The Most Dangerous Story is the One You Tell Yourself

The most dangerous story is the one you tell yourself.

One sunny afternoon last week, I was fishing around in my 9 year old daughter’s backpack and pulled out a crumpled, lined sheet of paper. Dropping the bag, I smoothed out the paper to find a spelling test that went awry. Lots of missed words, X’s to indicate wrong answers. That’s not her usual outcome, so when I asked her about it, the disappointment and frustration showed on her face. I looked at the test again and noticed tiny script on the lower right hand side of the page that said “Why are you so dumb Lily?” and had an angry face drawn next to it.

This is a painful thing to see your child write. My heart hurt for her. As I tried to talk to her about it, she grew embarrassed and tried to scratch out the comment with a pen.

It became clear that my daughter has an internal story that says “I am dumb.” These snippets are not just some line, or a limiting belief, or a bad affirmation. They are part of a greater story with a lot more power behind it. That line she wrote on her spelling test is a part of the narrative, a main theme of a story.

It doesn’t work to try to talk someone out of believing that story. Inevitably, when you confront someone about a story like that, they have a response that comes remarkably close to “Well, I should know. I’m the one with the front row seat to my [mistakes, idiocy, etc.].” The storyteller is ruthless, and the storyteller is helpless against themselves.

There’s almost no defense we have against our own stories. We have no barrier. We might look at a storyteller on stage or on screen and suss out our doubts, gauging their style, their use of words, the way they move when they speak. We detect the pause or stumble that hints at the sleight of hand.

Or we look at a newscaster and think about the likelihood that they are lying. We gauge what we know about the world, compare it to what they’re saying, and make a determination about what to believe. We try to be aware, and we pride ourselves on doing so. We learn to have at least a little discretion about the stories that we encounter out in the world.

But we have no such defenses against the stories we tell ourselves. We are the producer and the consumer of the story, the Alpha and Omega of our own bullshit. We don’t gauge the storyteller’s motives, or their manner or behavior as they’re telling the story. We can’t discern their motives. “They” is us/you/me. The call is coming from inside the house.

Worse, the story is compelling. We love to hate ourselves. In a sick way, we insist the storyteller is right, and at least there’s that! I/they/we are right, even if it sucks to be right and being right in this case is ultimately more damaging than any other outcome—being right leads to your own demise.

It’s easy to tell yourself to stop saying harsh things about yourself, say positive things instead, etc. However, one positive line, or even an encouraging pep talk from a loved one, is not going to change an entire underlying story that you’re running in the background.

The Karpman Drama Triangle, which is a model developed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman in the 1960s to describe the way people unconsciously take on roles in conflict with another person. There are three: the Victim, who has been wronged; the Villain, who did the wronging; and the Hero (or Rescuer), who swoops in to fix it.

What makes it a triangle and not just a list is that the roles aren’t fixed — people rotate through them fluidly, sometimes mid-conversation, sometimes mid-thought. The Victim becomes the Villain when they lash out. The Hero becomes the Victim when their rescue isn’t appreciated. It’s elegant in the way that all good models are elegant: it shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here we are.

Interestingly, these are all also the main roles in western stories and narratives. We’re primed to understand these roles and how we fit into them in the grand scheme of our lives. While the Triangle was developed for conflict between people, we can also use it to look internally at our own stories, at ourselves.

Who might my daughter be in that moment when she says “Why are you so dumb, Lily”? We can cross out the Hero. She’s not thinking of herself in Heroic terms at that moment.

Let’s look at the way she’s saying it. She’s talking to herself like she’s the Villain. Which means that the version of Lily who wrote it is acting as the Victim.

As the Victim, she is wronged. She is helpless. She’s definitely trying to shift responsibility somewhere else, for that is the core activity of the Victim. The Victim believes they never bear any responsibility.

The way she poses that line says she’s talking to someone. The version of Lily she’s talking to is the Villain. As the Villain, she’s getting things wrong and being dumb. It is the Villain’s fault that she got a bad score on her test.

The key here: She is both. And in being both… she can’t win. She can’t win — and neither can you, if you’re playing multiple roles against yourself simultaneously.

The way Karpman developed this model was to use it to teach people to identify where you are, and then exit. The trouble is that it’s very hard to exit, to stay exited, and to move from a neutral space when it comes to our most sensitive memories and stories (seems like accomplishing that—and staying there—is damn near a level of enlightenment).

That goal is useful but doesn’t help us navigate this tricky territory we find ourselves in when we encounter a sticky story. As a rule, most of us situate ourselves in one position around the triangle, and then move ourselves along it freely depending on what we need to think, feel, or what we believe about the situation (or ourselves) in that moment. Most of us also have stories that we find ourselves permanently stuck in, moving around and around the Triangle forevermore.

I don’t think the effort should be focused on escaping the Triangle. I think the effort should start first by descending into it and accepting that we are in it… and then accepting each one of the roles in turn.

Let’s leave Lily behind for a moment as we experiment with what this looks like.

To try on the Triangle, start with where you think you are. The Victim might be the most common one we’re sitting in when it comes to dealing with other people, but when we’re dealing with ourselves, it could either be the Victim or the Villain.

Let’s say you have a story that you spend too much, that you’re terrible with money. You’re standing at the kitchen counter at 9 PM, looking at another credit card bill or having just received another text notification from your bank, letting you know how embarrassingly high your credit card bill is. Your stomach sinks and you begin to feel miserable and full of regret.

At that moment, you are probably the Victim feeling the pinch of the Villain’s decisions made weeks or months ago.

Instead of beginning to rage at the Villain, you will do the opposite: you will sit with the feeling of Victim for two minutes. Feel the wrongness. Let the story come — how it’s not your fault, how you did everything you could, how you’re just the worst. Feel all the threads of the story move through you for two full minutes.

Then go to the Villain for two minutes and sink into that role. Laugh and sneer, rub your hands together like some cartoon bad guy if you must, but really get into what you “did” to the victim. Try on the fact that you did this on purpose, and try out some reasons. Or try on the deniability of a real bad guy who tells you they did it “for your own good.” Let the Villain fully speak until it feels right.

Don’t leave these two until you are very clear what the Victim thinks the Villain did, and what the Villain thinks it did or didn’t do to the Victim.

Then move to the Hero/Rescuer. Sit in that role for two minutes. What would the Hero in this story do? Or more importantly, what would YOU as the Hero do? Really think about the Hero and their solution. Is it actually an effective one? Or does it just cause more problems? You might think this will lead them to actually save the day, but the Hero might be just as inept.

I’ll try on this example to demonstrate. Victim Sara might be mad that she overspent. She got a little carried away and now regrets what she bought and how she made her purchasing decisions. She might also be upset about a pattern she sees, and the repetition of that pattern tends to set Victim Sara off and make her feel even worse. Victim Sara is sad, mad, and feels like she can never get out from under this experience.

Let’s go to Villain Sara, who immediately cops to it in ridiculous way (twirling imaginary 1920s gangster pencil mustache (cause I’m a man in this visual, apparently?) sneering, etc.). Villain Sara doesn’t deny doing it, but goes overboard in saying things like “Yesss, I totally meant to run up your credit card just for fun, because you’re such a prude and you never let loose.” Or “I just wanted to make you suffer.” Or “I deserved those treats and you’re too stingy.” In this scenario, Villain Sara does not deny the doing of the deed.

Then we go to the Hero Sara, who does not come in swashbuckling and swooping in to save the day. No, Hero Sara comes in the way I tend to like to be think that I’m seen: calm, cool, collected, with a level head and an easy-going, understated charm. I have no idea if that’s actually how I come off, but that’s what my ego would like everyone else to think about me. So that’s how the Hero Sara comes in. She tries to find the “middle ground” between Villain and Victim… but doesn’t pause to decide whether finding middle ground is the right tactic for this situation or not. It’s more like a reflex; she’s always seeking a way to connect somewhere in the middle.

More than that, Hero Sara would say to Victim: It’s not that bad! We can work this out. What can we return? Where can we pull/move money from? Do we have any big rushes of money coming in? Then she’d turn to Villain and say that she was sure she didn’t mean to screw Victim over, and that we’ll get this worked out.

She would spend most of her time trying to make everyone feel alright.

This just sounds like a shit show of parts and complexes at this point, doesn’t it? But already, we can sense that there is more going on beneath the surface.

Victim Sara reveals that what’s most upsetting to her is the pattern.

Villain Sara has said it in one way or another: she felt unnecessarily restrained.

Hero Sara reveals that we’re just trying to get back to baseline of feeling okay.

The point here isn’t to fix anything. The Hero isn’t going to save the day. The Victim isn’t going to vanquish the Villain. The point is to let the story tell you what it is, so you can start to do the real work of dismantling it. In order for hypothetical Sara to loosen the grip of this story, she’ll need to deal with the underlying pattern, find other ways to feel unconstrained, and create a way back to equilibrium.

Yours will look different, but it’s important to remember this: Victim, Villain, and Hero are never going to dismantle or disarm a story. You have to.

Now, let’s return to Lily. She’s got a Villain and a Victim who are slinging shots at one another right now.

My first instinct was to ask her what the Hero would say, to get her to channel some inner protagonist who could swoop in and counter the Villain’s verdict. But I caught myself… because that’s still the Triangle. That’s just adding a third voice to the argument, and the argument was already doing enough damage on its own.

So instead I asked her something different: Who decided that test gets to say that about you?

She looked at me a little blankly. Nine-year-olds are not always primed for epistemology. But I watched something shift behind her eyes — not an answer exactly, but the beginning of a question. The question got her to loosen the assumption that the story was simply true because she was the one telling it.

That’s the move: not finding the right role to play and running around the Triangle, but stepping back far enough to see that you’ve been playing roles at all. You’re the author, not the character. You’re the one holding the pen, not the one on the page.

It won’t hold. She’ll write something unkind to herself again, and so will you, and so will I. But the goal isn’t a clean, permanent exit. The goal is to reach the moment of recognition — that gap where the story pauses just long enough for you to remember you’re the one telling it.

The most dangerous story is the one you tell yourself. Which also means you’re the only one with the authority to write a different one.