 Hello and welcome to MIPTV and tonight on this broadcast, we are going to review, Bob's going to review one, probably the most popular book in the history of psychotherapy. Would that be an understatement? I bet you when you mention the name of this book, most people A will have heard of it and probably got it on their bookshelf. Yeah, absolutely. And that book is Bob. Games People Played by Eric Burr. Yeah, yeah. An absolute seminal book and I did read somewhere that it remained in the top 100 books in, I think it was a New York Times best-selling book for virtually 20 or 30 years. For a long time. For a long, long time and I came across this book like I'm okay, you're okay long before I was involved in counselling psychotherapy long before it. Yeah, yeah. It's a very, very popular book and you know it's also very popular for couples because it looks at how couples communication gets confused. People get stuck in communication, how people pick partners who've got interlocking games, interlocking scripts and it goes through two or three games from a couple's perspective. So it's very useful couples, very useful for social workers because you see in the 60s when this book came out, there wasn't much written in terms of looking at identifying patterns of behaviour. And social workers and earlier counsellors grabbed this book because it gave people a tool book, if you like, a way of analysing behavioural patterns that people get caught up in in terms of mental health. Yeah. So for those people who are perhaps not involved in the world of counselling psychotherapy and may have kind of just been looking at this video saying what are games? What are they, Bob? What is in communication and in kind of life? What type of games do people play? And also how do you know it's happening? Okay. Now Sigmund Freud, who was the sort of father of psychotherapy and psych analysis way back, he wrote many books and his first book was called Hysteria in 1888, but here we are in 2017. So he termed way back then called the compulsion to repeat and it was the compulsion to repeat behavioural patterns that we learnt in childhood as a way of getting on needs met. And then Eric Bern, who was a devout follower of Sigmund Freud before he changed to the humanistic school really, he changed the name of compulsion to repeat to games. So definition of games or a game is a series of repetitive behavioural patterns that you learn in childhood as an attempt to get your needs met. Yeah. And he gave them names, didn't he? Once, I've got you son of a bitch. That's one, wasn't it? I tried to have basically what he looked over years and years and years of how people communicated and looked at behavioural patterns that they adapted and looked at how other people locked into similar or different patterns. And he then, with Claude Stein and other early TA therapists, came up with three classifications of different types of behavioural patterns or games that we're talking about here. And they were victim games. So that would be things like kick me or games which you would set up or behavioural patterns which you would set up to get kicked or to get put down or to get discounted. So those would be kick games like I'm only trying hard or yes, but or those would be victim games. Then you've got persecutor games, whole classification, what we call persecutor games, which people set up to be persecuted or again, we will go through a list of those games. And then we've got rescuer games, the compulsive caretakers, the other size of the co-dependency pattern, which people would play out patterns and attempt to get taken care of but actually or to take, sorry, the other way around to take care of people from a discounted position. So you've got three different layers. We've got victims games, rescuing games and persecutor games. And by playing those games or those behavioural patterns, you get strokes. In other words, you get recognition. But in fact, they didn't work. Well, they worked a certain extent, but because they were from an unhealthy position ostensibly, they didn't actually get people what they wanted. No, and hearing the same victim persecution rescue, my mind is wandering to, of course, the Cartman drama triangle, that idea that literally if you think of three chairs in a room formed in a triangle, if you choose to sit in one of those chairs and adapt those behaviours that almost certainly you're inviting the people in other two chairs to then play out this drama like they're players in a film. Yes. Very well described. Thank you. I like that. That drama triangle became a classic way of analysing games. And you'd see it all the time in social situations, in psychotherapy rooms, just as you described it, where we invite people to either persecutors or rescues from a discounted place or we end up a vulnerable victim position. So that's a very good way to describe it. Yeah, I always thought that. It is literally, like opening a theatre, you choose the chair, whichever chair it is, and then as soon as you sit in that chair and start to act out that behaviour, then either of the other two chairs can be taken up and people will take that part and respond in that way. And as I've heard you say when I've watched your wonderful trainings, Bob, you step out of the triangle. You don't sit in the chair. That's the way to cure. But people do step into the chairs. And you must remember, these are psychological positions because in life from adults, we've got persecutors and we've got rescues and we've got victims. So I'm talking about psychological positions that people, as you say, step into. And the way out, of course, is to step out of the chair. But the first step is to be aware that you sat in the chair in the first place. You're going to get out of the chair. Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that, of course, happens in the Archive Therapies, where the therapist may reflect or share an observation about how you present yourself in certain situations. That's right. That's right. Because if you've been in a family of origin where, let's say you had a significant other, whether it was mother, father, uncle, whoever, it was particularly strict. And, you know, really, really only gave you recognition for stepping into the victim chair. Yes. Then in life, you know, probably later life, unless you've changed it, you will seek out from, you know, usually in an out of awareness place, you know, people to replicate that early dynamic of parent and child we're talking about or persecutor and victim. Yeah. And, you know, as it's been recognized for a long time, in terms of attention, I would see how we call it, you would call it strokes. Sometimes a negative stroke is better than no recognition at all. Absolutely. Absolutely. We know that all the search has shown that. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes people do negative behavior to get attention, but at least they're being recognized. They might have to live with a consequence of the behavior. And, you know, but we see that. We see that sometimes in our clients historically, you know, sometimes maybe in ourselves as we go through the art of our own therapy. Yeah. And of course, if they go into that position, they're usually in kick me games. Yes. Where they're inviting people to kick them for the escalation of the negative recognition. Yeah. Yeah. And that links into the anti-tartful position, isn't it? Yeah. Then they could see that by saying, the wheel's a terrible place. Yeah. And all those sort of things. So, analyzing these games, we can look at when people switch and move to different chairs in an attempt to get their pay off if you like. Yeah. So, look at how you can step outside these positions. So, you come from NTA, what you would call an adult position instead of locked into persecuted victim or victim rescuer position. Yeah. It's such a seminal book. I know we've gone off the track a little bit about reviewing the book, but it makes, as I said earlier, it seems to me, when I read it, I didn't have any link into psychotherapy or counseling. When I read it, it made so much sense. It was almost like the covenants of Byrne, which was to make therapy and psychological ideas so accessible to the general public. And I read it, I immediately think, oh, wow. You know, I immediately started seeing these games in others. It was like the veil was lifted. You saw the patterns. You saw when you were in a persecutor, how you might look for victims, how you're in victim position, you might look for rescuers. Yeah. And you would, if you were in the atherapy arc, of course, you would have tools to be able to help people with awareness on how to not take that share of you just said. Absolutely. You could get needs in a healthy way instead of those old repetitive patterns. Absolutely. It's such a seminal book. We could talk for hours on it, Bob, because it is probably the most well-known of books. I was trying to think, I still think another, and the only one I can think of that's probably as well-known maybe is The Road Less Travel by M. Scott Peck. Oh, that's a good book. But in terms of, you know, mainstream, when you ask people, it's amazing how many people from a non-therapeutic background have read it. And where it turns up, where it turns up in management training, it turns up in all sorts of disparate areas, not connected with psychotherapy. A wonderful read. Useful for students? Wonderful for students. Because, I'll say it again, I think I've said this on many times on different videos. It's the four major tenets of platform of classical transaction analysis, is ego stakes, scripts, you know, games, and transaction analysis proper. So an understanding of how we repeat patterns from our own history and how we seek out players to replicate, you know, these patterns, and how we can change those patterns and come from an adult healthy position, is crucial for any student to read. Absolutely. And I'm going to be kind of bold here. I would say even if you're not doing a TA course, I think if you're doing a personal centre or a CBT or an integrative course or the many different modalities, I think that it should be on your shelf or on your reading list, because it tells us an existential truth about the human condition. Absolutely, I 100% agree with you. And a wonderful book for our 21st book. It is. So as always, Bob doesn't get paid for reviewing these books. I think he should because he does such a good job. We'll put a link in the description bar below so you can click on, you can inspect the book if you want to buy a copy. I got mine, I think, for 10p off eBay or something. It's such a widely accepted book. If you're a pristine copy, you can go to the big booksellers. And we'll put a picture at the end of a picture of the book so people know what it looks like. And as always, Bob Cook, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, not only in the literature, but also in the practice of counselling and psychotherapy. Thank you. Thank you Roy.