8. Communication Games

      Now we are ready to play the communication games. I’m going to spell them out in detail in the hope that you’ll be challenged and curious enough to try them in earnest. Reading about something is far different from seeing and doing it. I’d like you to have all three experiences: reading about these games, doing them, and then interesting another group in doing them so you can watch. Each approach adds a new dimension to your learning.

      You can read about swimming, you can watch others swim, but you don’t really know what it’s all about until you take the plunge yourself.

      I have introduced these games to people all over the world, from preschool children (who call it “playing house”) to various adult groups: businesspeople, clergy, hospital staffs and personnel, as well as families. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t play. I’ve met a few here and there who wouldn’t, but I believe they were too scared to try and covered up by saying they couldn’t.

      It may seem strange, but the minute people start to play these games, they know the dialogue. For me this validates the fact that my games reflect actual experiences in families and in society. Regardless of economic status, race, age, sex, nationality, or religion, everybody knows the language and the gestures in these exercises.

      I urge you to take the plunge into these games. You’ll be surprised at what you learn about yourself, the other members of your family, and how you all function together. After playing, most people say the games opened new doors into greater understanding. I know that every time I play them I learn something new. They’ve been very useful to me in regaining my perspective when I temporarily lose it, and they certainly are a means of growing. You might have a similar experience. Go ahead!

      Apart from the learning and growing, you can find a lot of fun in these games.

      To begin, play with three people at a time——a triad——with the others watching. I start with a triad because that is the basic family unit (mother, father, and child). This is where we all learned our communication patterns. You can start with any three in your family , but I suggest you start with the oldest children first. Incidentally , the children will probably have to be at least three years old before they can enter in well.

      The first triad could be husband, wife, and the first child. To really make the plunge in your efforts to understand the communication in your family, I suggest you play with all your possible triads , one triad at a time. If you are a family of five, your triads would be as follows:

Husband, wife, and first child

Husband, wife, and second child

Husband, wife, and third child

Father, first and second child

Father, second and third child

Father, first and third child

Mother, first and second child

Mother, second and third child

Mother, first and third child

First, second, and third child

      This makes ten triads altogether, which will probably takes three to four hours. Take your time. If some helpful material emerges, let it happen. Don’t push.

      If you have access to an audio or video tape recorder, use it. Later look at or listen to it, and be prepared for some surprises.

      All right. Three of you have agreed to play the game. Invite the other members to watch you. They will have helpful feedback for you later. Seat yourselves in chairs near one another. Then each of you takes a name other than your own, including a different family name. Announce your new name out loud. It seems that more freedom to learn is possible when people use different names.

      To do these games, each of you selects a way of communicating. (You may need to refer back to the previous chapter, in which I discussed placating, blaming, computing, distracting, and leveling.) For instance, one of you could blame, one could placate, and the third might also blame. The next time around, you can all pick different roles. Below are combinations I see frequently:

      As you play these, you may come upon a combination that seems familiar to you. If so, linger with it. Learn how it may work against you. Ask your onlookers to comment.

      Now that you have decided who is going to do which kind of communication, tell each other out loud. Start by taking the physical position that matches your communication. Remember the communications stances that correspond to placating, computing,blaming, and distracting? Here the stances are shown in combination with each other.

      Hold your stances for one minute. While you are doing this, allow yourself to be aware of how you feel about yourself and the others. Then sit down and play these same communication styles by using conversation. Here is an example of a possible interaction.

SAM [father-husband] (blaming): Why haven't you got our vacation planned?

ELSA [mother-wife] (blaming): What are you yelling about? You've got as much time as I have.

SAM (blaming): Says who? Besides, young man, keep your nose out of this.
(Or, placating): Where would you like to go, dear?

ELSA (computing): According to the last issue of Woman's Day, making a change of pace is a good way to plan a vacation.

SAM (placating): Whatever you would like to do, dear.

CARL (placating): You always plan nice times, Mother.

ELSA (computing): That's good. I will being to make lists in the morning.

      Set a timer for five minutes. If any particular conflict is brewing in your family, use this as your topic. If you do not have such a situation, then try to plan something together: a meal, a vacation, a garage clean-up, or anything your family might conceivably attempt. As you play, don’t be afraid to exaggerate your communication. When the timer rings, stop, even you are in the middle of a sentence. Immediately sit back, close your eyes, and let yourself become aware of your breathing, your thoughts, your feelings, how your body feels, and how you feel about your partners.

      Try to imagine how it would be to live this way in your family all the time. It could be that your blood pressure may be rising; you might be sweating or experiencing aches of various kinds. Just let yourself relax, with your eyes still closed. Move about a bit to loosen tight muscles you need to. Then mentally takes of your role-playing name and quietly say your real name to yourself.

      Gradually open your eyes, then, and tell your partners about your inner experiences as you were playing your role. What actually happened? What were your thoughts and feelings, and what parts of the past and present came to the fore? What was your body doing? Tell how you felt toward the other members in your group while you were enacting your role.

      Possibly you are becoming aware that the outcome of any planning or conflict-solving is related to your communication. Using another kind of communication will produce a different outcome.

      Some of the combinations in these games are similar to the communication patterns you actually use to interact with one another. You might find some of them painful. Playing the games can also bring back memories of what your life was like, perhaps some of the time, with your parents when you were a child. If this is the case, treat it as a discovery rather than as a club with which to punish yourself. Instead of telling yourself how bad or stupid you are or they are, use the discovery as a point from which to go forward.

      Try again with a different set of communication stances. You could also experiment with changing roles. For example, the male who was father might now become a son or daughter.

      At the end of each game, take as much time as you need to express your inner experience to your partners. Then put on your next role, set the timer, and keep going on to the next set of stances until you finish.

      When you are sharing your inner experience, you may find yourself feeling uncomfortable. This will begin to ease as you put words to your discomfort. You may also find that you use a different voice when you are talking about your inner self. At this point you are close to using a leveling response.

      When people first start playing these games, they are often revolted by being asked to do openly what they secretly fear they have been doing all along. Some, for instance, feel nauseous at the thought of placating because they want to be perceived as powerful. Others react strongly against blaming because they don’t want people to judge them for it. You will learn a great deal, though, if you let yourself develop your roles fully. Remember, you can choose whether you let it rub off.

      If you are a woman, worry about being a bitch, and handle it by never, never letting yourself be bitchy, you will be ruling yourself with an iron hand. That hand can get awfully heavy, and you will have to set it down sometimes. Then, bingo! Out comes the bitch. In contrast, you can choose behavior at any moment. Bitchiness properly nurtured turns into healthy assertion, which all people need.

      This concept can be compared to keeping three hungry dogs who are always trying to get out of a cage, and three who are well fed and come quickly when called. If you forget to close the door, the hungry ones will get out and may even devour you. The well-fed dogs may run out and even run away, but they won’t eat you.

      So you have a tendency to be bitchy. Take it out, dress it up, and honor this tendency as part of yourself. Love it and give it a place with the rest of your feelings. You can do the same with all your tendencies. This way one tendency won’t stomp all over the rest of you; it will come out and act nice at your bidding. It may turn out that you summon it less and less until, like a formal gown you have outgrown or that is no longer in style, you perhaps reshape it into a play gown for your young daughter, give it away, or use it to dust with.

      If you try to hide or bridle your tendencies, however, you won’t be able to do this very well. They will be waiting for the chance to escape and act up.

      If you are a man and worry about appearing like Mr. Milquetoast, and handle it by being Mr. Big or Mr. Terrible, you are in the same spot. Your tendency is always ready to do you in. Nurtured and reshaped a little, however, that milquetoast quality becomes that tenderness that you, as a man, sorely need. It enables you to keep your body juicy and healthy, to make a loving connection with your wife and children, and to connect with your colleagues. Developing your tenderness does not have to eradicate your toughness. You need that, too. You can have both; you don’t have to settle for only one.

      Once people decide to look at all their parts, they can develop a sense of perspective and a sense of humor to help make better choices. They can also learn to neutralize any negative attitudes toward their tendencies and learn how to use these tendencies more positively.

      Here is another useful experiment. After all the triads have had a turn. play a game with the whole family. By now you will all be familiar with the games and have some skill at playing them.

      Each family member chooses a name and announces it. Each of you then privately chooses one of the four responses but doesn’t tell the others which one. Once you are all in character, try planning something together. Again, use a tape recorder.

      Set the timer for thirty minutes. When you start to have internal feelings of discomfort, change your roles. If you’ve been placating , change to another style——perhaps blaming. Use that until you again experience discomfort.

      At the conclusion of the exercise, tell your partners as fully as you can what you were feeling and thinking about them and yourself as you were playing. You may have noticed that long before the thirty minutes passed and even though you switched roles, you felt uncomfortable and got relief only when you talked fully about your experience. Again, this will bring you closer to the leveling response.

      As a result of thoroughly learning these games, people frequently realize they have more talent than they thought. Everyone can develop skill in playing the various roles. You’ll find that instead of being stuck with one possibility, you have at least four and perhaps five. Realizing this enables you to be a chooser, and this brings up your level of self-respect.

      Say to yourself, “I can be a placater, a blamer, a computer, a distracter, and a leveler. I can choose.” Personally, I prefer the leveling response. It has the best consequences; and it is, as you all must know by now, the hardest to learn. The only reason it is hard, however, is because we did not learn it as children.

      To apologize without placating, to disagree without blaming, to be reasonable without being inhuman and boring, and to change the subject without distracting give me greater personal satisfaction, less internal pain, and more opportunities for growth and satisfactory relationships with others, to say nothing about increased competence. On the other hand, if I choose to use any of the other styles, I can take responsibility for the consequences and accept the pain that comes from crippling my communication.

      Could you feel the wear and tear on your body while you were playing these games? Common aches and pains such as headaches and backaches, high and low blood pressure, and digestive difficulties are much more understandable when we look at them as natural results of the way we do or do not communicate. Can you also imagine how little chance we would have for growing closer to anyone or understanding that person if these patterns were all we had? The relationship would have to deteriorate!

      As you begin to feel the internal stress, personal frustration, and hopelessness that accompany communication patterns, can you further imagine that, if you were stuck in these responses, you might be tempted to think about getting sick, having an extramarital affair, committing suicide, or even committing murder? Only a very strong rule on your part will stop you. And the chances are pretty good that if you put all your energy into keeping that rule, you would give yourself unnecessary trouble. I’ll have more to say about rules in the next chapter.

      You see, just about everyone I have found who has serious problems coping with life——school problems, alcoholism, adultery, whatever——was communicating in the first four crippling ways. If people exist who are successfully making it with these responses, I haven’t seen them. I can hardly overemphasize that these four communication styles arise from low pot, low feelings of self-worth that we learned as children.

      Now you can see clearly how your pot connects with your communication. You can also see how other people’s actions grow out of their communications. It becomes like a merry-go-round: I have low self-esteem to begin with, I have poor communication with someone, I feel worse, my behavior reflects it, and around it goes.

      Let’s consider a common example. You woke up this morning grouchy and out of sorts. You have to go to work and face a boss who you think has something against you. You have a rule that no one should know about your fears. Your husband or wife notices your sour face and comments, “So what’s the matter with you?”

      “Nothing,” you respond coldly, rushing out the door, slamming it without kissing him or her good-bye. You’re not aware of the impact of your behavior.

      Your spouse is upset and acts accordingly. When you come home, you find a note that she or he has gone out. After your partner does come home, your invitation to come to bed is ignored. And so it goes.

      All four responses demonstrate that each person is making the other his or her choice-maker. We put our fate on someone or something else and don’t live as though we are free to make our own choices about our own reactions. Then, of course, it is easy to complain about how badly we have been treated.

      This scenario shows you that each person makes the other more of what he or she already is. The blamer makes the placater even more of a placater, and the placater makes the blamer even more blaming. This is the beginning of what I call a closed system, which I shall discuss later.

      After this kind of communication has gone on for several years, you get to thinking of yourself as blighted and of the world as tainted and impossible. You stop growing and start dying prematurely.

      It is important that we realize the power of these kinds of responses with other people.

      The placating response can evoke guilt.

      The blaming response can evoke fear.

      The computing response can evoke envy.

      The distracting response can evoke longing for fun.

So:

      If I evoke your guilt, you might spare me.

      If I evoke your fear, you might obey me.

      If I evoke your envy, you might ally with me.

      If I evoke your longing for fun, you might tolerate me.

      In no case, though, can you love me or trust me. In the final analysis, this is what makes for a growth-producing relationship. All we can do is survive.

      I think we need to discuss feeling a bit more at this point. I have met so many people who never openly share their insides——probably because they either don’t know how or they are scared to. I hope you are finding out whether you can share your feelings. If you find that you have not been doing this, remember it is in the interest of your health that you start.

      Successfully hiding your feelings, by the way, takes a kind of skill most people don’t really have. So their efforts often turn out to be like the traditional ostrich with its head in the sand. It thinks it’s safely hidden, but of course it is not. We who delude ourselves like the ostrich often feel misunderstood and betrayed by others.

      Oh, there are ways to hide yourself successfully if you insist. You could keep your body in a big black box with only a small hole for your voice to come through. You will have to talk in a steady monotonous voice. You won’t have much of a life, but you’ll be hidden.

      As we learned in our elementary exercises, you can mask your feelings by always talking to someone whose back is to you. You can’t see and won’t hear each other well, but your feelings won’t show. If you get thirty or forty feet away from a person, your feelings can be hidden pretty successfully, particularly if you put something between you, such as other people or a big table. In many families, marital partners often try to achieve this by putting their children between them.

      Be assured, however, that when someone tries to hide feelings——especially strong, intense ones—it usually shows somewhere on the body or face anyway. The net result is that the hider just appears more like a liar or a hypocrite than anything else.

      As mentioned, the four responses you’ve been experimenting with are forms of hiding or concealing parts of yourself. You could have been doing it for so long you are no longer aware of your other parts. You may be consciously thinking that this is a way of getting along, or it could be that you just don’t know any better.

      In the placating response, you hide your own needs; in the blaming response, you hide your need for the other person; computing hides your emotional needs and your needs for others. These same needs are ignored in the distracter, who also ignores any relationship to time, space, or purpose.

      These, then, are the shields people use to hide their feelings so they won’t be hurt. The problem is to convince them that it is safe to express their feelings. This is 90 percent of a therapist’s work and the biggest job an individual has——to know himself, and to feel safe to express feelings honestly.

      My experience shows that people who either can’t or don’t show their feelings are very lonely, even though their behavior might not always indicate it. Most people like this have been terribly hurt and neglected over long periods in their childhoods. Not showing their feelings is a way to keep from being hurt again. It takes time, a loving, patient partner, and some new awareness to change. Even then it doesn’t always work very well unless the person wants the change and understands the need for it.

      On the other hand, personal privacy is an important part of any relationship. At times, you have no words or simply don’t want to share your feelings. In that case, you can openly say, “I don’t want to tell you,” or “I don’t have the words to tell you.” Telling someone close to you that you don’t want to reveal something could easily cause discomfort, though. Secrecy can hurt. However, if the two of you clearly understand you can give each other privacy, both internal and bathroom, then you can stand the discomfort. What is important is that you make it clear that you don’t want to talk about your insides at that moment in time. This is being real and leveling. “I choose not to say what I am thinking and feeling now” is vastly different from using shields to hide your feelings.

      Being expected to “spill your guts” all the time can also make you very uncomfortable. The key to leveling is that you can choose when and how to talk, and find a context in which this is possible. Having privacy is part of maintaining self-integrity.

      What have you been accustomed to doing about your privacy? How well do you think it’s working for you? How do you find out whether or not it’s working?

      As you look back over your experience in playing the games, if you played them seriously, you may have been surprised that your body, feelings, and thoughts got stirred up even though you knew you were only role-playing. Your response indicates how powerful these roles really are. They are also a tip-off to your vulnerable points.

      Something else of which you‘re probably well aware by now is how tired you got playing these games. Suppose you knew of no other way to communicate except these four? You could feel tired and hopeless and unloved much of the time. Maybe the tiredness you regularly experience isn’t only because you work so hard.

      Remember how alone, helpless, and isolated your felt inside regardless of how you sounded and what you said? Did you notice how your sight, hearing, and thought processes were diminished?

      I consider it tragic that I have found thousands of families who live out their lives in this way. They simply don’t know anything else, and thus live miserable, isolated. and meaningless existences.

      By now you have an idea of which communication patterns you follow with your family members when you are under stress. Position yourself in your specific communication stances and see what happens. My guess is that you are finding it isn’t as easy as you might have thought to be fully honest and complete in your responses when given the opportunity. If this is the case, you may be getting in touch with some of the barriers between you and the rest of your family. This is helpful. Try the exercise of bringing yourself up to date with each other.

      Whether or not you achieved the flowing, leveling response as fully as you would have liked, you are probably more aware now that you do have choices about how to respond. When you exercise these choices, you like yourself better.

      Second, you probably realize you have been responding in ways of which you hadn’t been aware. This realization may help you when other people react to you in ways you didn’t expect.

      Third, you probably realize you have been responding in ways you would never have used intentionally. Though painful at the outset, this realization can help you to a greater understanding of what has been happening to you. Understanding is the first step to change.

      After a bit, you will find you can really have fun with these games. It may even turn out that you develop a little do-it-yourself drama group and, in the process, find yourself doing something pretty exciting and dynamic about increasing your sense of humor.