The Games We Don’t Know We’re Playing
How hidden patterns shape conversations, why we keep repeating them, and what becomes possible once we can see them
My daughter has been known to warn her friends before they meet me. “She’s a coach and a trauma therapist. Don’t even try to pretend. She’ll be able to smell the trauma and insecurity on you.”
This is, for the record, a terrible way to introduce your mother.
Underneath the teasing, though, is something most of us recognize. We notice far more in conversations than the words people say. A pause lasts slightly too long. Someone says “yes” in a tone that sounds remarkably like “no”. A perfectly ordinary question leaves you feeling unexpectedly defensive. Someone asks for help, but every attempt to help makes the conversation stranger rather than better.
Sometimes you walk away from an interaction replaying it in your head because you can’t quite explain what happened. Nothing obviously terrible was said, and there may not have been an argument. On the surface, the conversation was perfectly ordinary, but something about it felt off. You may not know exactly what you noticed. You just know there seemed to be another conversation happening underneath the one everyone could hear.
The conversation underneath the conversation
In the 1950s and 60s, psychiatrist Eric Berne developed Transactional Analysis, a way of understanding what happens between people as they interact. One of the ideas he eventually became famous for was what he called “games.”
The word can be misleading because we tend to associate playing games with deliberate manipulation. We imagine someone who knows exactly what they are doing and is trying to get one over on somebody else. That isn’t necessarily what Berne meant. To understand his idea of games, it helps first to understand that communication can happen at more than one level at the same time.
There is the conversation we can hear, in which someone asks a question, makes a request, offers help, gives an explanation or raises a concern. Berne described this as the social level of the interaction. At the same time, the exchange can carry information about what is happening between the people involved. Tone can change the meaning of a perfectly ordinary sentence. A question can carry an accusation nobody has actually voiced. An offer of help can come with an expectation attached to it, while a request for advice may seem to require something other than advice.
Most of us have experienced this without needing a psychological theory to explain it. “What do you think?” may genuinely be a request for your opinion, or the person asking may be hoping you will reassure them that they have already made the right decision. The words are the same, but the conversations are different.
The presence of that second layer does not, by itself, make an interaction a game. Human communication is full of subtext, emotion, history, expectations and things we have difficulty saying directly. If every conversation containing an unspoken layer qualified as a game, most of us would barely make it through breakfast. Berne meant something more specific.
A game has a pattern
Berne gave the games he observed names, often slightly provocative ones. One of the best known is “Why Don’t You, Yes But,” which begins when someone presents a problem and another person responds by trying to help solve it.
“I have no idea what to do about this employee.”
“Why don’t you sit down with her and talk about what’s been happening?”
“Yes, but I’ve already tried talking to her.”
“Could you be more explicit about what needs to change?”
“Yes, but she’ll get defensive.”
“What about getting HR involved?”
“Yes, but HR is useless.”
The suggestions can continue for quite a while, but each one is met with another “Yes, but…” until eventually the person trying to help runs out of ideas.
At the social level, the exchange looks like a problem-solving conversation. One person has a problem, and the other is offering possible solutions. Once we follow the sequence rather than the stated purpose, however, something else becomes visible. Each proposed solution gives the person with the problem another opportunity to demonstrate why it cannot work. In response, the person trying to help generates another alternative. The exchange continues until there are none left to offer.
Berne was interested in this recurring structure. The problem being discussed can change, as can the suggestions and even the people involved, while the interaction continues to follow a recognizable path toward a familiar ending. The game is not located in any single statement. It becomes visible in the sequence the two people create together.
That makes the ending particularly important because it tells us where the sequence has taken them.
The ending tells us something
Berne called the outcome of a game its “payoff,” the psychological outcome produced when the pattern reaches its conclusion. The word can be confusing because it sounds as though somebody wins. Many games do not end pleasantly at all. The people involved may finish the interaction frustrated, irritated, embarrassed, disappointed or helpless.
In “Why Don’t You, Yes But,” the person offering solutions eventually reaches the point where there is nothing left to suggest. Whether or not they say it aloud, the conversation has arrived somewhere close to, “I suppose there really isn’t anything you can do.” An exchange that appeared to be organized around finding a solution has instead established that none of the proposed solutions will work.
That outcome is puzzling if we look only at the stated purpose of the conversation. Berne asks us to look at the entire interaction instead, including what was happening underneath the apparent problem-solving and where the sequence eventually took both people. The payoff does not have to be enjoyable, nor does either person have to be consciously trying to produce it.
The person presenting the problem may genuinely believe they are asking for help, while the person offering solutions may genuinely believe they are being helpful. Neither has to decide in advance where the conversation will end. Each response can make perfectly good sense in relation to the one immediately before it, even when the sequence as a whole keeps producing an outcome that neither person claims to want.
This is part of what makes a game difficult to recognize while you are inside it. The individual moves can look entirely reasonable. You have to see the pattern to understand where they are taking you.
Why would we keep playing?
The question becomes more interesting once we recognize that many of Berne’s games end badly and still get repeated. People can leave feeling angry, rejected, helpless, vindicated, resentful or disappointed, then find themselves participating in a similar exchange again.
For Berne, the payoff had psychological meaning for the people involved. The interaction accomplishes something that is not fully explained by the conversation taking place at the social level. An outcome can reinforce a position someone already holds about themselves, another person or the world around them. It can also allow feelings to be expressed or familiar roles to be maintained without those things becoming the explicit subject of the conversation.
“Why Don’t You, Yes But” gives us a way to see what that means without pretending we know what is happening inside either person. We can observe that one person repeatedly becomes the source of possible solutions while the other demonstrates why those solutions will not work. When the suggestions are finally exhausted, the interaction has established something: the problem cannot be solved in this way.
What we cannot know from observing that sequence alone is why this particular outcome has psychological meaning for this particular person. Watching someone reject three suggestions does not give us privileged access to their unconscious motivation. The pattern gives us something to investigate, not a diagnosis.
The person with the problem may have wanted help very much, just as the person offering solutions may have been sincerely trying to provide it. Their intentions do not erase the pattern. They help us understand how people can participate in one without consciously setting out to create it.
You can play a game without knowing you’re playing
Thinking about games as patterns between people also keeps us from reducing them to something difficult people do to innocent people. A game requires participation, and much of that participation can happen without either person realizing the role they have taken in keeping the sequence going.
Participation, however, does not mean equal responsibility. People enter interactions with different degrees of power, freedom and awareness, and sometimes one person has considerably more ability than the other to shape what happens next. Recognizing your part in a pattern is different from assuming equal responsibility for creating it.
If you ask for help, it makes sense for me to help. If you criticize me, defending myself may seem reasonable. If you appear upset, I may reassure you, and if you suggest that I have failed you, I may begin explaining myself. Each response may feel entirely appropriate in the moment.
The pattern emerges through what happens next. One response creates the conditions for another, and the interaction gradually takes on its familiar shape. “Why Don’t You, Yes But” needs someone who will continue supplying solutions. Without that response, the same sequence cannot continue in quite the same way.
Concentrating exclusively on the other person can therefore make a game harder to see. When I focus only on what you are doing, I am more likely to explain the interaction in terms of your personality. I may decide that you are difficult, manipulative or unwilling to accept help, rather than noticing what has been happening between us and how my responses have become part of the sequence.
Looking at the interaction allows us to ask a different question: how do we keep arriving at the same destination when neither of us appears to have chosen it?
The pattern is easier to see from the end
When a conversation leaves you wondering what just happened, it is natural to go back through the words and look for the moment when things went wrong. Sometimes that is exactly what you need to do. Ordinary miscommunication happens, and an uncomfortable conversation is not automatically evidence that anyone is playing a psychological game.
A recurring interaction gives you more to work with. Rather than examining every sentence in isolation, you can look at the shape of the conversation. Where did it begin? How did you become involved? What happened as each person responded to the other? Where did the exchange eventually end? Then there is the question that can reveal the pattern: have you arrived here before?
Perhaps attempts to help repeatedly leave you feeling useless, or disagreements have a habit of ending with you defending something you were not originally discussing. Requests for reassurance may somehow become arguments, while conversations about workload repeatedly end with you taking responsibility for more of it. The details can change considerably while the sequence remains recognizable.
Seeing that pattern does not tell you exactly why it exists, and it certainly does not give you enough information to diagnose the other person. What it gives you is a way to examine an interaction that previously seemed confusing. You can compare the conversation you appeared to be having with what actually happened between you, where the interaction eventually took you and whether that destination has become familiar.
That is the value of Berne’s idea of games. It draws our attention away from isolated words and individual blame long enough to see the interaction itself. Once the pattern becomes visible, so does the role you have been taking within it. You may not yet know why the game exists or what would happen if you responded differently, but you can finally see what you are participating in. That is where the possibility of a different response begins.
