the games people play tagged posts

November 13, 2023,  Games People Play, Life, Relationship, Script  No comments

Aggressors are not OK, and for them, no one else can be OK either. They need someone Helpless to persecute. The Aggressors hope in putting someone else down is as a vain attempt to feel a little better about themselves. And as this is only ever for just a moment, generally their harassment becomes more frequent and intense.

However, at some level within themselves they really do know the truth: that this momentary boost is usually only acquired through someone else’s fear of what might happen if they don’t give in to the Aggressor.

The Helpless is also not OK. The have to believe that the world is always mistreating them...

September 28, 2023,  Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

The Aggressor

It’s often said that to survive in today’s world we need to be a little more Aggressive. That may be, though I would be more inclined to say we need to be more Assertive.

Aggressor is used here to denote a game position which is never OK. The Aggressor presents in one of two ways: as hostile, or outwardly aggressive, or as manipulative, or passive-aggressive.

A wife’s constant nagging her husband is an example of a hostile Aggressor’s relationship game. This game might be called “You Can Never Do Anything Right.” She ridicules him for everything he does to try to please her. This may extend to insulting him for what he wears or how he looks after the children.

On the other hand, an example of a manipulative Aggressor’s game might be when a wife pul...

July 12, 2023,  Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

The life that you ultimately come to live, and all that you think, feel, say, and do in it, is for the most part lived out subconsciously through the psychological games you play, and which are especially evident in your relationships.

Eric Berne, the same person who developed script theory, proposed that we play these psychological games for one reason only: as a way to find confirmation or validation for our deeply held values and beliefs about ourselves and about others: our life script.

To clarify this further, let’s refer back to the life positions Victor, Vi...

December 30, 2021,  Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

You might even think that if only the other person could change or be more like they used to be when you first met, then everything would be OK. On the other hand, you might distract yourself by having an affair, or by doing any number of other things to fill in time and thereby remove yourself from the conflict. Many people use distractions instead of confronting what the conflict may mean for them and what they could learn or change about themselves that could improve the relationship between them and their partners.

Some of the things people do to distract themselves from reviewing their script beliefs and behaviors could include working more hours, spending more time at the gym, eating more, eating less, shopping more, gambling, drinking to excess, reading cheap novels or spend...

February 24, 2020,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

I would like to say something about the title of my book Love, Lies, and the Games Couples Play. Put simply, love, and all that it embodies for us, is what each of us seeks in life above all else. It is the main reason we enter into relationships in the first place because it gives us a place to belong and to feel connected to others.

The “lies” in the title refers to the mistaken attitudes and beliefs that we hold about ourselves and about others. These are most likely based on someone else’s thinking which in the first instance were probably our parent’s. And as these beliefs were presented to us at a time when we were not able to make well-considered decisions for ourselves, they are not necessarily reflective of our current subjective truth.

Those beliefs, and the w...

July 10, 2019,  Games People Play, Life  No comments

Spontaneity

Eric Berne, Founder of Transactional Analysis as a model of therapy, defines spontaneity as the capacity to see multiple options from which we choose to act. We can freely choose how we think, feel, and behave in response to an event.

To be Spontaneous means to be free from the compulsion to have only the thoughts and feelings you were taught to have and to play the games you were taught to play (or learned to) to maintain your scripted life position.

Intimacy

Finally, Berne defines Intimacy as the “spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of the intuitively perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its naiveté living in the here and now.”

He adds:

Intimacy is essentially a function of the Natural Child; […] it tends to turn ou...

May 27, 2019,  Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

In The Games People Play, Eric Berne defined the process of becoming autonomous (self-determining) as the manifestation of the “release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.”

Let’s take a closer look at the first of Berne’s three capacities for Autonomous living.

Awareness

For Berne, Awareness is the capacity to observe the world through all five of our physical senses, plus intuition, which might otherwise be defined as coming to understand something unconsciously through the combination of all our senses.

However, it needs to be done in one’s own, unique way, and not in the way someone else once taught us.

Berne offers this example: A child hears a bird’s song, but he doesn’t know it comes from a bird...

May 1, 2018,  Counselling, Games People Play, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

Many years ago, people believed that a healthy relationship looked like this: two complementary halves making a whole. Now we understand that a relationship that looks like this is far from complementary and where generally one person in the couple dominates the other.

People need first to be whole within themselves in order to be happy with another person.

If we look at this issue from a Transactional Analysis perspective, according to that theory, we all have a mixture of personalities; we don’t just have one way of being. Instead, in different places with different people, we can actually relate quite differently as well. Berne described these different personality styles as “ego states...

October 16, 2017,  Games People Play, Life  No comments

Golf and Other Games People Play

Finding compassion for people and situations you hadn’t imagined you would is a good way to free yourself from any past hurts and things that are holding you back. Forgiveness and a balanced and considered reaction to mistreatment can actually win the “game”.

Let me explain this with an example. Jon (made up person) is playing a game of golf at the club with three people he had not played with before. He is certainly the new kid on the block and is feeling every bit of it. They are playing for a competition and he is basically tagging along for a bit of fun. He’d decided some time ago that enjoying a game of golf for him is more about being outdoors and being in the fresh air in beautiful parkland rather than about any need to compete...

June 30, 2017,  Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Games People Play, Relationship, Script  No comments

Some people realize they are having problems at an early stage in their relationship while others they only realize there have been problems when their relationship is about to break down.

As with every other couple, with Lyn and James, the problems appearing are connected with both their childhoods.  Lyn had grown up in a family with three older brothers and a mother who was struggling to manage as she and her husband had separated some years before.

Lyn’s mother was anxious and depressed and on medication and her father was only occasionally available to take care of the children.

As she was still young at the time, Lyn knew very little of what happened to separate her parents...