When Someone Else’s Mistake Makes You the Bad Guy: the Karpman Drama Triangle at Work
In short: how do you correct a colleague’s sloppy work without feeling guilty or looking like the bad guy? The culprit is the Karpman drama triangle, a role-play (Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer) that we fall into without meaning to. The way out is to stick to the facts, and to admit your own blunders without making a ceremony of it.
One day, Nina, my dear Parisian friend, told me what had just happened to her at the office. She was still mortified, and as I listened, I thought: “Oh, I know that one.” I’m telling you the story with the names changed, for discretion’s sake.
Nina, Thomas and the Spreadsheet of Shame
Monday, 9:12 a.m. Nina hasn’t even finished her coffee when she opens Thomas’s spreadsheet, received Friday at 6:47 p.m. The timing should have tipped her off, but you can never be wary enough. Two shifted columns, a total adding up apples and oranges, and a delivery scheduled before the order was even placed. Pure art.
“Right,” Nina tells herself. “Two options.”
- The first: redo everything herself, sighing loudly enough for the whole coffee machine to enjoy it. She knows it’s a lousy idea. She does it anyway every other time, because she’s only human and a good sigh feels so good.
- The second: send the file back. But here, her stomach knots. She feels like a schoolteacher about to give detention to a six-year-old.
She sends it back anyway, with a message she meant to be neutral and which came out curt as a slap. Thomas’s reply lands twenty minutes later: three paragraphs of justifications and, as a bonus, an “I did tell you I needed more time.”
Bottom line: Nina, who was right, feels awful. Thomas, who was wrong, feels humiliated. And the spreadsheet hasn’t budged by a single cell.
I know this scene by heart, and from both sides. A reformed scatterbrain (reformed, not cured, let’s not get carried away), I’ve been Thomas more often than I care to admit. And I’ve been Nina too, facing typos, forgotten attachments and wildly imaginative figures that put me, without anyone meaning to, in a seriously uncomfortable position.
So why is it so painful on both sides? Because our two heroes have just fallen into a triangle. And if it’s not the Bermuda one, it’s a close cousin.
What is the Karpman drama triangle?
The Karpman drama triangle is a transactional analysis model created in 1968 by the American psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It describes three roles we step into, almost always without realizing it, as soon as a relationship gets tense:
- The Victim whines: “Poor me, it’s not my fault, just bad luck.”
- The Persecutor accuses, criticizes and points fingers. They’re often right on the facts, but rarely on how they say it.
- The Rescuer cries: “Here, let me handle it!” They help without being asked, and in doing so they keep the other person dependent (and feed their own need to be indispensable).
The nastiest part is that these aren’t identities but positions in a game, and we switch between them like changing shirts. Yesterday’s Victim becomes today’s Persecutor (“I’m sick of cleaning up after you!”), and the Rescuer ends up as the Victim (“after everything I’ve done for you”). Round and round it goes, and nobody gets off the merry-go-round.
Who plays what in our story
Let’s look at Nina more closely: she hasn’t finished her coffee and she has already nearly played the Rescuer. Redoing everything in silence was tempting, and she knows where that leads: straight to the exhausted Victim. She sends the file back in the end, but with her curt message, there she is as the Persecutor, at least in her own eyes. And that’s what knots her stomach.
Thomas, for his part, plays a different tune. With his three paragraphs of justifications, he casts himself as the misunderstood Victim. Then he drops his “I needed more time,” and there he is as the Persecutor: he throws the ball back at Nina.
The ball keeps passing from hand to hand, and nobody puts it down.
The most unfair part is that the person doing the correcting often feels worse than the person who made the blunder. Nina asked for nothing outrageous, just correct work. But she dreads being seen as harsh, picky, a pain. Without meaning to, she has slipped over to the bad guy’s side.
Thomas, meanwhile, hears “you’re useless” when Nina only said “there’s a mistake in the spreadsheet.” And deep down, he knows perfectly well he screwed up. That doesn’t make him an idiot or a slacker, and he doesn’t deserve to be shamed. He simply sent his file on a Friday at 6:47 p.m., his head already in the weekend. It happens to the best of us.
How to get out of the triangle
Let’s be realistic: a very careless or very absent-minded colleague won’t turn into a Swiss watch, and wearing yourself out trying won’t help. But you can change your own way of interacting, and that’s already huge, because it avoids a direct and virulent confrontation.
If you’re Nina and you’re the one correcting
Talk about the work, never about the person. State what you see, make a request, and give a deadline. Banish the novel, the written sigh, and above all the “again” and the “always,” which are real detonators. And don’t redo the job for them: the Rescuer looks kind, but it’s paid for in resentment, with interest.
A message that defuses the situation, for example:
“Hi Thomas, I’ve looked at the spreadsheet: columns B and C are shifted and the delivery date is earlier than the order date. Could you send me a corrected version by tomorrow noon? Thanks!”
Not one adjective, not a shred of interpretation. Thomas has nothing to sink his teeth into, so nothing to counter-attack.
If you’re Thomas and you messed up
Acknowledge the blunder to yourself first: yes, it’s a mistake, and no, it doesn’t make you a lesser person. To err is human, and nobody ever got promoted for a total absence of typos. Then fix it right away, with no further comment. A simple “Thanks, it’s fixed, here’s the new version” is more than enough.
Justifications and explanations are the Victim’s reflex: the more you explain, the guiltier you look. “Fixed, thanks” is the reflex of a calm adult, and that’s the one people respect.
If you think you weren’t the one who got it wrong
It happens: the person you’re dealing with thinks they’ve spotted an error, when in fact they’re the one who misunderstood. If that’s you, before you counter-attack, ask a question, calmly and without emotion.
“I can’t find the error on my side. Can you explain what makes you say that?”
There are then two outcomes, and both are good.
- If the error really is on your side, the explanation shows you where, and you fix it without justifying yourself.
- If it’s the other person who misunderstood, then in explaining it to you, they’ll see it on their own and can own it with no harm done.
Discovering your own mistake is far less humiliating than having it pointed out to you.
Going further
There is an antidote to the drama triangle: the winner’s triangle, proposed by Acey Choy in 1990. Each role becomes its healthy version.
- By sticking to the facts, Nina goes from Persecutor to Assertive: she makes her request without attacking.
- By letting Thomas redo his own work, she goes from Rescuer to Caring: she trusts him to fix it.
- And Thomas, with his “Oops, thanks, fixed!”, goes from Victim to Vulnerable: he owns the mistake without hiding behind an excuse.
It doesn’t look like much, but it changes everything !
What Nina did the next time
Two weeks later, Thomas sends a new file, with a new mistake (Thomas will be Thomas, old habits die hard). This time, Nina takes a deep breath and writes him three factual lines, with no sighing and no subtext.
Thomas replies: “Oops, thanks, fixed!” And that’s it. No justification, no drama, no resentment. Nina has gained nine minutes of her life back, and at 10 a.m., they even share a coffee.
They didn’t become perfect or best friends. They simply stepped out of the triangle, and that’s already a pretty great win for a Monday morning.
FAQ
It’s a transactional analysis model describing three unconscious roles (Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer) that we fall into during conflict.
Talk about the work, not the person, stay factual, and make a clear request with a deadline.
Acknowledge it to yourself, fix it right away, and don’t justify yourself.
Acey Choy’s winner’s triangle, which replaces the three roles with Vulnerable, Assertive and Caring.
A correction is not an attack, and a mistake is not a sentence.
And you, which corner of the triangle do you find yourself in most often? Tell me in the comments, no justifications, promise.
