Triangulation in relationships refers to a communication pattern where one person avoids direct interaction with another, instead using a third person as an intermediary. This can create misunderstandings and conflicts, often serving as a manipulative strategy to control or gain power.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Triangulation is a pattern where one person routes communication through a third person instead of speaking directly to the other.
- Origins: Murray Bowen described how a third person absorbs family tension, steadying the system without resolving the conflict.
- Roles: Karpman’s drama triangle names three roles in a triangulated conflict: victim, rescuer and persecutor.
- Intent: It can be deliberate manipulation or an unintentional way of avoiding confrontation.
- Effects: It breeds confusion and hurt feelings. Meta-analyses link children feeling caught between parents to poorer adjustment.
- Evidence: Triangles clearly form, but Bowen’s explanation of why people triangulate has only partial support.
- Responding: You control only your own response, so pause, check the facts and speak directly to the person concerned.
Triangulation Manipulation
Triangulation is often an attempt to gain control. The manipulator seeks advantage from the situation, in the form of loyalty or attention from the other parties.
It brings difficulty and confusion. Too many people can get involved, which raises the risk of harmful behavior.
Signs of Triangulation
Triangulation can be used in an array of relationship types:
- Families: Siblings, or a parent and a child, can form an alliance against the other parent.
- Friendships: A friend whose feelings are hurt brings in a third party for supposed support or sympathy.
- Romantic relationships: One partner involves an outside person to create feelings of lust or jealousy.
Example 1: Using a Messenger
Let’s say John wants to communicate with Marissa. However, instead of directly talking to her, John would rather speak to Marissa’s brother, George, as a messenger or relay. This then allows John to manipulate the communication they have.
Being the person in the middle is uncomfortable. Family therapist Esther Perel told a caller who was the sole confidant to two feuding friends that they were “triangulated and in a bind” (Perel, n.d.).
The caller was caught in a conflict of loyalty. Perel then asked about their past:
“Did you grow up with triangles? Are you familiar with this intense geometry of relationships?”
Perel treats the pattern as one that often has roots earlier than the friendship causing the stress.
Triangulation is a versatile tactic. People use it for many reasons, from creating a rivalry to turning others against each other.
The immediate outcome is that attention moves away from the actual issue. The focus becomes the conflict between two people in a relationship.
The third member can feel pressured or manipulated. One party in the triangle feels rejected or excluded from the alliance formed.
The third person may also be an inappropriate choice. For example, a parent becomes a mediator between the other parent and their child.
In some cases, triangulation is an intentional attempt to make the situation in favor of the manipulator.
It could involve turning people against each other, making someone else look like the so-called “bad guy,” and creating intense emotional confusion in the communication between everyone.
Example 2: Unintentional Triangulation
However, triangulation can be unintentional, or the individual may not realize the true impact of their behaviors.
People may use triangulation to avoid confrontation or tricky situations. They could be uncomfortable speaking up or resolving an issue directly with the person involved. Maybe they are shy.
Then they get a third party involved, which can fuel the fire even more. This type of person often demonstrates passive-aggressive tendencies and lacks assertiveness.
Some of these individuals also lack the psychological awareness to understand their harmful behaviors. It is common to seek a friend’s moral support.
In these situations, though, they are continually looking for someone to just agree with them and verify the supposed injustice they think they have experienced.
That agreement can briefly relieve stress. It can also become risky, because it leads to dysfunctional relationship patterns, especially if reinforced over multiple incidents.
The result is messy. It often leads to more hurt feelings or confused misunderstandings.
Let’s say that a parent refuses to acknowledge their children’s personality and uniqueness.
Simultaneously, each sibling is treated very differently and is discouraged from communicating with one another except via the parent; this is a clear case of triangulation.
The pattern can last into adulthood. As family therapist Annie Wright explains, a parent may become the only channel of information between adult siblings. The parent filters, shades or even invents what each sibling supposedly says about the other (Wright, n.d.).
Wright argues this is among the most underrecognized forms of relational damage in narcissistic families, because siblings may never realize the parent is the source.
Friends and partners can triangulate too. They may use another person to build a hostile environment, whether to stir up drama or to pressure someone into doing things they would not otherwise do.
The two kinds differ in motive, behavior and awareness:
| Intentional | Unintentional | |
|---|---|---|
| Motive | Tilt the situation in the manipulator’s favor and gain control, loyalty or attention | Avoid confrontation, often through shyness or discomfort resolving a conflict directly |
| Behavior | Turn people against each other and cast someone as the “bad guy” | Keep seeking a third party who will agree that an injustice occurred |
| Awareness | Deliberate | The person may not see the impact on others |
Example 3: Avoiding Direct Confrontation
People also use triangulation to bring another individual into a relationship without directly confronting the person they have an issue with.
Triangulation is linked to some personality disorders. These include narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. People with these conditions often judge themselves by how they compete with others.
This competitive, “win or lose” attitude can turn malicious. It can lead someone to sabotage or manipulate a person they see as a threat, rather than confront that person directly.
Chances are, you have probably experienced triangulation and this sort of manipulation before. Suppose a person had an issue with a friend or family member.
In that case, direct communication may not have been used. Instead, the friend or family may have chosen to manipulate a third party or another person to say everything they needed.
This separates the two people and only involves another person in the conversation as they see fit.
Annie Wright shows how this plays out in a composite case she calls “Rosalind,” whose mother was the link between her and her sister.
“My mother was the only line between me and my sister for most of my adult life. Everything she told me about my sister, and everything she told my sister about me, had been filtered. Shaded. Sometimes invented outright.”
The sisters were, in Rosalind’s words, “estranged for three years over conversations that never happened” (Wright, n.d.). Wright notes that her client stories are composites, so this illustrates a pattern rather than one person’s testimony.
Three Points of Triangulation
Triangulation is often described through three roles from Stephen Karpman’s “drama triangle”: the victim, the rescuer and the persecutor (Karpman, 1968).
Karpman, a psychiatrist, developed the model in transactional analysis to describe the positions people take in recurring conflicts. Each role has a typical stance:
- Victim: “Poor me!” They present as helpless and look for someone to save them.
- Rescuer: “Let me help you!” They need to be needed and often keep the victim dependent.
- Persecutor: “It is all your fault!” They criticize, blame and control.
The Victims
This person has a prey complex, and their stance is essentially, “poor me!”
Regardless of whether they actually are the victim or not, victims view themselves as oppressed, helpless, sad, and ashamed and come across as sensitive people.
Victims usually create the triangle in the first place. They bring others in, cast themselves as victims, and generate a sense of empathy that binds the triangle together.
They tend to deny responsibility for their harmful actions. They also deny having any power to change the circumstances they helped create.
Victims look for a rescuer to “save” them. They often struggle to make decisions, solve problems, find pleasure in life, or recognize their own self-defeating behavior.
This person will often reenact the triangle whenever they can to build as many “support” networks for themselves.
They will produce triangles at work, in school, in their family, and in any other relationships they have. Why? They may love chaos, enjoy being the victim, or genuinely believe triangulation is a positive way to communicate.
The Rescuers
The belief of the rescuer is, “Let me help you!” They work hard to help and take care of other people. They frequently need to help others to feel satisfied with themselves while dropping their own needs and not taking responsibility for themselves.
Rescuers are enablers and classically co-dependent. They need victims to provide support to and often cannot allow the victim to get better.
They use manipulation tactics like guilt to keep their victims dependent on them because rescuers feel guilty if they are not helping somebody.
Over time, the role leaves rescuers overworked, tired and outwardly saintly while resentment builds underneath.
The Persecutors
The persecutor often says, “It is all your fault!” Persecutors tend to criticize and blame the victim and can set strict limits.
Therefore, they are controlling, authoritative, angry, and unpleasant. They keep the victim feeling dejected through constant bullying.
Persecutors find it hard to be flexible or vulnerable.
They also are afraid of risking being a victim themselves, so persecutors will yell and criticize without actually solving any problems or aiding anyone else in solving the problem.
These are the most extreme versions of these three roles, but we can encounter people playing milder versions of these roles regularly.
Triangulation in Relationships
Triangulation can come in various dynamics. Let’s look at how triangulation shows up in family dynamics and romantic relationships.
Golden Child – Scapegoat Family Dynamic
Within a dysfunctional family unit, an unhealthy, toxic, and often selfish caregiver splits their god-like self-image and subordinate self-image into two different parts projected onto their children.
As a result, one child becomes the golden child, idealized as the perfect one who can do no wrong. Another becomes the scapegoat, blamed for faults and mistakes whether or not they are responsible.
Hence, the golden child is idealized. The scapegoat, however, is depreciated and can only do wrong.
These projections may vary over time, depending on how the caregiver currently feels about each child. Research on nuclear-family triangulation links the pattern to poorer marital satisfaction and stability, and to childhood depression (Wang & Crane, 2001).
Romantic Partnerships
In a romantic relationship, the manipulator usually brings another person into their intimate connection, creating friction, confusion, and jealousy.
The manipulator typically enjoys the attention, positive or negative. They may even let the triangulated individuals know about each other so that they compete for it.
Sometimes the triangulated individuals do not know they are being used to manipulate others. Or only one of them may be aware.
On top of this, a narcissistically inclined person may triangulate someone they are no longer in touch with. They use that absent figure to influence the people they are currently involved with. The same splitting and projection occur here.
The new friend or partner is idealized as perfect, whereas the prior person in that position is seen as entirely flawed. The idealized or devalued person is wholly subjective and depends only on the manipulator.
Bowen’s Family Systems Theory of Triangulation
Triangulation has its roots in family systems theory, which Murray Bowen developed from decades of clinical work with families (Bowen, 1978).
Why Two-Person Relationships Turn Into Triangles
Bowen argued that two-person relationships are unstable under stress. A pair alone has no built-in way to dilute the tension between them. The process unfolds in three steps:
- Tension rises: Anxiety builds between two people.
- A third person is drawn in: Deliberately or unconsciously, someone absorbs some of that anxiety.
- The system steadies: The triangle becomes the smallest stable unit in a family (Bowen, 1978).
The stability is a trade, not a solution. The triangle contains the anxiety without resolving what caused it. It typically leaves one pair overly close and the other two relationships more distant.
Bowen saw one version as especially unhealthy: parents pulling a child into their own unresolved conflict. A parent might confide in the child, seek the child’s loyalty against the other parent, or use the child to relay messages.
A child has none of an adult’s power to decline.
Differentiation of Self and Detriangulating
Bowen treated differentiation of self as the underlying cause. It describes a person’s ability to keep reasoned judgment separate from emotional reactivity, so that anxiety does not automatically dictate behavior (Bowen, 1978).
People at the poorly differentiated end of the scale experience fusion. Their sense of self is so bound up with the people closest to them that they struggle to think, feel or act independently under pressure. They react with impulsive over-involvement or defensive emotional cutoff.
Bowenian therapy reverses the process, a move Bowen called detriangulating.
Family members learn to notice when they have been drawn into someone else’s conflict. Then they step back. They encourage direct communication between the two people who hold the disagreement, so the third position can be vacated.
Therapists often use a genogram, a multi-generational family map, to trace these patterns. Triangulation is thought to pass from parents to children largely without conscious intent (Haefner, 2014).
Karpman’s Drama Triangle and Minuchin’s Structural View
Bowen’s triangle is a structure: a stable arrangement of three relationships under stress. Karpman’s drama triangle, drawn from transactional analysis, a theory of how people interact, describes the positions people play inside such a triangle (Karpman, 1968).
The two models are compatible rather than competing.
Karpman adds something Bowen’s account does not stress. People often rotate between roles. A rescuer can become a persecutor, or a persecutor can recast themselves as a victim.
Salvador Minuchin saw the same pattern as a boundary problem. He called a parent and child aligned against the other parent a cross-generational coalition. In his view, the boundary around the parental pair has become too permeable (Minuchin, 1974).
His structural family therapy therefore strengthens that boundary instead of working on each person’s differentiation.
Each model describes a different layer of the same pattern:
| Model | Where the problem sits | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Bowen | Emotional fusion and low differentiation of self | A triangle is the smallest stable unit under stress |
| Minuchin | Family structure and boundaries | A cross-generational coalition: parent and child aligned against the other parent |
| Karpman | Role scripts people repeat | Victim, rescuer and persecutor positions that people switch between |
What the Evidence Does and Does Not Support
The descriptive core of Bowen’s model is well supported: triangles form, and children caught in them are linked to worse adjustment. His explanation of why people triangulate is on weaker ground.
Willis et al. (2021) followed 332 married couples over five years. Husbands’ differentiation of self predicted whether they later triangulated a child, but wives’ did not. Anxiety did not explain the link for either spouse.
Dallos and Vetere (2012) question whether the concept is precise enough to be useful. It may work as a loose label applied after the fact.
Culture matters too. Researchers have questioned how well Bowen’s ideal of a separate, differentiated self travels across cultures (Erdem & Safi, 2018). Bell et al. (2001) found that triangulation patterns and their developmental correlates differed between American and Japanese adolescents.
The Impact of Triangulation
When someone experiences triangulation, they may worry about what others think and feel humiliated, concerned, and self-protective.
You may feel the urge to set the record straight or confront everyone involved. Resist it. The manipulator often wants you to lose control and act out of impulse or fear.
A third party can bring short-term relief from stress. That relief is part of what makes the pattern so persistent.
The relief comes at a cost. Reinforced over multiple incidents, triangulation builds dysfunctional habits in the relationship. Over time, it creates an increasingly chaotic situation that tends to leave more people with damaged feelings than the original conflict would have (Dallos & Vetere, 2012).
Contemporary Research
Recent meta-analyses, which pool the results of many studies, give the clearest picture of how triangulation affects children.
Both are by Paul Schrodt, who studies “feeling caught”: a child’s sense of being caught between parents.
- Conflict and feeling caught (Schrodt, 2026a): 49 studies (N = 23,336) found a moderate link (r = .40). It was stronger when children, not parents, reported the conflict.
- Feeling caught and adjustment (Schrodt, 2026b): 54 studies (N = 25,582) linked feeling caught to internalizing distress (inward symptoms, r = .24) and externalizing problems (outward behavior, r = .19).
The first analysis found a stronger link in cross-sectional than longitudinal studies. In the second, the externalizing link was stronger in samples with more male children. Divorce status, child age and race made no significant difference to either link.
The pattern is not confined to divorced families. Large pooled syntheses like these sit near the top of the evidence pyramid, and they support the claim that being caught in the middle carries a real psychological cost.
Coping with Triangulation
When facing triangulation, it is essential to recognize that only you have power over what you do, not the provoking or baiting person.
Remember, nobody can make you feel guilty about yourself without your permission.
Here are a few things one should not do when dealing with triangulation:
- Do not make promises, commitments, or agreements that will only hurt your relationship with people you trust and love. No one who loves you will desire to harm your healthy, supportive, positive relationships.
- Try your hardest not to lose your temper and take control of your feelings. While you cannot control other people, you always have authority over your own words and responses, which is where you will always have power.
- Do not respond rapidly to shocking news.
- Take a step back, evaluate, and assess all of the facts.
Here are a few things one should do:
- Have a healthy balance between family, friends, work, and leisure time.
- Clarify anything you are told before impulsively acting on it.
- Stay in touch with loved ones in your life, and trust them with any problems or issues.
- Maintain self-control. This is how you retain your power and show that you will not be manipulated.
- Disengage from a conversation if you sense it turning unhealthy.
Healthy communication requires honesty and authenticity and working to resolve conflicts rather than producing them.
The most robust way of dealing with these situations is to take a step back, assess what is occurring, and act accordingly.
Family therapists call a related move detriangulating (Bowen, 1978). It means noticing when you have been drawn into someone else’s conflict and encouraging the two people who hold the disagreement to talk to each other directly. The aim is simple: leave the third position.
Contact a mental health professional if you sense that you or a loved one could benefit from additional support.
They can help you learn more about your relationships involving triangulation and how to navigate them safely.
References
Bell, L. G., Bell, D. C., & Nakata, Y. (2001). Triangulation and adolescent development in the US and Japan. Family Process, 40 (2), 173-186.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.
Dallos, R., & Vetere, A. (2012). Systems theory, family attachments and processes of triangulation: Does the concept of triangulation offer a useful bridge? Journal of Family Therapy, 34(2), 117–137.
Erdem, G., & Safi, O. A. (2018). The cultural lens approach to Bowen family systems theory: Contributions of family change theory. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 10(2), 469–483. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12258
Haefner, J. (2014). An application of Bowen family systems theory. Issues in mental health nursing, 35 (11), 835-841.
Karpman, S. B. (1968). Fairy tales and script drama analysis. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7(26), 39–43.
Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press.
Perel, E. (n.d.). In the middle: Fed up with friends’ relationship drama | Where should we begin? with Esther Perel [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cn4kLuSXqY
Schrodt, P. (2026a). Interparental conflict and parent–child triangulation: A meta-analytical review of children feeling caught between parents. Human Communication Research, 52(2), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqaf018
Schrodt, P. (2026b). Parent–child triangulation and children’s adjustment: A meta-analysis of children feeling caught and symptoms of distress. Annals of the International Communication Association. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/anncom/wlag024
Wang, L., & Crane, D. R. (2001). The relationship between marital satisfaction, marital stability, nuclear family triangulation, and childhood depression. American Journal of Family Therapy, 29(4), 337–347. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926180126502
Willis, K., Miller, R. B., Yorgason, J., & Dyer, J. (2021). Was Bowen correct? The relationship between differentiation and triangulation. Contemporary Family Therapy, 43(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-020-09557-3
Wright, A. (n.d.). Triangulation: How narcissistic parents use you against each other [Blog post]. Annie Wright Psychotherapy. https://anniewright.com/triangulation-how-narcissistic-parents-use-you-against-each-other/
