Dave Kashen explains three personas that emerge under threat: victim, villain, and savior. These roles trap you in a cycle where rescuing others or playing the hero helps you avoid your own difficult feelings.
when you're in a state of threat, and these are, I think they're common from psychology, what are the 3 most common personas?
Yeah, I, I like the idea of thinking of them as personas. Um, they're encapsulated in, uh, what I've heard called the drama triangle or the fear triangle. So, uh, one is victim, right? That's often how we think of threat. It's like, oh, I'm a victim. Um, but there are actually other flavors of victimhood. Uh, the other is bully or, or villain we could call it. And then the third is hero or savior. And, um, you know, the, the victim, as it sounds, is this person, this persona is like, oh, poor me. Right. It's hard. It's happening to me. The, uh, the bully is like, actually feels quite alone and scared, but tends to like want, you know, need to control and need power. And so the bully tends to show up super righteous and judgmental and, you know, blamey. And sometimes it's interesting, sometimes like we have an inner bully, right? So there's a whole other conversation around how the voice in our head can play these personas, right? We often experience our inner bully that's like, wow, you screwed that up. What's the matter with you? You need to do better. Right. And that's, but then we'll also sometimes outwardly play that, especially if we have an active inner bully. And then the savior, savior tends to, um, basically want to avoid feeling something by, um, kind of rescuing the situation. It's like, oh, I, you know, I want to save you from feeling sad so that I don't have to feel sad.
