Recognising Relationship Roles
Relationship roles are behavioural patterns, expectations and responsibilities held within relationships. In healthy relationships, clients and their partners will hold different roles in different contexts and will perceive these roles as equitable, fair, and mutually collaborative. Healthy relationship roles allow everyone to thrive and enable love to grow.
When clients present with problems in their relationship, exploring the different roles they hold within their relationships can be helpful. It provides clues to their inner roles or schemas, and helps us to better understand their inner experience. This means we can offer a greater level of empathy, improving relational depth.
Healthy relationship roles respect relational differences, allow everyone to thrive and enable love to grow.
Doctor Divergent, 2025
Relationship roles are co-created and evolve from differing power dynamics in the relationship. Relationship roles are influenced by early life and family patterns, attachment styles and social and cultural norms.
Increasing a client’s awareness of the different relation roles they hold allows them to re-evaluate whether their current ways of thinking and relating. They can question if these still serve them and explore of new ways of thinking and being.
Negative relationship roles
There are multiple theories and perspectives on the different relationship roles that we experience. For example, psychology focusses upon internal factors or why we choose particular roles, and family systemic theory focusses on how different roles interact to maintain family patterns.
Some common negative relationship roles include:
Parent and Child(ren): One partner takes a more dominant, controlling or critical role, and the other partner(s) are more passive and/or dependent. This can lead to mutual resentment.
Victim, rescuer, and persecutor (drama triangle): These are dynamic roles whereby partners feel powerless and avoids responsibility (the “victim”), intervene to help without prompting and enable dependency (the “helper”) and/or take control by blaming or criticising others (the “persecutor”). This arises within conflict and can also lead to mutual resentment.
Pursuer and distancer: One partner seeks closeness and reassurance, whilst conversely, the other partner seeks space and pulls away. This dynamic is often present in intimacy and attachment patterns in a self-reinforcing cycle, leading to disconnection in the relationship.
Areas for Growth and Healing
Therapists can work with clients to increase their self-awareness of the different relationship roles they hold. Thereafter, clients can identify any patterns or negative relationship roles that are present. We cannot control how others behave, but we can change how we show up as individuals in our different relationships. Consequently, these changes often lead to some form of reciprocation.
A key focus of therapy for clients will be increasing their ability to prioritise their self-care and begin to set healthy boundaries within the relationship. Additionally, recognising different relationship roles enables us to communicate more effectively with our partners, communicating our needs without pushing others away.
Options for couples or other relationships include couples counselling, emotionally focussed therapy (EFT) and systemic family therapy.
Key takeaways
- What are relationship roles?: Relationship roles are behavioural patterns, expectations and responsibilities held within relationships that lead to cohesion or distance.
- How do relationship roles develop?: Relationship roles are co-created and evolve, and are influenced by early life and family patterns, attachment styles and social and cultural norms.
- How do I spot negative relationship roles in my clients?: Negative relationship roles are signified by the absence of equity and perceived fairness and a lack of mutual collaboration.
This article was written by Dr Jackie on behalf of Doctor Divergent Ltd. Click here to book a free initial 15-minute session.