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The secret roles and unconscious identities that sabotage our relationships and keep us alone
If you’ve been in a toxic relationship you may have noticed a strange phenomenon. You weren’t yourself for long stretches, and you would do and say things completely out of character. There was a sense that the relationship had its own kind of gravity, capable of pulling the worst out of you at the worst possible moments. Much of it felt automatic and predestined, as if nothing you did could make a difference and everything you tried would fail. You and your partner would adhere to familiar patterns, and situations would unfold as if they were scripted on a page.
I have personally struggled immensely in the grips of toxic intimate relationships, pulling, pushing, and constantly on edge. Through the better part of 20 years, and multiple serious relationships, I came to inhabit a particular identity over and over. I loved hard, and I chose to love women who were maximally challenging, strong-minded, and for some reason, supremely flawed (or so I thought). I embraced my role as the noble, caring guy who would be broken down and ultimately disparaged by partners who would never choose me over their latest existential crisis or depressive episode. When the onslaught of unceasing negativity and doubt eventually threw me to the ground, I would turn angry, lash out, and accuse my partners of an inside job.
Only after a particularly painful breakup–an experience that literally felt like being set on fire and jumping out of a window into a bed of nails–did I come to realize that my overriding impulse in relationship, more than love, commitment, forgiveness, or anything else, was to cast myself as a righteous victim who would suffer some ultimate betrayal. So strong was this attachment that I would, like a chameleon, reconfigure myself in any situation to preserve it. Whatever was required of me: actions, words, or otherwise, I would do, even if that behavior proved mortal to the relationship and my own well being.
As I began to unravel more and more of my own behavior, I came to discover the many ways in which peoples’ allegiances to identities that are inherently toxic doom them to relationships that are chaotic, dysfunctional, and tiresome. Most befuddling in all of this is the common sensation that we are trying our absolute damndest to make a situation work, even as our actual orientation towards that situation is sabotaging it at every step. Through this disconnect between what’s essentially above ground and what’s below, we are able to feel, in the most quixotic of ways, that we are fighting the good fight, all without being accountable to the more pressing needs of the relationship, or the person we love on the other side of it.
The degree to which many sad souls from broken homes are drawn, like moths to a flame, into dysfunctional relationships that both infuriate us and reinforce a core idea about ourselves is not well understood. Through my own observation, we like to cast ourselves as various types of tragic heroes. The ones who battle mightily against impossible odds (and impossible personalities), who are betrayed at the worst possible moment, who are cursed with some inescapable flaw. To this end, we quite literally write ourselves into particular roles, recruiting very specific people through which we nearly guarantee a particular result. With a bit of distance, one can appreciate the absurd degree to which this unfolds like a literal theatrical production, all while being a serious engine behind generational trauma and cycles of abuse.
In my view, the scripted quality of so many dysfunctional relationship dynamics is best explained by the Karpman Drama Triangle, invented by the psychiatrist Stephen Karpman back in the 60s. He proposed that nearly all interpersonal dysfunction finds its source in the interactions between three toxic roles. There is the victim, always manipulated and taken advantage of. The persecutor, who must whoop the victim into shape. And then the rescuer, who swoops in to rescue the poor victim when the persecutor oversteps.
While each role is different, all three unconsciously seek positions that work against solving the issue at hand. Each role avoids taking responsibility, justifies their positions at every turn, and desires righteousness over reconciliation. The victim embodies a powerlessness against the gaslighting, manipulation, and abuse of a persecutor. The persecutor, aggressive and overcompensating, blames everything on the victim. The rescuer attempts to save the victim, masking their low self-esteem in faux heroism and fostering dependence within the victim.
At the macro level, each role eventually progresses to a final state of utter helplessness. In order to secure this outcome, people can and do switch roles over time. I’ve often started a relationship as a rescuer or guide, eager to counsel, help, and lead. Then I would transform into a persecutor, admonishing my victim for not accepting my help. Finally, I would swap roles with the victim, so I became the victim and they the persecutor.
These dynamics appear in nearly all degrees of dysfunctional relationships, from trivial workplace disputes to the gravest instances of domestic abuse. Broadly speaking, if any relationship is inherently unhealthy, which we could define as any situation where discontent, struggle, and misery make the relationship unsustainable over time, the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer are likely at play. Relationships do not need to be personally devastating or debilitating to be dysfunctional.
To unravel why we end up in relationships that hurt us, we must first understand the adaptations we make as children to simply survive our circumstances. All of us develop what is often referred to as a “core identity” (or identities) that becomes the anchor of our individuality. They affect how we see ourselves in the world and how we navigate relationships. The problem is that for many of us from difficult circumstances, key aspects of our identities are completely maladaptive to healthy relationships. In my experience, people from broken homes struggle almost daily with ingrained patterns, habits, and perspectives that make it difficult to give love, receive love, and even recognize love to begin with. When you experience violence, addiction, abuse, and poverty as a young person, or if you were parentified at an early age, it’s likely that your core identity will be an obstacle to healthy relationships in some significant way.
One would think as adults we’d want to reshape our identity to reflect a world that is no longer such a threat. To the contrary, many of us are intent on holding these identities close, even as they cause us suffering. The reason is simple, if a bit sad. For some of us, especially those who experienced particular upheaval as kids, our personal identity, no matter how pain inducing, is the most dependable relationship we have. Sadder still is many of us feel at a very deep level that we both know what we need, and will recognize it should we ever find it. This faulty logic encourages us to believe that there is someone out there somewhere capable of realizing our dreams, blinding us from the real work of inner transformation.
Our attachments to these identities can be so unyielding that we will often sacrifice our own relationships and well-being at the altar of misery, rather than risk jeopardizing such fundamental components of our own self-concept. Many of us, including myself, find receiving love and working through hardship to be far more uncomfortable than the familiarity of loneliness and despair. Therapists will often refer to these isolationist postures as “protection mechanisms,” a type of internal armor we develop to shield ourselves from the worst of emotional harms, with our hearts ultimately paying the price.
"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind." - Friedrich Nietzsche
This identity attachment influences how we treat others and, more importantly, how we see ourselves. We are all experts in manifesting our own internal realities in the relationships we are in, for better or worse.
Take for instance the guy who is himself not so confident, who feels deep down he’s unworthy and unloveable unless he is doing something of objective value. He believes on some level all his efforts will ultimately fall short, despite wanting so desperately that they succeed. This guy likely had a father who withheld affection, or was unpredictable in his love, or was needlessly critical. This is the guy's core identity, his self-concept.
To enforce this self-concept, he may very well pursue a woman who always keeps him at arm’s length, who never accepts him fully, yet requests his help when it’s useful to her. Maybe she needs some help around the yard, with her car, or fixing something in the house. The guy immediately volunteers, even though the woman has not shown she cares for the man beyond when it’s convenient. The guy desperately wants something more, and feels some proximity to it. After all, the woman does want him sometimes. Ultimately though, the woman will move on from him, often finding someone better, leaving the man to ruminate in the rejection. Ironically, had this woman magically accepted the man, fallen in love with guy, become obsessed with him, he likely would have ended it somehow. That outcome would have deviated so far from the script, and so far from what the guy feels about himself, that it would have proved too threatening to his core ideas about himself.
I find it personally heartbreaking the degree to which good people, with good hearts, pursue bad relationships and sabotage decent ones, in an unconscious reaction to these hidden currents within. In these circumstances, relationships, which should be stories of enduring love, personal growth, and triumph, end up as nearly staged productions designed, at a truly psychic level, to reinforce the same tragic storylines people were victim to as children. In this arrangement, what seems to be two people trying to make things work, boom or bust, is in actuality just a mechanism to amplify and perpetuate a mutual cycle of suffering. That these relationships often feature a persecutor (abuser) and a victim (the abused) is of no material consequence. Not only do both parties suffer equally, but they depend on one another to realize their deepest individual fears about love.
We would be wise to appreciate the degree to which we are actively participating in any relationship we are in. Becoming aware of the roles we are playing in relationships, the personal identities we are attached to, and the negative storylines we feel most compelled to reenact, is the first step to breaking what are often generational chains of trauma. By taking a more holistic view of our behaviors, we can begin to take real responsibility for the directions our relationships take, and how they effectively become mirrors to what we feel about ourselves. Changing your relationships isn’t then so much about finding a better partner, or avoiding some toxic dynamic in the future. These are important, but they will only happen if we are able to change internally first. We cannot change something we are unaware of.
Ultimately, this is the work required if we are to grow. And it’s exactly because of the difficulty that so few do. It is just too easy to blame, shame, and point fingers, especially when culture, along with our family and friends, support our narrative. Fantasizing about meeting the one. Longing for a lifelong marriage of love. Wishing for the white picket fence. These dreams are no substitute for doing the work, which includes demanding of yourself that your behavior selflessly, sustainably, and healthily supports another person, and in turn the relationship between you. If your behavior does not support that, and the results do not substantiate your desires, then you ought to question where your true allegiances lie.
“The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.” Mark Nepo.
There are only two doors we can walk through: fear or love. Resentment or responsibility. We cannot credibly choose to walk through love, while remaining bound to identities that do not include ourselves or others in that love. If we are only pursuing love, hoping for love, dreaming of love, but not generating it. If we are refusing to cultivate the very soil within our hearts that love needs to grow, then we aren’t choosing love at all. We are choosing a role. An identity. A storyline. Perhaps the very same ones our fathers chose, and our father’s father, and so on. We are living blind, like emotional automatons in a larger generational machine of sadness.
To reject all of this, to cast aside and fight against every internal barrier to giving and receiving love, is about far more than our own happiness. It’s about doing battle with the very forces that have gripped us, and our families, for decades. This is the work of warriors. Choosing love is the pinnacle of courage, not only because of what it demands of us, but what stands in the way of our choosing it. The hardest battles will always be fought within the mind and inside the heart. To navigate such unpredictable terrain is hard enough, let alone overcoming the darker forces within. And yet that is what is required if we are ever to free ourselves, and our future families, from the demons lurking in the shadows.
