Gameplaying! A Primer on Avoiding Communication

 

When you’re in a relationship, there’s always the risk of game playing. This happens when either one or both of you avoids interacting directly with each other in a manner where issues of intimacy and conflicts are addressed face to face.

Game playing takes many forms. One of the reasons there are many forms and variations is that you and your spouse have likely developed some unique individual quirks in how the two of you communicate along with how the two of you avoid communication.

Generally game playing is about avoiding communication. Game playing often develops when a lover is brought into the picture.

What often happens is that the cheater and lover ‘team up’. They form an alliance that works against the team of you.

It becomes two against one. The dynamics shift depending on where the cheater aligns themselves.

Anytime you put pressure on them, the lover removes that pressure and neutralizes what you attempted to do. It becomes an emotional whack-a-mole game.

This shifting game is known as the ‘drama triangle‘.

Besides the drama triangle, there’s also the one-up, one-down communication positions. This allow the parties to either talk up or talk down to each other.

When the communication ceases to be between two equals, game playing is underway. There are many variants of the up/down communication games.

Most of the relationship games are either a triangulation, up/down game or some combination of the two. Although there may be many ways to disrupt the communication, the payoff of the games remains to distort or avoid the communication.

Decoding and disrupting the games is important in getting communication between you and your spouse back where it needs to be in order to maintain intimacy and problem solving.

The games may consist of actual behaviors, or emotional based games or mental games. Knowing which area of your functioning is impacted will give you clues as to the type of game going on with you. Below are a couple of examples of affair game playing.

Cheaters may play a game where they leave ‘clues’ about the affair so that you make discoveries. By you making the discovery, they don’t have to tell you about the affair.

This way they have the relief of being found out without having to bring the topic up. A variant of this game is leaving clues in such a manner that your imagination connects the dots and creates a situation which is very different from what is actually happening.

Since your imagination can often work against you, the cheater uses that tendency. By allowing you to create a bigger more menacing monster than what actually is there.

When you are busy racking your brain trying to imagine what the lover looks like and competing with the lover, the cheater is watching the show. They know it is putting more pressure on you than is on them.

There is also the ‘deserve’ game. This is where relationships are looked at in terms of people getting what they deserve. There are many variants of this game.

When deserve games are taking place, there is a type of score keeping going on. Each party keeps a tally. The one with the highest score believes that they ‘deserve more’.

What “More” means is never defined. It may be more attractive, more sex, more understanding, more ….The intentional lack of definition behind what ‘more’ is keeps the game going.

They may even play a ‘negative’ variation of the deserve game and tell you that you ‘deserve’ better. By doing so, they have taken a one down position.

In the download, “Affair Recovery Workshop” you can learn more about relationship games and ways of changing them.

Sure you can learn what to do through trial and error, but is that what you want. You can know what to do and when to do it in order to change those drama triangles. You don’t have to stay in the victim role.

Order your copy today and start turning your marriage around and ending the games keeping the two of you apart.

Best Regards,

Jeff

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One Response

  1. Having dealt with this for many years without understanding what was going on or why ..reading this makes me tired! hahaha….it is such a waste of real life ….I assumed I had married a man who was interested in being in an authentic grown up relationship and learning more about how to maintain one….I was wrong.

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