, including when we align with that which is not according to our preferences.

The stakes are exactly as high as they are low. It all came from Nothing, it all returns to Nothing.