Reflective Discovery - Uncover Your Roles

You may gravitate to more than one role in the list of roles we have discussed. Most people are a mixture of one or two. We can learn how to let go of some of the traits of our role that cause us to disconnect.  We can learn how to use our great strengths at the right time. Not all the time. We can lessen the effects of the trauma using knowledge as our power. 

For your first action, write down the names of the roles you recognise in yourself in the workbook. 

The next section is about how roles are a combination of actions. How you can choose your actions and reactions - unless trauma has taken hold of the space. You can process and lessen the impact of trauma, gradually reclaiming your capacity to respond thoughtfully and intentionally, rather than reactively. You may need to seek support in this. These patterns are well entrenched.

Determine Your New Roles

In the last action you learned about your main role within the family. You learned that the family system forces you to take up certain roles. You can now build on what you have learned about roles and look at them in a new way. 

By now you have worked out which of the roles you took on in your family to survive. You know how these roles play out in your life today. You know whether you joke or withdraw, cause problems, or look after everyone but yourself. We can look at the roles as ‘role collections’ and use this information to change what isn’t working any longer. 

We can see that role collections consist of many different roles. The Acting-Out Child role collection, for example, consists of a whole lot of roles. These include ‘strong group leader’, ‘truth seeker’, ‘reality checker’, ‘stress absorber’. There is nothing wrong with these roles in themselves. The problem arises when a role that you use too often from the collection shows up at the wrong time. Vivienne Thompson agrees with this. She says that roles are not good or bad. They depend on what is happening at the time. They are situational. 

If I am curious and non-judgmental, I am able to look at a situation, event or behaviour simply as a thing that exists. I can view roles in the way they contribute to my personality. I still remember the day I learned that I could change the way I reacted to some things. I wasn’t trapped in my mascot role collection.  I could respond using aspects of the hero role collection, or black sheep role collection, or cheerleader role collection or anything else any time I wanted. All I needed was a little practice.  We don’t act. We are. This is important to remember. We are not acting, and our true self is somewhere in there. We are the roles.

Your role development began before you were born, when you were in your mother’s womb, you and your mother reacted to each other every day. Some days you would move around and she would feel it and react. Everything she ate and drank influenced you. Every feeling she had and the accompanying hormones influenced you. You reacted to this, and in turn influenced her. You were taking on roles in a dance with your mother. Then, as you were born and started growing, your roles developed and solidified. 

Before we dive into learning how to take on different roles, let's talk about something important: how trauma affects the ability to pause and choose  responses.

Think about trauma as something that squeezes out the breathing room between when something happens and how you react to it. When you’ve experienced trauma, especially during your formative years or repeatedly, your brain gets really good at one thing, keeping us safe! But this comes with a cost.

Instead of having that moment to think "hmm, how do I want to handle this?", you jump straight into reaction mode. It's like your brain's autopilot kicks in before you even realise what's happening.

In healthy situations, you develop what one might call a "response pause button" - that little moment where you can consider your options. Trauma tends to disable this pause button. Rather than responding from a place of choice, you react from patterns that your nervous system learned would keep you safe.

These automatic reactions often show up through default role collections. That Acting-Out Child role collection might pop up instantly in situations that even slightly remind you of past difficult experiences. What looks like an action you’re playing is actually your body and mind trying to protect you - it's reaction, not action.

The good news is that healing involves gradually rebuilding this space. As you practice feeling safe and regulated, you can stretch out that gap between what happens and how you respond. This creates room for choice again, allowing you to move from automatic reactions to thoughtful actions.

When you learn to get comfortable in this space between trigger and response, you gain the freedom to pick from your role collection intentionally, rather than being driven by old patterns. This ability to choose is the foundation for the role development work we'll explore next.

As we start to understand how trauma affects our role collections and responses, here's something really encouraging: just becoming aware of our patterns can create powerful changes! Dr. Gabor Maté touches on this in "The Myth of Normal" – sometimes simply recognising what's happening is enough to start shifting things, without needing years of intensive therapy. When we notice how trauma has squeezed out that breathing room between something happening and how we react, that very noticing starts to create more space. It's like turning on a light in a dark room – suddenly we can see what's there.

When we catch ourselves thinking, "Oh, that's my old pattern kicking in," we've already created a tiny moment of choice that wasn't there before. This doesn't mean deeper healing work isn't helpful – it absolutely can be! – but it's reassuring to know that even these small "aha" moments can create real changes in how we interact with ourselves and others. As you continue reading about different roles, remember that the awareness you’re building right now is already part of your healing journey. Noticing is the first step to choosing differently.

Here are the references for you to look more deeply into this if you want to:

Thompson V. 2014 Reflections on Role Theory. AANZPA Journal (23)

 Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2025). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Vintage Canada.

Against, Towards or Away From - Our Survival Actions

When under stress, we all fall back on survival actions, to protect ourselves and our values. Our survival actions show a general tendency; we either move against, towards, or away from others. Karen Horney (pronounced Hor-nay) lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She rocked the psychoanalytic world of her time because she could not agree with Freud’s theories, which were prevalent then. She showed how culture and interpersonal relationships determine, to a large extent, how we act. Horney writes about three interpersonal trends in two of her books: to move against others, towards them, or away from them. Horney believed that basic anxiety, brought about by insecurities, makes us who we are. We need the anxiety and insecurities to shape us. We also need them to keep us safe. In a home with no trauma of an adult dependent on substances or processes, a child can use all three methods of protection.  They learn which one works best in what situation: against, towards, or away from. In a traumatised home though, after a while, one will become the favourite and the others will be runners up. By the time we are adults, we have found the one that works best and use it almost exclusively. 

My own survival style is to move towards others; make it better, make them like me. I find this very easy and a successful method. The problem with this is that my own needs, wants and desires come second. My second survival style is to withdraw (away from) others. “Fine. I’ll go be by myself then if you don’t want me”. My least favourite way of survival is to confront (move against) others. I’ll only do that if I am secure in the relationship.

If we want to put this into trauma response language we would say that moving against could be called the fight response, moving toward could be called the fawn response and moving away cold be the same as flight and freeze, which are both ways of detaching.

Actions taken from the role collection change depending on the people around us at the time. It is ok to make jokes at a party, but generally not at a funeral. Or it may be, depending on the people who are there. It is ok to inspect the ranks if you are a drill sergeant. It is generally not ok to inspect the children when you get home. If you do this, we could say that you are using an action from the collection of Family Hero: ‘driven perfectionist’. This may be one that you fall back on in most situations. 

In this next action we are going to only work in the moment; in our client’s current relationships. We are not going to look at the past, even though the past is where they have come from. It is today that we are going to change. They will describe themselves in a systematic way. They will observe and analyse their responses in a thoughtful manner. They are kind to ourselves. They will show compassion. They don’t judge (and neither do we). They want to see and grow the health in their role collection rather than focus on the dysfunction.

 It is important to recognise that all actions have an origin; a starting place. They acted that way the first time in response to something that happened, and it worked, so they kept on doing it. Good news is, they don’t have to stay in that place any longer. They can practice the actions from any other collection, just like a child would in a family with no trauma caused by a family member dependent on substances or processes. 

In everyday life, we want to use the role collections to our advantage. Take the good from all the role collections to live in a healthier and happier way.

Here are the references for the information about this:
 Horney, K. 2014. Neurosis and human growth. Place of publication not identified: Routledge.

 Horney, K. 2014. Our inner conflicts: a constructive theory of neurosis. Oxfordshire: New York, NY.

Discover Your Roles in Action

Think about your past week. You got up, and did whatever it is you do to get ready in the morning. You went to work or school or whatever it is you do all day. You spoke to people, you worked with people, you shopped. You ate and drank, you enjoyed leisure activities, or you didn’t. There was weather, it was sunny or rainy or foggy or whatever it happened to be. 

Time to brainstorm.  Use the worksheet to write down the names of people you interacted with over the last few days. Or last week, if you can manage it. You can use code names if you want to maintain privacy. Then write down the main actions you can think of that they were taking on. You could list them or use arrows if that’s how you work best. If it was a longer encounter, there could be many actions from many collections. Did how you act depend a little on the other person? Or a lot? Could you see how much you affected the other person by the way you talked, acted, stood? By your facial expression and tone of voice? Do you seem to have certain patterns of interactions with some people? Can you see how this ties in with the trauma role collections? 

You may need to go back to the worksheet from the last action where you discovered your way of being – Hero, Mascot, Lost Child, Scapegoat – to compare. 

Here’s a short exchange between two sisters as an example of how to approach this action.

Mary meets Stephanie at a café with some exciting news: she is getting a promotion at work. She’s worked hard and did everything right, and is finally getting recognition. The promotion means a salary raise as well as a car and an office to herself. She is out of her mind with excitement, and wants to share it with Steph.

 “Hey, I have news!” she says. She can’t keep the excitement out of her voice and she has a huge smile on her face.

“What is it?” Steph says, not looking up from her phone and frowning at it.

Mary can see how stressed Steph is and wants her to be ok. She also wants to share her news. This is a familiar conflict. She says “Um, Steph this is important,” feeling a little sick as she hears the pleading in her voice. 

Steph retorts “What!? I’m listening!” She sounds irritated as though Mary is interrupting something important.

Mary sighs. She knows yet again that Steph has zero interest in her news. She keeps the anger to herself and says “Never mind, I’ll tell you when you aren’t so busy.” Steph glances up then turns back to her phone.

Mary sits and drinks her coffee alone, even though her sister is sitting right there. 

This is how Mary and Steph act with each other. I would say that Mary is acting out a well-worn action from the Placater/Mascot role collection. She makes sure Steph is ok, even though it means she can’t share her news.

You don’t need to scrutinise every single interaction with every single person. Just take a short exchange and use it. How did you interact? Were the actions different from your feelings? Were they the same? It will be helpful in the coming worksheets to have more than one, so I’ve included two worksheets, just do as many as you can. When you have done at least two or three, use the summary page to list all the actions, be sure to include the feelings that went with them.