The Games We Play Instead of Loving Each Other Honestly

Nearly all of our suffering, and nearly all the pain we hand to others, comes from a strange kind of confusion: we don't actually know what we want. Like a child fumbling with a new toy before she's learned what her own hands can do, we go after love, recognition, connection — fumbling, clumsy, half-blind to our own motives.

In 1964, the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne gave that fumbling a name. He called it games — and he paid to publish the book himself, borrowing money from friends because he sensed, correctly, that he'd stumbled onto something people desperately needed. Games People Play went on to reshape popular psychology so thoroughly that its vocabulary — the "games," the "strokes," the whole architecture of it — leaked into everyday speech, mostly stripped of the rigor and tenderness with which Berne actually built it.

His model starts with a simple claim: each of us contains three ego states, three distinct selves that take turns running the show. There's the Child — spontaneous, vulnerable, the source of our real joy and our real hunger. There's the Parent — the internalized echo of how our actual parents responded to us, replaying itself on autopilot. And there's the Adult — the clear-eyed, competent part of us capable of actually assessing a situation and acting in our own best interest.

All three live in us simultaneously, and all three show up uninvited in every conversation we have.

When two people interact Adult-to-Adult, things go smoothly — Berne called this a "complementary transaction," and noted that as long as the lines stay parallel, the exchange can continue indefinitely without friction. The trouble starts when the wires cross: when your Adult question lands on someone else's frightened Child, or your wounded Child sends out a plea disguised as an Adult remark, and it gets answered by their stern internal Parent. Suddenly two people are technically having a conversation and genuinely talking past each other, each responding to a self the other didn't know was even in the room.

This crossed-wire pattern, repeated and predictable, is what Berne meant by a game: "an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome." One person sends a message with a hidden message riding underneath it. The other person — often without knowing why — responds to the hidden one. And then, remarkably, the original sender reacts with hurt or anger, as if ambushed by a response they themselves invited. Nobody asked for what they actually wanted. Everybody got exactly the bruised, familiar outcome they were unconsciously engineering.

Why go through all this instead of just asking? Because what we're really playing for, Berne argues, is what he calls a stroke — the small units of recognition and affirmation that function, psychologically, the way physical touch functions for an infant. Without strokes, something in us withers. And we chase them along three separate hungers: for structure (something to organize our days around), for stimulus (something to wake us up out of the fog of half-living), and for recognition (proof that we and our efforts matter to somebody).

The tragedy is that these hungers are wildly personal in scale. As Berne memorably put it, a famous actor might need hundreds of anonymous admiring strokes a week just to keep functioning, while a scientist might run for a whole year on a single word of respect from someone whose opinion actually matters to him. We are all calibrated differently, and most of our conflicts are just two different calibration systems colliding in the dark.

But here's the deeper trap: the strokes we chase in adulthood tend to be the same strokes we learned to expect in childhood — including the painful ones. If we grew up starved for real attention and learned to settle for criticism, or pity, or drama as a substitute, we'll unconsciously engineer situations as adults that reproduce that exact substitute, because it's familiar, because some deep old part of us mistakes the familiar for the true. Berne called this recycling of childhood strokes racketeering — and it means that most games aren't really about the other person at all. They're a rigged machine for confirming what we already, secretly, believe about ourselves.

Which is why games, however cleverly constructed, are always a kind of self-betrayal. They let us extract a stroke without ever having to risk the raw ask — without saying, plainly, this is what I need from you. That plain ask is terrifying precisely because it opens the door to real intimacy, and intimacy, as even Emerson found in the one relationship that actually reached him, can feel like "no terror like that of being known."

Berne's whole, quietly radical point is that the games are a detour around that terror — a way of getting some recognition without risking the whole undefended self. They work, in their limited way. But they cost us the very thing we were playing for in the first place: to be seen, without the mask, and loved anyway.

Distilled from The Marginalian