games people play.....

Been stroked lately? We all crave them you know....the good, the bad and the lovely strokes. If we feel depleted of the nourishment we receive from being stroked, we will seek them out voraciously. It doesn't matter if they are loving or hurtful, our needs will override our logic. Hunger for love and affirmation is universally craved.....it is the key to what we all have in common. We all need to be stroked. Our thirsts need quenching.

Recognized

Affirmed

Emotionally touched by others

Loved

Stroked through our interactions.

Recently, I've spent some time re-acquainting myself with the need for global open heart surgery......an offshoot from my more academic readings while considering the approach I want to take for a counselling course I will be teaching next fall. Consequently, I've been spending some time with Eric Berne's concepts behind Transactual Analysis. (Parent/Adult/Child, Ego States, Strokes, Scripts, Interactions, Games People Play.....I'm Ok, You're Ok). In order to take my own learning to a deeper level....to the place where I am in my life right now, I have been evaluating it through my own life lens.....through the experiences I am involved in, which includes the counselling work I do, the stories and the issues I am privy to, but also the experience of my own life and interactions. It is what makes learning so compelling. It has to make sense through our own life lens. If it can't be applied, it ain't worth learning.....this is the number one rule in Adult learning. :)

So, where am I? Oh.....Games People Play.....stroking.


"However good or bad you feel about your relationship, the person you are with at this moment is the "right" person, because he or she is a mirror of who you are inside." This Deepak Chropra quote was sent to me from a friend who asked me to explain it.... Hey beautiful friend??? How am I doing here? Have I confused you even more, or does it make sense??(oh, that was a stroke request wasn't it?) Ok....let's continue inside my confusion shall we?? :)

Our relationships reflect to us what we need.....? It seems to me that we are all trying to survive as stroke depleted victims and in so doing we continue to reach out for any kind of affirmation even if it is harmful or emotionally destructive. I will even say that our way of giving and receiving strokes has been impacted severely by the fact that we seem to have an unquenchable thirst.......or perhaps our cups have holes in them from past hurts and neglectful/harmful past and present relationships and the golden nectar we collect constantly seeps out. The types of relationships we try to form often reflect the need inside of ourselves.....if we haven't dealt with our own "holes" our own "wounds" ..... if we don't recognize them, name them, heal them then we will seek out relationships for the salve we so desperately crave.


Its a vicious cycle we are in as we continue to seek out strokes....by any means, unaware of the fact that our vessels have big weepy holes in them. How do we plug up the holes? How do we heal the wounds left from the games and roles we played in the past in order to learn how to give and receive healthy strokes? The first step is to recognize this in ourselves. We've got to wake up and SEE the holes! You can't fix something broken if you don't know what it is! Then, you can focus your attention on it...... It's like understanding the goal behind the behaviour. There's nothing worse than realizing you have been used as a pawn in a game you weren't given the rules for. And the only thing you can do is to change the script....to recognize that you yourself got into the relationship to fulfill your own needs too.

There's ALWAYS a reason behind why we act the way we do. Our actions are not solo flying....they are TIED to our emotional and cognitive stirrings! Our actions may be the kite seen in the air doing tricks, but it can only do so because it has a tail AND it has a string attached to someone standing on the ground! AND it's sharing the sky with a bunch of other kites with their own strings, and their own multi-coloured tails.

We need to ask......

Why does someone act that way?

Why does a child misbehave?

What is the goal behind the action???? It's all in the need to be recognized, seen, heard, loved.....are these not the goals behind the majority of our actions?

Maslow postulated that we have three basic survival needs we have to fufill in order to survive...we all need food, water and air to breath. We need to recognize one more fundamental need and that is love. We will go to any lengths to satisfy that need. We'll even try to fly a dozen kites at the same time if it means that we will eventually receive the strokes we so sorely need.

This to me seems to be the key to helping someone (and ourselves) recognize the feelings which manifest the motivation for the transactions we seek out. We gotta know the dance steps..........and we may have to alter them in order to alter the interaction with another. If we are caught in a script.....you know one where how we act and what is expected of us detrimentally plays on over and over and over again, only to try to fulfill our desire and need to be stroked, how do we learn to recognize the fact that this may in fact BE the reason for some of the holes in our cups.

It all gets ravelled up doesnt it? We are complicated beings when it comes to relationships aren't we? Man, the games we play just to get a few strokes!! We form friendships which on the surface the interactions appear to be healthy and positive only to find out there is an underlying motive, an underlying script playing out. It is a frustrating and sometimes heart wrenching story.......we've all been there. We've all experienced a friendship which has very different motives than what we were open to see and feel. WHY does this happen? Because we are trying to fulfill our own needs which sometimes can blind us from what is really happening. Its like looking through a fogged up mirror.

We are all in need of open heart surgery. WE could all benefit from a course in emotional literacy.....to learn to READ our own emotions as well as others as part of understanding the script in the drama we call life. Maybe life is the ulimate course... maybe its the only way to learn how to read emotions....ours and others. It really isn't something you can glean from a textbook is it? Learning about love in all its colour must be experienced, not read about. But HOLY, sometimes its a rough ride isn't it? Life is a rough and tumble ride.....

I think I'll be revisiting this again...... I'm OK.....I think......are you OK?