Your Body Keeps Playing the Victim: New Framework Targets Relational Habits Through Movement

Why do so many people understand their destructive relationship patterns perfectly well, yet keep repeating them anyway? A new theoretical paper published in the journal Current Psychology argues that the answer may lie not in what we think, but in how our bodies have learned to move, breathe, and hold space in relation to others. The work, authored by Chrysostomos Kalyvas of the University of Ljubljana, proposes a structured, embodied methodology for transforming the maladaptive roles of the well-known Drama Triangle into the healthier positions of the Empowerment Triangle, using movement, play, and improvisation rather than insight alone.

The Drama Triangle, first described by psychologist Stephen Karpman in 1968, maps three interlocking roles that people slip into during conflict and stress: the Victim, who feels helpless and dependent; the Rescuer, who over-functions and intrusively helps; and the Persecutor, who criticizes, blames, and controls. These are not fixed personality traits, the framework emphasizes, but dynamic positions that individuals can occupy from moment to moment, particularly under perceived threat. When enacted rigidly and unconsciously, they sustain cycles of blame, dependency, and disempowerment across personal, professional, and group relationships.

A popular counter-model, the Empowerment Triangle, reframes each of these positions: the Victim becomes the Creator, oriented toward choice, agency, and problem-solving; the Rescuer becomes the Coach, who supports others through curiosity and listening rather than over-functioning; and the Persecutor becomes the Challenger, who offers directness and accountability without aggression. The problem, according to Kalyvas, is that most people can describe these healthier roles with ease yet still default to their old patterns the moment pressure mounts. This gap between knowing and doing is the central puzzle the new framework sets out to address.

The theoretical key is embodied cognition, a research program holding that thinking, emotion, and interpersonal behavior are grounded in the body’s sensorimotor systems. From this perspective, posture, muscle tone, breath rhythm, gesture, and spatial orientation do not merely reflect internal psychological states; they actively generate and modify them. Somatic psychology extends this idea by proposing that entrenched relational patterns are stored as implicit procedural memories, encoded in the autonomic nervous system, habitual tension, and characteristic movement patterns. In other words, the Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor are not just stories we tell ourselves; they are full-body configurations that the nervous system can re-run automatically whenever context cues them.

This account is consistent with research on habit formation, which shows that repeated behaviors become contextually cued and enacted despite conscious intentions, and with psychotherapy literature indicating that insight alone often fails to produce behavioral change. Role awareness and role transformation, the paper argues, are partially distinct processes that rely on partially distinct mechanisms. Someone may genuinely endorse the values of the Creator, Coach, and Challenger in a workshop discussion, yet find their shoulders collapsing, their breath shortening, and their feet retreating the instant a colleague raises their voice. If the old role lives in the body, the argument goes, then interventions must reach the body too.

The proposed intervention consists of six sequential sessions of roughly 75 to 90 minutes each, designed for group or dyadic settings and adaptable to psychotherapy, coaching, education, and organizational training. Each session follows a consistent architecture intended to support psychological safety and incremental learning. Sessions begin with a somatic warm-up, including grounding, gentle joint mobilization, spatial orientation exercises, and breath-based centering, all aimed at sharpening interoceptive awareness, the ability to sense internal bodily states. Participants then deliberately activate the embodied qualities of the Drama Triangle roles, exploring through posture, movement motifs, and relational positioning how Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor actually feel in the flesh.

Once these habitual configurations have been recognized, participants experiment with their adaptive counterparts, each introduced through characteristic somatic features. The Creator is anchored in grounded verticality and a centered gaze; the Coach in an open lateral stance and a receptive posture; the Challenger in relaxed firmness and clear spatial boundaries. Structured improvisational scenarios then bridge the studio and the street: role-switching exercises, dyadic encounters, boundary-setting dialogues, and group problem-solving tasks simulate everyday relational challenges. Each session closes with structured reflection, consolidating learning by linking bodily experience back to cognitive understanding so that insights can transfer beyond the training context.

Crucially, the framework does not claim a one-to-one correspondence between any single posture and any psychological role. A collapsed posture may occur in many contexts without signifying a Victim position, just as an expansive posture does not necessarily indicate a Persecutor. The somatic indicators, which also include gesture patterns such as reaching, shielding, or pointing, and breath rhythms ranging from shallow to steady, function as exploratory prototypes and observable entry points into broader relational processes rather than diagnostic markers. This caution is warranted, the paper notes, given mixed findings in posture-based embodiment research, where bodily configurations may influence affect and cognition but do not reliably map onto fixed psychological outcomes.

To promote long-term integration, participants develop somatic anchors: simple bodily cues such as a grounding stance, a hand placement, or a breathing pattern that evoke the qualities of the Creator, Coach, or Challenger during real-life interactions. The hypothesized mechanisms of change are tied directly to intervention components. Grounding and breathwork are proposed to enhance interoceptive awareness, which prior research links to emotion regulation and self-monitoring; spatial differentiation exercises are proposed to strengthen boundary awareness; and repeated improvisational role-switching is proposed to build role flexibility. Together, these processes are expected to help people recognize role activation earlier and expand their behavioral options under stress. The paper is explicit, however, that these mechanisms are testable hypotheses, not established pathways, and that the intervention has not yet been empirically evaluated.

That evaluation is precisely what the proposed research agenda is designed to deliver. Following established models for developing complex interventions, Kalyvas recommends a phased approach: first, small-scale feasibility and acceptability studies in psychotherapy, coaching, or educational settings; second, mechanism-focused mixed-methods studies combining repeated self-report measures, behavioral observation, movement analysis, and qualitative inquiry; and third, controlled comparisons against psychoeducational or purely cognitive approaches to test whether embodied work adds value beyond insight alone. The author also acknowledges significant limitations, including the framework’s untested status, the likely cultural variability of embodied expressions, and its heavy dependence on facilitator skill in somatic cue recognition and trauma-informed practice. Because movement-based exploration can evoke strong emotions, the methodology emphasizes predictable structure, participant choice, and non-interpretive facilitation, and it is explicitly not intended as a trauma-processing modality. Evidence for body-oriented psychotherapy more broadly remains promising but heterogeneous, with recent reviews calling for larger and more rigorous studies. Still, the framework raises a question that extends well beyond the Drama Triangle itself: if recurring interpersonal patterns are maintained partly through embodied processes, then meaningful relational change may depend not only on what people understand, but on what they repeatedly enact with their bodies. Whether that proposition holds is now an empirical challenge for future research.

Subject of Research: Embodied transformation of Drama Triangle interpersonal roles into Empowerment Triangle roles through movement-based intervention

Article Title: Embodied role transformation: from the drama triangle to the empowerment triangle

Article References: Kalyvas, C. (2026). Embodied role transformation: from the drama triangle to the empowerment triangle. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10065-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10065-0

Keywords: embodied cognition, somatic psychology, Drama Triangle, Empowerment Triangle, interpersonal roles, experiential learning, intervention design, interoceptive awareness, emotional regulation, role theory, improvisation, habit formation