The Villain, The Victim, And The Hero: How This Dynamic Is Playing Out In Your Parenting And Life

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome to the podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. Life is good. My family’s good, my kids are good, I’m good. It’s summertime in the Midwest, in Chicago. It’s amazing. I’ve been coaching a lot of you on summertime mindset and routines, and creating a summer intentionally that’s rooted in your high standards, but not rooted in perfectionism. And I love that and it’s just a really good season. I’m not pregnant, that’s amazing because that means I feel good.

It doesn’t matter if I’m sleep deprived. I do all of this mindset work, as you know, and it’s just a really good time. And as my Membership mamas know, I am always working on expanding my capacity to feel good. I think that can be really helpful when things are just going well in your circumstances, to not kind of, limit yourself and to really expand feeling joy and feeling delight and creating more safety in that. That’s a whole different podcast. But I just wanted to say hi. If you would, like, you can send me a DM over at mom.onpurpose on Instagram. Let me know that you came from this podcast. I just love connecting with you all and you know, making it a two-way street. Haven’t mentioned this in a while, but I think it’s time. Remember, you can leave a message on the podcast hotline.

I’ve had so many content ideas and the business growing and it’s been just so fun. So I haven’t checked in with it in a while. But you can always call the podcast hotline. All you have to do is dial 833-3AskNat. That’s 833-327-5628. Leave me a message, let me know what you would like coaching on. There were several questions I didn’t get to on a recent Instagram q and a. So if, if you are one of those people and you would like help with tantrums or listening, or summertime, any of that, it’s an opportunity to get some free coaching. All you have to do is leave me a message on that hotline and I will do a podcast on it. Time to get some of those back so it can, it can just be a different type of podcast. And what I love is that it feels like it’s more back and forth, which is really fun for me.

Okay, with that, let’s chat about the villain, the victim and the hero. I love this framework. It is a positive psychology framework. I did not create it. I use it all of the time as an awareness tool. It’s often referred to as the villain, the victim and the savior complex. But I prefer the hero word there. Same thing. This dynamic plays out everywhere. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it and it can be pretty life-changing. So I am talking about the psychology tool describing relationship dynamics. So there’s this triangle. There’s the villain. Who is the one to blame. There is the victim who is sort of helpless, and then there is the hero who swoops in to help the victim. And everyone’s blaming the villain. These roles happen in reaction to relationship dynamics and reaction to circumstances. The key is that, you know, they’re reactive.

It’s not intentional. It’s not like we go about choosing this. You will just naturally find that as a mom, you probably, if you have multiple children, you probably see one of them more often in the villain or victim role, especially if you have older kids. I was coaching a lot of moms inside the Membership with teens and young adult children. And you know, nine times out of 10, it’s repeatedly seeing one child as primarily the victim and one child primarily as the villain with younger kids. And this has been my experience, I find that it is more interchangeable. So, you know, for example, one of my sons might be throwing a car at the other one. And so you have the one who’s throwing the car in that situation as sort of the villain, and then the one who, is potentially going to get hit as, uh, the victim there and an hour later it could be reversed.

Someone’s taking someone else’s toy outside when we’re playing. So those roles can switch. I find that, you know, in my experience coaching hundreds, thousands of moms, typically when your kids are older, you just see one child in that victim role. You see one, child more as the villain. And you mom are playing hero, fixer jumping in to solve every problem, to manage emotions, to “rescue her family”. Now, that is how it comes up with respect to parenting. But it also comes up just you being a woman in your life. And you probably have found yourself in each of these roles at different times. So for example, when you are feeling like your life is happening to you and you put yourself in that victim mentality, in your mind, you are likely looking to blame someone. So for example, if you are feeling like you don’t get any help and you are unsupported and it’s just too much right now, you might be blaming your husband or maybe blaming your mother-in-law, right?

There’s someone in your mind who is responsible for this, and you’re also looking for someone to save you. It’s not like your brain is, spouting off ideas to come up with solutions. You’re not in empowerment. You are looking for someone to blame and you think it’s someone else’s fault, and you are also looking for someone to save you. That’s when you’re in the victim mentality. And if you have listened to this podcast for any length of time, you probably know that I, I used to be the queen of this, the queen of self pity, the queen of kind of feeling like my life is happening to me and just this kind of low grade self pity. And I mean, as you know, I have accomplished so much in my life. So it’s not like it’s debilitating. I wasn’t going around talking about this or even having the awareness of it.

There was just this sense of, you know, this isn’t fair is really what that’s about. When you are playing the role of the victim, this isn’t fair.

This is happening to me. And what I do want to point out is I’m talking about the mentality here, right? This is that triangle, this psychology tool. I’m not talking about being an actual victim. And it’s important to point out because you could be an actual victim and then after the fact, carry out this villain victim hero mentality to your own detriment. So it’s not even asking, is this true or not? It’s noticing how unhelpful it’s so for me, I’ll give you an example of my student loan debt. Many, many moons ago when I got into student loan debt for law school, very common thing to do, and I didn’t really have any awareness of my financial life until after law school.

And I was shocked and I really felt like I was a victim in that sense, right? Of course I didn’t say that, but it just felt unfair, right? That’s kind of how I probably would have phrased it. Unfair, this is happening to me, this shouldn’t be happening, it’s not fair. And very quickly relative to, you know, my life and where I’m at now, like within a year I would say I really learned so much about money and I shifted to empowerment. And that benefited me because then I was able to problem solve, to get out of it because it’s not, you know, useful to ask, well, is this someone else’s fault? Is this the education system’s fault? Is this my parents’ fault? You know, is it, just the way that we, we allow this sort of lending? Is it the bank’s fault? Those questions just aren’t helpful, right?

Because it’s looking for someone to blame. Because even if that’s true, okay, which we could argue that that is true, that there’s some blame that could be shared there, that’s not helpful because the bank, the schools, my parents, were not coming to pay off the debt. So that’s, I I just like to use that example to show you that the benefit of noticing and knowing when you are in the victim mentality is that you get to problem solve to create the actual results that you want. Because if someone else is to blame, then you can’t create the solution for it. So I, for those of you who don’t know, or if you’re new here, I started my online business years ago and ended up paying off all of my debt, quitting practicing law, and now I have this coaching practice and it truly blows my mind that this is like what I’m doing in the world.

Like I love it so much. I’m so passionate about it. I help my clients. I’m so devoted as a coach and I get to have flexible hours and just all of the things, right? And that never would have happened. But for me, getting to empowerment and out of that victim mentality, right? I had to create a solution, no one would’ve said, I know you should start a blog, okay? And that was the solution that I came up with, and it worked because I was committed to it. And I’m going to come back around to how helpful this is for you to think about with respect to when you’re playing the hero role. When you play the hero role and you try to jump in to help your kids, to manage their emotions, to rescue who you are perceiving as, you know, the victim from your, the sibling who you’re perceiving as the villain.

Like maybe the, the brothers always just really tough on the sister, and you’re thinking like, this is so unfair, you actually aren’t helping, sister. Now this doesn’t mean you don’t care, it doesn’t mean you don’t support, but for my mom’s, you know who I’m talking to, that is, you’re nowhere near that end of the spectrum, right? You’re not, you’re not going to be like apathetic, like good luck daughter. Instead you are trying to micromanage brother in this case and solve it so that sister doesn’t have this challenge. And it’s such a small shift in the way that you think about daughter just using this example here. But it’s everything. Because when you start to see her as capable, as confident, as able, that is what she needs to believe in herself. It’s like the exact thing that you want to believe about her, but you’re not doing it because you’re filling in as that hero role and as someone who formally would’ve definitely identified as a fixer growing up, again, you know, who knows what your childhood was like, but I can tell you about my childhood and having that fixer identity was helpful as a child.

And so it’s not bad. There’s probably a reason that you gravitated towards that. It got you useful results potentially growing up at least it definitely did for me. It’s just now seeing that as a mom, okay, not helpful, okay, my kids are safe. We’re not talking about, you know, anything that’s actually dangerous or harmful. Here we’re talking about siblings who have their own relationship. And the most helpful thing that I could do, or in this case the hypothetical mom could do with her daughter, if the son is, you know, doing whatever he’s doing, is to believe in the daughter and to believe in her capabilities and to believe in her being able to figure it out. So what often happens is the person who believes in themselves as, the victim and having that victim mentality, they will look for that hero and it can kind of feel good as a mom to be needed like that, especially for moms with kids who are teenagers or out of the home.

Like it feels good to be needed. And what you have to see is that it’s actually not helpful. And so there’s a little bit of, I don’t know, I want to say it’s not resistance to believing in the child, it’s just, it doesn’t feel as good as when you are just needed and you’re in there fixing and solving. But I’m telling you from all of the moms who I’ve coached on this with older kids, it’s so empowering for them to actually believe in their kids. And it just sounds like simple shifts in your language instead of, oh, I know what you should do, you should do this, or I’m going to talk to your brother. It’s, huh, that sounds really tough. I’m so sorry that’s happening. Tell me more. What do you think you’re going to do about it? And, you’re there, you’re present, you’re talking with her.

You’re maybe even offering ideas. But it, it’s not so much about the actions, it’s the belief underlying the action is I believe that my daughter can figure this out. So you’re not perpetuating that victim mentality that she needs rescuing or saved. And on the other side of the coin is believing that the “villain” isn’t the “villain”. It’s giving that person, more empathy and sympathizing with them. Often they’re the ones who, you know, are given sort of a hard time. And, and for all of the reasons that you would guess in your mind, and I was just coaching,, a mom with young adult kids recently on this, and it was so hard for her brain to see how the child could not be the villain in this case. And, and there was nothing actually, harmful going on. It was just like sibling dynamics and not getting along.

And they, they’re older, right? They’re in their early twenties. And, I had to show her like how in this case you could flip it around and say he could be the victim and how does he feel about that? And how might he feel like the victim? And it was like a glitch in the matrix for her to even consider that. So just notice it. I find that this explanation is often enough because parents, especially with older kids, can typically identify rather quickly, oh yeah, this is something that I am doing and I am definitely like perpetuating that sort of triangle and it’s not helpful for, for anyone, right? Definitely not for, for the kids. They have their own relationship to figure out. And again, this doesn’t mean that you’re apathetic, it doesn’t mean you totally step away, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t involved.

But it does mean that you stop seeing one as the victim and one as the villain. And a book that I do want to mention here that, that talked,, I think at length about this, that, you know, it wasn’t the whole point of the whole book, but it was definitely a huge takeaway that I took from the book, Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish Siblings Without Rivalry. Excellent book. The point of the book was not to talk about this dynamic, but it is brought up there in the book. So if you’re looking for more on that, I definitely recommend that book. I do also want to talk about it with respect to littler kids. I think, at least in my own experience, it can be really easy to, you know, think of the bad kid and then think of the good kid.

And even if it switches, right? Like the example I gave earlier, if you think, or it could be just, it’s always one, but it is more likely to switch, I think when they’re really little. Just noticing that you have a tendency to maybe side with one kid, or it’s not even necessarily that maybe you are overtly siding with them, but in your mind you kind of feel sorry for one of your kids. That’s a telltale sign that you are seeing that child as incapable. It’s the exact opposite of what, how you would want to see your child. And where I think this comes from is the underlying belief that we don’t want our kids to have challenges. So for example, you know, let’s say, one of your kids, you know, has a lot going on maybe mentally and emotionally, and you’re giving them a lot of resources. And it’s not that the older child, this other child is doing anything to the other child, but the impact of what’s going on with that child is that, you feel bad, and sorry for the other child who doesn’t have those challenges. If you keep that way of thinking about it, it could send the message that this child isn’t capable of navigating this challenge or this, you think this child shouldn’t have this challenge.

And so one thought that is so helpful that I like to go to is, oh, apparently my kids are supposed to have this challenge right now. It, again, it does not mean you are not helpful, you’re not supportive, but you’re, you’re not doing it from pity, from pitying them, from, you know, feeling sorry for them. It’s just not helpful, right? Because if you look at the facts or what’s going on, it’s not like you’re going to change any of the circumstances. And so you really gotta check in with yourself and ask yourself, what is my motivation here? Meaning, what are my thoughts and feelings driving this?

Is there one that’s, you know, the helpless one and then the one to blame? And then are you being fixer? Notice that, and what you want to do is you want to feel more confident in the one who you would typically think of as the helpless one. And you want to empower them, and you want to see them as capable. And for the one who tends to get all the blame, you want to give them more empathy. It can be just as simple as that shift. Now, when it comes to you being in any of these roles, I find that if you tend to be in, you know, let’s just say the fixer role as mom, the hero role, it is probably likely that there are other areas of your life where you bounce around in different roles in this sort of triangle. So for example, if you don’t get your way, you’re probably looking for someone to blame and you’re probably looking for a hero.

And again, the the reason that it’s really helpful to think about these roles and where you fall into them is because it doesn’t help you. If blaming someone actually helped you get a solution to your problem, I would be all for it, right? I always say people are responsible for their actions, but when you blame them for what’s going on and they can’t change what’s happening for you, they’re not going to, right? No one was coming to pay off my student loans. Like that was something that I had to do. The quicker you get to empowerment, the better it is for your sake. So notice when you’re looking for someone to blame, notice when you’re looking for a hero to come rescue you, it might be as simple as, you know, blaming your kids, blaming motherhood, not overtly, but in your mind, blaming them for feeling tired, blaming them for not enough self care, blaming them for not being able to I don’t know, whatever it is that you want, do the things that you want to do.

If you’re blaming them or you’re blaming motherhood more generally, or maybe you’re blaming your husband and you are feeling kind of that mommy martyrdom that helplessness, again, it doesn’t even matter if any of that is true. Let’s say your husband isn’t helpful at all. It doesn’t matter because blaming someone doesn’t help you get the results that you want. When you get into confidence and self-empowerment and get out of that triangle, you will stop looking for a hero. You will stop looking for someone to fix, and you will step into you being the hero of your own life. That’s the goal. Now, if you’re used to, again, falling into one of these roles, it is also likely that from time to time you fall into the hero or the fixer role when it comes to other adult relationships. So do you have a friend who calls you to really get you to help her solve her problems? And does that stress you out? But can you not even help yourself by taking the call and trying to help her because you have taken on this identity as being the one who is the hero.

The best way that I have found to help clients get out of doing this is to show them, and that’s what I want to share with you here, how extraordinarily unhelpful that is for the friend, for the person calling. It, it gives them like a short term little fix that’s assuming you actually, you know, help them in a certain way. But long term, what does that teach them? They need to keep coming back to you for help. It does not teach them the very thing that we would hope that they would learn, which is, you know, self-reliance kind of, self-empowerment. Again, this doesn’t mean that we’re, we don’t have, um, some interdependence on each other. Absolutely. I’m all for asking someone for help. I’m, please don’t hear me saying like, we have to all be independent and can’t ask anyone for help. That’s not what I’m saying.

I’m talking to a very specific person because I get it. I was you and I’ve been there. So, I, I truly believe the, the person listening will hear what I’m saying here in that it’s not someone coming to you like, Hey, I’m working on solving this challenge and I’m wondering what your opinion is on this. I’m thinking about A, B, and C, and I’m wondering if you can, you know, give me your thoughts on it. Okay? It’s never like that. That’s like a very clean, helpful situation. It’s more like, oh my gosh, I’m in desperation here. Please help me. I don’t know what to do. This isn’t working. I’m stuck. You’re my only way out. Okay? They might not say those words, but that’s sort of the energy behind it is like, I am drowning. Please save me. And again, I’m not suggesting you’re like, Nope, I can’t talk to you. Sorry, Natalie said, get out of the hero role. Of course not. But I am saying the way that you step in to support should be fueled by belief in the person and their capabilities to figure it out. And you can offer them suggestions, but again, it’s, it’s from such a different energy that often you won’t even need to because you’re conversing with them in a way that’s so respectful. It’s not from, oh yeah, I’m going to play mom here and save you and rescue you and be the hero.

It’s, I respect you and I know deep in my bones that you can figure this out. Now, you’re probably not going to say that. I don’t know, wouldn’t say that to one of my girlfriends, but I’m going to be talking with them and you know, asking them what they want to do and you know, offering my 2 cents. But again, the energy behind it is so different. It’s respectful and it’s fueled by my friend is amazing, and I know she’s going to figure this out and I’m here to support her along her journey, not, I know what’s best for my friend. And so she should do it this way because you know, she doesn’t know. And again, I think the huge benefit I hope from this podcast is kind of looking at this drama triangle and bringing awareness to it for your own sake. Like where are you playing the role of the hero?

Where are you noticing that you are in self pity and playing the role of the victim and looking for someone to blame and looking for someone to save you? And also with respect to your parenting, are you in that hero role? And then if you have multiple kids labeling in your mind, one of them as villain, one of them as victim, and often siding with the victim and then viewing them as helpless, blaming the other one, even though you might not be saying it, you’re doing it in your actions and in your energy and kind of meddling in their relationship. And again, for all of the reasons that I mentioned in the other examples, it’s not going to be helpful for them. You’re not believing in the one who you’re perceiving as the victim, the helpless one. You’re not seeing them as capable and motivated and you know, self-reliant.

And then you are disconnecting and essentially blaming, even if you don’t say it in that way, the one who you are perceiving as the villain. So something that I try really hard to do is to just remove those labels and some thoughts that help me are okay, these are just kids, different personalities, brothers, siblings, figuring it out. They’re doing the best they can and sometimes it’s a miss. And you know, my kids are so little, so I add in thoughts like, and I can hold boundaries and I can support them. No one is to blame here. It’s really important for me to be in that space. I’m there to hold boundaries and to facilitate anything that I need to. But I’m not judge and jury. I’m not the mediator. I’m not the one who is going to meddle in their stuff. I’m going to let them figure it out.

And I’m not going to view one of them as the helpless one and one of them as the one who is to blame for my sake and for their sake. So notice the role you are playing and just ask yourself, what role am I in right now? Notice the roles that you are attributing to your kids. Just awareness is enough. You can add a pause in there, you can breathe, you can start to let go of those labels as someone who can definitely identify as a recovering fixer. This has been a game changer for me personally in all of my relationships and in my own experience of motherhood. So I’m not blaming my kids or motherhood on anything. And then also in the way that I view my kids and the sibling dynamics that they’re already experiencing. If you want me to answer your specific questions on this, bring them to Ask A Coach inside the Mom On Purpose membership, and I will coach you on it so you can get direct feedback from me and make sure that you are stepping out of this triangle and into feeling empowered both in your life and in your parenting.

Alright, my beautiful friends, I will talk with you next week. Take care. Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.