Games People Play 2026

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY 2026

A modern field guide to Eric Berne’s Games

In 1964, psychiatrist Eric Berne published “Games People Play”, arguing that much of everyday social life isn’t candid, nor intimate. Instead, it’s a “Game”: a repeated pattern of interaction with a hidden motive and a predictable, often self-defeating payoff at the end. A way to confirm your own reality tunnel, justify your “favorite bad feeling”, and stay in the safety of a sense of control – yup, things are still the same old, same old! They are often passed down through the generations.

The surface conversation (the social level, the words being used) says one thing; underneath it (the psychological level, or undertow), we communicate something different. Many examples would today be called “gaslighting”, in which the manipulator adopts a one‑up position and forces the other person into a one‑down position by undermining their reality. Berne mapped dozens of these patterns, from marriages to bar fights to therapy sessions. Below, I explain the Game patterns with examples from our 2026 reality.

All Games can be played at three levels: first, second, and third degree.
A First-Degree Game is socially acceptable in public circles.
A Second-Degree Game doesn’t cause permanent, irremediable damage, but players prefer to avoid the public eye.
A Third-Degree Game is played for keeps, and it ends in the hospital, the courtroom, or the morgue.

The degree is set by how hard, intense, and tenaciously it’s played.
A “gentle” player can walk away from a game easily and doesn’t need a hard-hitting payoff.
A “hard” player is rigid, escalates when challenged, and needs a serious payoff to feel satisfied. Playing Games can be genuinely destructive as a hard, third-degree grievance-collecting habit that structures someone’s personality and has a toxic impact on the people around them.

The line between “self-harming” and “harming others” is blurry, because most Games have at least two roles. The “Addict” needs a Persecutor and a Rescuer to complete the pattern; “Now I Got You, You SOAB” needs a target. So, a Game may look self-contained in its damage (drinking, debts), but it is usually casting others into supporting roles. To break the Game, another cast member must stop playing their part, which is hard if there’s secondary gain as the “Rescuer” or the “Victim”.

Berne describes people as shifting between three “ego states”: Parent (inherited rules and judgments), Adult (objective, present-tense reasoning), and Child (spontaneous feeling or old adaptations to authority).

Games typically look like Adult exchanges on the surface but are running a Parent-Child crossed transaction underneath. They follow the “Drama Triangle” with role switches between Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor and the related switches between I+ / I- and You- / You+.
The switch ensures both parties are left with their “Favorite Bad Feeling” as the payoff to the Game.
For instance, gaslighting typically involves the Persecutor role (Critical Parent) in the I+ role and the Victim (Adaptive Child) in the You- role as the person being manipulated.

If this is new information to you, read more about this psychological framework in my blog on Transactional Analysis before reading the Games below.

The point of naming these patterns is to notice which ones you’re running on autopilot
& to find out what happens with a relationship, your family, or a (working) day when
 YOU…  JUST…  DON’T…  PLAY…

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Attachment: Understanding Entanglement

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

Attachment:

Understanding Entanglement

What is entanglement?

Entanglement occurs when boundaries between people blur and your emotional wellbeing becomes dependent on someone else. Feeling responsible for other people’s feelings, and other people being dependent on you for their feelings. With emotional entanglement, you lose track of where your feelings end and theirs begin, often feeling responsible for their moves or sacrificing your autonomy to maintain the connection. These are attachment wounds within you: you are trying to attach to your loved ones by overlapping your emotions with theirs.

Most people aren’t trying to harm their loved ones, but this is a form of coercive control without the bad intentions. People just need reassurance about their feelings and to calm down their ego or their inner children who are acting up. When I’m adding to the chaos by contributing with rescuing actions instead of just staying out of it and allowing them to self-regulate, my loved ones or colleagues become dependent on my efforts of rescuing. Relationships in which it isn’t clear where they begin and you end are an example of a coercive control situation and how we get caught in that toxic cycle – without realising it. It’s like saying: “I don’t want you to feel like this (their own feelings), I don’t want you to be like this.”

Then when I stop rescuing, it feels like abandonment and that feels like it reinforces their and my own spiralling.
But if I don’t stop, I’m sacrificing my own autonomy to maintain the connection, and that means I am fawning – which is one of the trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop). 

Fawning is being good at being good, to be safe, but at the expense of yourself. A key warning sign is mood contagion. Meaning, your happiness is entirely dependent on other people’s moods.

You may feel intense anxiety when you are not in emotional contact with them. These are the blurred boundaries between you and them, a lack of autonomy. Not only for you, but also for them. Do you allow them to feel what they feel? Do acknowledge their behaviour for what it is?
No, instead you absorb their emotions as your own. You’ll find you frequently make excuses for toxic or damaging behaviour or for emotions that they need to self-regulate, instead of bleeding all over the rest of the world.
Sometimes you feel so porous that you don’t even know if it is you feeling this or them.

So, this goes back to how long are you going to put up with what you’re putting up with? What is the cost? What is maintaining this behaviour costing you? And what is it costing your children? They learn what love is from you and your partner, they copy your behaviour patterns.

you need to disengage rather than validate the entanglements.

The mystery of knowing

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

A woman feels alone, abandoned and is trying to overcome an addiction issue, her method to calm her anguish.
We do a constellation. What emerges is that in her mother’s womb, there was another baby. This woman used to be a twin.
But it was just her when she was born. How is this possible?
Her mother later confirms that she had a heavy bleeding during the pregnancy, and there was a twin brother whose life ended before it really started.

A man finds himself torn between siblings and parents, always the one maintaining peace, ensuring everyone continues to talk with each other. In the constellation, the father-representative behaves a bit like a child, abdicating the responsibility to his son to resolve the troubled relationships. None of the representatives knew this about the actual father. It takes the client himself a few moments to acknowledge the truth about the father he respects: “Yes, this is how my father behaves, deflecting, not taking ownership”.
The field knew. He didn’t.

A client feels she can’t find the right partner. She also feels somewhat disconnected from her mother and daughter.
In a constellation with her female lineage, we discover the grandmother lost her first love in war and had to marry a man she didn’t love.
She wasn’t too fond of the daughter from this marriage, as she disliked the father.
The stand-in indicated that in her heart-of-hearts she felt neither her daughter nor granddaughter deserved the happiness of a good marriage since she never got one. The client later validates with her mother: yes, grandmother’s first love died in the war.
Later on, the client informed me that she feels her DNA has changed, that the relationship with her daughter has completely turned around. Not only did she influence her own life for the better: it changed her daughter’s, who wasn’t even in the room.

The mystery of knowing: family constellations and the holographic universe

Everyone is lying on the floor. Dead.

A woman I’ve not spoken with beforehand asked for an impromptu constellation about her relationship with her daughter.
But within minutes, all the representatives have collapsed.

One says she is a man, clutching his belly, describing searing pain. So, this is clearly not a miscarriage, which was my first thought.
Another feels she’s in a mass grave, surrounded by bodies.
I’m at a loss. I turn to the client for explanation.

“I’m half Libyan,” she tells me quietly. “Family members from my father’s village were killed in the civil war there.”
Nothing in our brief interaction, not even her name, suggested this history. None of the workshop participants knew.
Yet somehow, the field knew.
The representative feeling the belly wound suddenly connects the dots: “Yes, I feel I am a perpetrator. I was shot in the belly.”

This end scene is what Family Constellations founder Bert Hellinger described in his books about his workshops: perpetrators and victims lying calmly together after death. There is peace between them. Only in life do we feel hate, strife and suffering. All morality – so important in daily life – is meaningless after death. After death, all that remains is unconditional acceptance.

The impossible knowing

If you’ve experienced family constellation work, you know this phenomenon. Representatives access information they couldn’t possibly know through normal means. They feel physical sensations in body parts that mirror the original person’s ailments. They know about deaths, births, traumas, or secrets that have been buried for generations.

If you’re a sceptic and find this hard to believe: do join the next workshop!

How is the impossible possible?

I get asked this question in every workshop. My honest answer is that I don’t know. But I know what I experience, what hundreds of participants have experienced. The knowing is real. The information – whenever we can check the details with living family members – is accurate. The healing that follows from understanding the pattern, closing that open loop, is genuine.

You can decide for yourself how to interpret this, but here’s my two cents.

I’ve been exploring a framework from theoretical physics that offers a fascinating possibility – NOT as THE ANSWER (because we know from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that THE ANSWER is 42😊), but to think about what might be happening when representatives download information from somewhere beyond their individual awareness.

 

Where does the information come from?

 

Is hypnosis NLP or is NLP hypnosis?

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

Is hypnosis NLP? IS NLP HYPNOSIS?

What is the difference?

The short answer is: hypnosis is not a form of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. And NLP can absolutely be used without hypnosis.

NLP is a therapeutic model, a set of techniques and processes that involve communication, problem-solving, and self-development, based on the proven techniques of famous psychiatrists and therapists.
Hypnosis is a form of focused attention that can be used to achieve a desired outcome. It is a natural state, not a therapeutic model and it is by itself not therapeutic in nature, as you can see in stage hypnosis. 
While both techniques can be used for self-improvement, they are thus distinct.

So, now that you know this, you can simply leave this page or… maybe you want to hear some fascinating backstory and the dark side of both techniques… in that case, do read on for the long answer!

Let start with the oldest technique, hypnosis. It has been practised for as long as we know, sometimes with enhancers in the form of consciousness expanding drugs, sometimes through ritual trances, like in the sleep temples of the ancient Middle East and Greek civilisations. The Greek word hypnos means sleep. Still today, there are religions that encourage an altered state of mind to enhance healing by laying on hands, swirling, dancing, drumming or speaking in tongues. But hypnosis is a survival skill older than humanity. 

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TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS

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TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS

Transactional Analysis is the psychological assessment of communication and the ego states associated with the way someone communicates in each situation. It’s great to have basic understanding of these principles for a number of reasons.

With the use of TA and through understanding your behaviours, you can manipulate a conversation or discussion in your favour, by using the ego state corresponding to the one being used by the other or by using the ego state corresponding to your objective. You can understand your own behaviours and get yourself to the most opportune ego state for the situation. You can understand yourself and resolve your “favourite bad feeling”. 

TA transaction

ego statES

This theory by Eric Berne looks at “Parent”, “Child”, and “Adult” ego states (internal parts), which remain active in all humans regardless of age. Berne believed that through identifying which ego-state one uses in a given situation, and by then using another state you can change the course of an interaction.
Also, psychological problems can be indicative if one of the states are overly or unnecessarily used in normal conversation.

The three ego-states Berne’s describes are the Parent, the Adult, and the Child.

TA ego states

The Parent state refers to the unconsciously incorporated parental (or other authority-based) feelings and positions. The Parent state copies how you were parented or guided in childhood and often upholds the guidelines that were set then, with learned behaviours. This Parent state can be Critical or Nurturing.

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Trauma Toolkit

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TRAUMA TOOLKIT

INTRODUCTION

We used to think that only horrific events would cause trauma. The soldier or civilian who witnessed death and destruction in war zones. A traffic accident in which people were killed in front of your eyes. These days we know better.

Research has shown that many people get traumatized in childhood, because there was a lack of connection and attachment to the parents. Relationship trauma can have a worse impact on mental health than physical or sexual abuse. A persistent lack of good is worse for a person’s mental health than the existence of infrequent bad experiences. The CDC- Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACE”) Study (1995-1997) showed that almost two-thirds of study participants had at least one ACE, while over 20% reported three or more ACEs. The questionnaire concerns childhood abuse, neglect and household dysfunction, which proves to lead to an increase in physical and mental health challenges as well as a decrease in social success. For more information, please visit: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html

INDICATIONS OF TRAUMA

What is the most powerful memory of your childhood?

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Why therapy doesn’t work – part 2

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Why therapy doesn’t work

Part 2

What if you’re smarter than your therapist?

As mentioned in the last blog post, we love to think that we’re all rational beings and that we can resolve our problems with rational methods. There, I talked about your therapist making this common mistake. Here, I will discuss what happens if you yourself make this mistake of depending on your rational (defense) systems.

Rather than relying on our first brain, the gut, or our second brain, the heart, we too often depend on the evolutionary latest brain to lead our life, and then specifically on the neocortex or thinking brain.

The Cartesian concept of “I think, therefore I am” is widespread in our Western culture.

Einstein quote

As if cut off from the neck down, we let our mind lead us through life, rather than allowing our passion and drive, heart and gut, instruct our brain cells on how to make our essential values and core purpose happen. What then happens is that, over time, we start to feel more and more disconnected. Disconnected from our life, from our deep wants and needs, from others. We might start to feel like frauds, dissatisfied with ourselves, by lack of a valid expression of who we are. 

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Why therapy doesn’t work – part 1

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Why therapy doesn’t work?

Part 1

Every so often I get clients who tell me that within one session with me they feel so much better than after 4, 5, 6 sessions with their psychologist.
Is it that I am much better than other therapists, usually working with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Solution-Focused (Brief) Therapy (SFBT)?  
Ha, I wish! …. So, how can this be?

What’s happening is a common mistake we humans make.  We love to think that we’re all rational beings and that we can resolve our problems with rational methods.

If you’ve read my previous blogs you know that I love The Work by Byron Katie, a very CBT way of working.  I just like Katie’s worksheet better than the ABC(DEF) worksheet from CBT / Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.  It’s more personable and if you want to try it, she has volunteers available for you – free of charge!

These exercises work like magic when people are getting wrapped up in negative or self-destructive thinking or are stressing themselves out with imaginary future events that are never going to happen.
It works great when you’ve got patterns or beliefs taken over from your parents that no longer serve you.  As the Buddha says: our human suffering is caused by our convictions, cravings, thoughts.  Use the worksheet and you can fix it.  Next time you try to go into an outdated pattern of negative thinking, your brain will recognize it and interfere.  Same goes for focusing on your strengths, recognizing wins and successes.  Wonderful stuff – that is, if your rational brain is on-line during your problem state.

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Warning: you’re bringing your family to work

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch
Yesterday I was having lunch with my old colleagues. We had a great conversation: several people told me they liked my blogs, so I was feeling wonderful. Of course, this is not even remotely interesting to you, but it did encourage me to finally start writing again. So, here it is!

The topic: stress takes you back to your childhood and your family. Why?

What do you need to let go

The autopilot

When there we’ve got more work than we can handle, we build up stress, and when we’re stressed, we revert to running on the automatic pilot as much as we can. Going on autopilot saves us energy. However, the autopilot is not always pleasant for people around us:
  • It’s locked in on the goal
  • It hates distractions
  • It believes it’s always right
  • It’s quickly on the defense
  • It’s irritable with what- or whoever irrelevant for our goal

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Get that teflon coating against stress

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Stress at work… A corporate, project or change management role is a challenge. Performing at the higher levels is top sport. Like an athlete, you need to keep yourself sharp, in shape, react instantly, be strategic, predict what the next steps need to be and act accordingly.

Athletes work a lot on state control, keeping their mental game together – even when things start to look bleak. They have to stay cool as a cucumber.

What do YOU do to manage the stressors in your life? Are you able to maintain your high performance state at all times, or do you sometimes find yourself lacking energy? Lashing out to your loved ones? Jumpy and on edge like a scaredy-cat?

What distinguishes people who are resilient, who seem to wear their Teflon-coating at all times, from those of us who bring work stress to our family and homes?

LEARNED BEHAVIOUR

Stress is a given. How we deal with it is not. A lot is learned behaviour, habits. Learned behaviour means we can change it. We can bring the stress reaction down with practice.

What do unflappable people use as defense mechanisms?

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Train your happiness or “the happy few”

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Train your happiness or “the happy few”

Weird concept: “The Happy Few”.

Honestly, to me it seems The Happy Few are usually not so happy. And besides, thanks to Positive Psychology we know exactly what to do to be happy!

Happiness is 1. a muscle that you can practice and 2. a choice you make.

Let’s start with #2. Yes, I no longer have to adhere to any rules but my own, so I can start with #2. if I like!

2. The choice you make

Say, you are not making the choices that are at your heart’s desire.

For instance: you tell yourself you are safe when you’ve got 500K on the bank.

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Luxury problems – too embarrassing!

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So, I was sitting at my desk, with Mont Blanc view, in my dream job, leading a great team, interesting projects. Happily married, a lovely house, dear friends, bucket loads of money and …. I was freakin’ unhappy. What the heck?! Impossible! Embarrassing! Unthinkable!

Acknowledge success

To cut a long story short, I found my way back to happiness with positive psychology. Rainbows & roses. Let me tell you about it… or am I the only one with luxury problems?

What if the job you loved makes no sense to you now? You had energy to run marathons before but now you ask your love to kick you out of bed each morning. All your life you were convinced that you must add value, work hard, rise to the higher echelons. You’ve pushed yourself day-to-day like a top athlete. Is turning your life around really an option? Retiring early? Going down another path? What to do with the rest of your life?  You may fear the lack of status. Because who are you, if not the VP of xyz, the partner in this firm, the director at this company? Who will want to know you if you are no longer moving within your professional network? You may fear not having that regular income, not convinced you deserve to live so selfishly, choosing to do only what you want. This is not what your parents taught you. Who are you to live only for pleasure & freedom? Not earning that income, losing that status, no longer measuring your success by a big car, a job that impresses, being useful to society in a way you believe is right… If becoming a rat-race drop-out is your dirty secret desire … I’ve got some tips.

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Emotional Intelligence

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Emotional Intelligence Competencies Goleman

Emotional Intelligence is an essential skill for any leadership function.
The topic is often snubbed as “soft skills”, but a.o. HBR, McKinsey, Korn Ferry research shows that these skills are in hard demand by the corporations for any leadership function.

Several recruitment agencies reported that they are now being instructed to value “soft skills” above “technical skills” for leadership searches.

Certainly for service companies, people are the most important asset and losing important talent in your team can cost you and the company dearly. Sometimes this means you have to say goodbye to those who are undermining your team. And, how do you do that with emotional intelligence?

Do you have concerns about keeping your talented team members on board? Are you working effectively with other functions and businesses in the organization? Would you like to keep growing and learning, so you become eligible for your next promotion? How can you increase your influencing & persuation skills?

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When the universe spits on your security

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Sometimes we find ourselves holding on, with our nails digging in, hoping to maintain security, safety, certainty.

For me, this usually happened when I was holding on to relationships that had died,  6 … 9 … 12 months before. Utterly unhappy, without the guts to end it. Because the devil you know…

Well, one thing was certain, I maintained the security of unhappiness till the bitter end.

That bitter end is usually when the universe throws you a curve ball and you are forced to do something, anything.
And then finally, you go through the shouting, the tears, the grief, the pain.
Only to come out on the other end, a bit shaken but still in one piece (surprise! surprise!).

And there the “epiphany” awaits you that you should have done this months earlier. That yes, you feel guilty. That yes, you disappointed people. That yes, this was painful.

But YES!!! IT WAS WORTHWHILE!

Because in taking the guilt, you’ve grown up and grown taller at least 2 inches.
Reality comes with the unexpected – can you believe that that curve ball the universe throws at you is for the best?
When will you start to have trust that your life leads you down the path that was meant for you?
Fighting reality… haven’t we all been there? How about you? Are you ready to stop it?

When we are fighting reality, it hurts

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Our What stories have you been telling yourselfsuffering comes from our thoughts, desires, convictions about what life should be, what should happen, not from what is actually happening. Suffering will cease as we let go of this clinging & craving for things that aren’t. When we experience grief, we want back what we lost.
When we are angry with someone, we want this person to behave differently than they do. We experience anxiety about (imaginary) things we do not want to happen. In all these cases, you are wasting energy fighting reality – in the last case, even a reality that does not exist and most likely will never exist.

The unthinkable suffering Victor Frankl experienced in the concentration camps left him with wisdom where death was close, because he was able to maintain purpose, meaning in his need to survive this suffering. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, you’ll find his endless wisdom that prescribes us to find meaning in the things that we want to believe should not be so. Once we find that meaning, we know that everything is as it should be – even the bad experiences have a purpose.

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Breaking through perfectionism

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So, I totally broke through my perfectionism! Happy release! This is so powerful…

John Grinder NLP

My perfectionism was very specific: for me it meant that I could not fail, not that I would do everything perfectly.

Well, what does it mean “to fail”?
For everyone, these words mean something different, while the consequences can be fairly similar.
Self-torture, pushy for others, taking too much time for things that are not worth it.
In the end, it can thus bring you the opposite effect of holding you back from being the best you can be.

What is the underlying purpose of your perfectionism?

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You forgot something

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I don’t know about you, but I do sports regularly, eat healthy and make sure I rest well.
But it wasn’t until a couple of years back that I realized that I was forgetting something….
And I think most of us are in the same place.

We do sports to keep our body in good shape, we go on holidays to spend quality time with the family, we take vitamins to support our immune system. Maybe you even do your calls standing up these days, since you heard “sitting is the new smoking”?
So, would you consider yourself to be fit?

Whether yes or no, let me ask you another question: what efforts do you make to ensure the fitness of your magnificent brain? Most of us treat our laptop better than the wiring of our internal computer: virus protection, defragmenting, removing the cookies,…

Scientists now tell us that mental aspects heavily influence all kinds of (auto-immune) diseases, with a positive mindset having a tremendous impact on recovery.

Mental fitness matters greatly, so why don’t we initiate regular upgrades?
How much better would your life be with a brain wash – clean out the cob webs?

Take the edge off. Stop the tiring energy drains. Work more freely and easily with your co-workers. Alleviate strong memories that only cause recurring tension between you and your spouse. Lift the anchors and get more excited about challenging targets. Reach them halfway the year instead of scrambling at the end. And why not: have your bonus increase accordingly?

How does one achieve “the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”?

I’ll tell you about my experience. You don’t have to do the same, just consider this.

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The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself – 1

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Act the way you'd like to be

Two – honestly! – life-changing points to make on this quote.

  1. We tend to think problem focused:
    “Why does this happen?
    How can I be so stupid?”.
    As a result your brain comes up with ten reasons why you are stupid.
    Ok, so that was really helpful. NOT! 
  2. Your brain does not register a negative.
    If I tell you not to think about a pink elephant….
    What happened in your mind’s eye? That’s right!
    So, asking yourself: “How do I make sure I don’t miss the deadline” will echo in your brain as:  “… how to miss deadline… how to miss deadline…”

The short and simple conclusion is to practice the following:

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The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself – 2

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

Or in my case, I started wondering about the quality of my life by the questions Umair Haque asked me.

Early 2013, I read his HBR piece “How to have a year that matters”.  In which he posed the following question, among a number of other relevant comments: 
“… let me humbly ask: do you want to have a year that matters — or do you want to spend another year starring-slash-wallowing in the lowest-common-denominator reality show-slash-whiny soap opera of your own inescapable mediocrity-slash-self-imposed tragedy?”

OK, maybe that does not speak to you the way it did to me.

But he also asked: “Why are you here? I don’t mean to induce a full blown heart palpitation accompanied panic attack filled existential crisis in you (or maybe I do) — so let’s keep it simple. This coming year: why are you (really) here?”

Which did induce a full blown heart palpitation with panic attack and existential crisis. Why am I here? What am I doing here? Does this matter, what I do? Why do I really want to be here?

How to have a year that matters: the quality of your life

Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

quality questionsI read Umair Haque’s HBR piece “How to have a year that matters” early 2013. Umair challenges the usual superficial New Year’s resolutions big time “… do you want to have a year that matters — or do you want to spend another year starring-slash-wallowing in […] mediocrity-slash-self-imposed tragedy?”

I picked up the glove and started working through his questions – not that I remembered every single one of them, however, once you start considering what it means for you “to have a year that matters” you will work through them naturally.

He asks:  “So what’s your true north? […] Does your true north point to consumption, status, transactions — instead of investment, accomplishments, relationships? If it’s the former, I’d bet: a life well lived is going to remain as elusive to you as it’s been to Lance.”

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