July 21, 2024

Love Games

HI ,

Eons ago, back when I was in college at UC Davis, I became enchanted with the book by Eric Berne, Games People Play. Little known to folks back then, he was in practice right here in Sacramento and then moved to the Bay Area. At that time, I was double majoring in both psychology and physics. My interest was in how our minds interacted and influenced what we perceive as reality. Eric's book opened me up to recognizing that simply researching this interaction would do nothing to help me put this knowledge to a useful purpose. I wanted to understand how and why people thought the way they did. How did the thinking and feeling processes that create everyone's lives come into being? I had to learn how we learn to think and feel the way we do. Unfortunately, there was no such field of study at UC Davis. However, I was able to design my own major which I titled the Psychology of Education. Davis had an education department, a child development department, and a psychology department. So halfway through my junior year, I dropped my double major and dove into my inter-departmental individual major. I have never actually stopped studying this field.

So why did I become a Chiropractor? Surprisingly, upon graduating from UC Davis, I discovered that there is no such field as Educational Psychology other than an interest by full professors in the departments I pulled from to create my major. So unless I wanted to become a full professor, there was no way to make a living – something which back in those days was considered a necessity. I was still driven by the need to have a useful purpose. I wanted to be of service, yet still be able to support a family. Medicine was an obvious choice and that route was open to me, but I just could not line up with the philosophical stance of the medical world. They were focused on death and disease. I wanted my life to be focused on health and functionality. At that time I was deeply involved in areas of study and practice that utilized mind-body connections. This was new stuff to the common person back in the 60s and 70s. The only licensed profession that employed and understood this stuff was Chiropractic. So that was the direction I headed in.

Obviously, the study of mind-body interaction was not new in other parts of the world. This arena has been studied in other cultures for thousands of years. Part of what primed me for my interest in this area was my study of many of these cultural practices while in high school. I was studying Yogic philosophy texts in high school while my classmates' only extracurricular interests involved getting beer to drink down at the river. There seemed to be a big influx of East Indian philosophy into the USA back in the late 60s, and I was caught up in it. It offered glimpses into how our world worked which was completely different from our Western psychological/medical model. I was into expanding my worldview. I wanted to figure out how to create a better world. Ah, the idealism of youth!

Once I embraced the perspective that most of our experiences in life come from our experiences with our relationships, my quest began to have a more practical focus. The mantra of the flower generation of the late 60s and 70s (that's me) was that love is the answer. This sounded very good, but my observations of how well love worked for folks I knew didn't match my image of what love was supposed to do. Here we are over 50 years later and I am still trying to figure this one out. Eric Berne's book gave me a closer look at what the word love might actually look like under the hood. For a long time, I refused to even use the word love because I came to realize that the definition of love was different for every person. I thought of it as the most frequently misunderstood word in the English language.

A couple of months ago, I tried to come up with the most stripped-down basic definition I could for love. I finally settled on Love = the desire to participate. This seemed to cover the most essential feeling in the wide diversity of forms of love. I found this useful in how I could now look at what were termed love relationships. It captured the desire portion of the feeling of love which seems to be fairly universal. What now remained was to explore the different ways people want to participate. The field is wide open. Being a parent is one way as is being a child or dependent. Being a friend, being a teacher, being a lover, being a coach, and even being a fan are all clear forms of love. But with the simplicity of simply desiring participation, we are able to open up the perception of love to understand abusers, bullies, authorities, and demanding brats. Although these are generally considered negative, at their essence they are attempts to find connection through participation – love.

You can begin to see why there is so much confusion between people created by the basic expression I love you. What that means to the person expressing it probably is completely different than the expectations generated by the listener. This expectation mismatch between people is the source of so much suffering in this world. The early Greeks tackled this problem thousands of years ago and improved expectations somewhat by dividing love into multiple different forms of love. The three most commonly used today are eros – sexual passion, philos – brotherly love, and agape – altruistic love. But the Greeks also defined several other forms of love, storge – parental devoted love, xenia – guest hospitality, philautia – self-love, pragma – practical love, and its opposite ludus – playful love, and mania – obsessive love. As you can see the Greeks put some thought into this whole issue of love so that they could manage expectations more appropriately.

I can honestly say that I have experienced all of these forms of love and at the time I labeled each of them as simply love. But if I tell someone I love them, which form of love do I mean? That concern is why I would not use the word love, but would instead try to communicate my feelings more explicitly. Unfortunately, this frequently did not work. The person would try to press the point to get me to simply say “I love you” so that they could superimpose their definition and subsequent expectations on me. This is where Eric Berne's work comes into play. It becomes my job to figure out what their expectations are and decide if I want to participate in the way they are looking for. These preset expectations are called games. And like all games, there are rules and there is a goal and a desire to win. What makes these relationship games challenging is that frequently the players have no idea that they are engaged in a game. 

Let me use an example. Let's say person A felt ignored as a child and built a belief that if they could just be the center of attention they would be okay. This conscious childhood belief would be suppressed after years of negative responses to their demands for attention. Yet subconsciously they are constantly motivated to seek center of attention status. The motivations for our behaviors almost always come from our subconscious feelings. Person B may have felt unsafe as a child and observed that a domineering parent seemed to always be in control. Person B's subconscious game may be to act aggressively domineering to feel safe. A game A and B might form is one where A might become a vocal victim and engage B to act as an abuser. This way A gets constant attention and B gets to be domineering. This is a classic abused wife game. When A and B are asked why they are doing what they are doing, both will answer that it is because they love their partner so much.

Every one of us has subconscious motivators running our lives that are generally created in our first 7 to 10 years of life. Perhaps you begin to see why those of us from the flower power generation looking for love to solve all our problems might be a little mixed up. Fifty years have gone by and the problems have not been solved. My suspicion is that our issue is that we never had any idea that love was such a complicated subject. We thought that love was simple and obvious. Little did we know that what we really were dealing with was a snake's nest of love games being played by a load of folks without a clue.

My personal answer is to drop the whole love story and go for something with a greater chance of success – respect. I am not talking about the gangster type of respect which is really submission to authority or power. I am talking about respect as in to esteem and honor someone. The Greek agape has too much codependent self-sacrifice in it and philos has too much demand for sameness. Respect allows for individuality and mutual exchange for mutual benefit. Respect fits my perspective of the golden rule – treat others as you would want to be treated. How would our society look different if it were based on respect instead of the games we currently play? Just a thought...

Take care,

David          

Ellen

This last week was time for Ellen's yearly checkup with her primary doctor Warren. Over all she did quite well. The doc was happy with her lab numbers except for a bit of excess hemoglobin in her red blood cells. He has set her up with a hematologist to check that out further. Afterwards we went out to lunch at the nearby Persian restaurant Shahrzad. They were out of Ellen's favorite dish there, the trout. But we did just fine with a couple orders of koobideh and green salad.

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"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

~Friedrich Nietzsche

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"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

~Friedrich Nietzsche

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"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. "

~Friedrich Nietzsche