You may have heard of the book I’m OK — You’re OK. It was all the rage in the late 60s and is still popular today. It’s about Eric Berne’s theory of Transactional Analysis and his concept of games, but added to the dialogue the idea that drama and games largely stem from an underlying sense of “not OKness.”

The basic idea is simple. How do you tend to feel about yourself? About others? These two things, together, can be shown as a 2×2 grid. You may tend to “hang out” in one quadrant of the matrix more than others. This is your “life position.” The aim, obviously, is to spend as much of your time in the top right as possible (adapted from Mountain & Davidson, 2016).

Leaving the top right and abandoning your sense of OKness — of both yourself and others — is when you veer into drama. More drama, more games. Below, psychologist Taibi Kahler makes the same point in terms of his “four myths.” Like Thomas Harris’ (1967) I’m OK — You’re OK, Kahler’s work grew out of Berne’s theory of TA, chiefly popularized by his 1964 book, Games People Play. (Image adapted from Regier, 2017.)

To paraphrase Kahler, “Maturity is the avoidance of drama.” Another related concept is Karpman’s Triangle. In 1965, Stephen Karpman was drawing diagrams to figure out ways a quarterback could outsmart the defensive halfback in American football.

He started applying his diagrams to the depiction of drama in stories. In 1967, around the time Berne was talking about fairy tales and working on his follow-up book, What Do You Say After You Say Hello?, Karpman saw the film Valley of the Dolls. He realized that the drama in the movie largely took the form of the role and location switches of the characters.

Karpman then took Berne’s TA and replaced its ego states of Parent, Adult, and Child with the roles of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer, creating what Berne dubbed “Karpman’s Triangle.” Karpman started a paper about his concept and sent a draft to Berne. Berne sent back a copy, presumably with revisions, and told Karpman over the phone, “People are going to quote you on this for two hundred years so you might as well get it right the first time” (Karpman, 1972).

Though that remains to be seen, here we are talking about it more than 50 years later. Here’s the triangle (below). You may be familiar with it already. It’s in lots of books, and Michael Bungay Stanier discusses it in his recent bestseller, The Coaching Habit.

All of these concepts are about drama and how to avoid it. Notice how both Harris’ concept of life positions and Kahler’s four myths can be shown in terms of Karpman’s Triangle (with two of Kahler’s myths mapping onto the Victim role). If the triangle represents “drama,” then staying in the position of “I’m OK — You’re OK” is the avoidance of drama.

You’re fine. You don’t need rescuing. They’re fine. They don’t need you to fix them. Nobody should be persecuting. As Dustin Hoffman’s character says in Papillon, “Blame is for God and small children.” Even if you’re there to coach, to advise, then you’re there to help people own and solve their own problems. You’re there to help people do their own magic.

Let’s take a deeper look at the three roles on the triangle (descripti