Layer 474 . . . Games, Pastimes, Winners and Losers, Berne, Reich and Maslow

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My father taught me how to play chess. He taught me the basic moves, but nothing about strategies, openings and endgames - of which I still know very little. I've never been a great one for playing games, or for pastimes. What the hell is a pastime?

My father taught me some basic things about life. He lived a very simple life - practically hermit-like and very monagamous, as far as I could see. If it turned out he'd had a secret lover I'd be completely shocked and amazed.

And yet dad was a great player of games. He had drawers and cupboards full of games. His own children were a huge disappointment to him in terms of their enthusiasm for games. It was his grandchildren who joined in with his games-playing to while away hours of companionship, having innocent fun on many a rainy weekend and school holidays. Dad would much rather play a game than have a conversation. What was the point of talking? Listening in to most people's conversations you might have to admit that he kind of had a point, even if he never expressed it as such. Inarticularcy was pretty much dad's speciality.

In terms of winners and losers - it's hard to say whether dad was one or other of these things. Having a leg blown off and almost losing your life in a war against fascists isn't exactly conducive to being a winner in the game of life. Yet having been brought back from the battlefield in Normandy and having survived horrendous injuries - you possibly learn certain things during a year or so of hospital convalescence about the preciousness of life itself, and an appreciation of its absolute value. You maybe learn that life is simply about being, and learn not to worry too much about doing or having.

Dad was a winner in that he had a beautiful and thoughtful wife who was his lifelong companion. She was feisty as hell and gave him endless brainache, but she was loyal and strong, and she took good care of him. She was full of enthusiasm, and she was brave and energetic. She gave him pride and dignity, and two children to enliven their lives and their modest household.

Dad was a winner in that he was able to retire to a beautiful part of the country and live in a part of the world he truly loved. He had enough money to live on, a decent car to get around in, and a decent home he could call his own. His lifelong work in a factory gave him dignity as well as a regular income. He also had a decent retirement pension that allowed him and mum to live out their lives well above the poverty line. He owned the home he lived in, and paid no rent to any landlord or local authority. This home that must now be sold - the last remaining contact with two good people and their decent and honourable lives.

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It's never been clear to me what's supposed to happen to people's possessions when they die. Obviously some of them are inherited and are gratefully owned by descendants - for their utility as well as their sentimental value. Some things are essentially useless but are wonderful reminders of their previous owners.

I was shocked by my sister's lack of interest in mum and dad's possessions. Her only interest was in their monetary value - and very few of their possessions had any monetary value. Therefore her attitude was - throw it all away, or sell bits if you're able. She was quite happy to give away all of mum's clothes to charity shops, keeping nothing at all for herself - not even a scarf or a cardigan. Thankfully my children, my nephews and their partners at least wanted to inherit some things as souvenirs. The bungalow had been a second home for my nephews as they were growing up, and living in various places around the county - as much as it had been for me. It was a place of stability, identity and continuity.

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During certain periods of her depression mum didn't really want me to go to stay with her at the bungalow. She'd come to rely on her meals on wheels, and she hated not being able to buy food for me or cook for me. It negated all she stood for as a mother and a provider. In the end she didn't even have the strength to clean properly or to change bed linen. Such is the indignity and loss of pride when you're old and feeble and reaching the end of your life.

I wonder now if she had any regrets - any unfulfilled ambitions, any thoughts about things she'd not done that she could have done, and maybe should have done, when she still had energy, drive and feistiness.

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Dad must have learned to play games to while away the hours as he was lying in a hospital bed, while the war in France and Germany continued, whilst hundreds and thousands more teenagers were losing their lives and their limbs in a war against fascists and their evil leadership.

Dad taught us how to play ludo and drafts and card games. He introduced us to the joys of Monopoly and Totopoly. (I get it now - it was about the Tote. Ha!) He was a great fan of dominoes and games involving picking up sticks and flicking counters into plastic cups. He was a good winner and a good loser. My sister was a habitual loser. Myself - I couldn't see the point of winning, or the taking part, and definitely not the losing. There were much better things to do - many of them involving friends and the vast amount of complete freedom available outside the house, away from parental control and the strict rules of the game; away from winning and losing.

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Aunt O was born during the First World War. The solicitor who came to the house yesterday was shocked when she told him she was born in 1915. 96 years of age and still sharp as a tack. "Oh well," she said, on learning how much it was going to cost to change her will and to set up powers of attourney. "I'll just have to get a job."

She would too, if only it were possible. Never afraid of hard work, my aunt - infirmity now afflicts her body, but not her mind. She can even cope with loss of hearing, as well as loss of mobility. She can still prop herself up on a walking frame and on her worktops well enough to cook a roast dinner for two. "Yes I know you can buy roast chicken in the supermarket - but I've already taken the lamb steaks out of the freezer!" Now be quiet.

She hadn't been allowed to get a paid job till she was 18 or 19. My Victorian grandfather had insisted that as the oldest girl in the family she had to stay at home and look after the rest of the children. No wonder she ran away from home to be with my uncle.

She manages quite well in her own home, and still does her own cleaning and washing. She has a stair lift and someone to take care of her gardens and her shopping. As she says herself, she wants for nothing.

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Eric Berne was a psychologist and the author of a seminal book called Games People Play. In it he describes the game-playing that goes on between both consenting and non-consenting adults. He also talks about people who take part in interpersonal 'pastimes'. Berne was the grandfather of what's now known as Transactional Analysis. It's worth reading about - especially if you've ever been involved in inappropriate game-playing or on the receiving end of an adult behaving like they're either a child or your parent.

To find out about what adults are supposed to be like when they become fully evolved human beings try taking a look at Layer 20 and the conclusions of another great psychologist - Abraham Maslow.

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Yet another great but little-known psychologist mentioned in the media recently - Wilhelm Reich. Channel 4's curious documentary series on human sexuality did a superficial review of his work on human sexuality with particular mention of the function of the orgasm. It's maybe time to write some more about Reich, and time to write something more about Zen, sexuality, enlightenment and well-being.

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Layer 74 Be Strong, Education and Affluenza

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The peace of the riverside café was broken by a sudden outburst over in the corner.

“Be strong”, is what she kept saying to her pathetic little scrap of a 5 year old, as he wept and moaned, needing her comfort and attention. Her friend and her friend’s little daughter looked on, somewhat bemused, somewhat embarrassed. The child was an obvious poser, an attention-seeker. His reaction to something quite minor was clearly borderline hysterical.

Most parents would have said either ‘calm down’ or ‘be quiet’, but this lispy blond mum in a pink sweater and blue jeans kept saying, as she put her arm around him and patted his little blond head, “Be strong”.

I have never, ever, heard a parent speak like this to a child. Strong? What’s that about? What strength? What kind of message is that? He's a pathetic, weak, small child!

Now in terms of Transactional Analysis, “Be Strong” is one of the 5 controlling “scripts” that bedevil and subvert people’s lives - people who then spend years acting according to the command of some distant voice they heard long ago, following an instruction that they continue to try to carry out for the rest of their lives. To their own considerable cost.

The others are:

Be Perfect
Hurry Up
Please Me
Try Hard

I’ve had many a chat with people - adults and children - whom I’ve worked with, trying to persuade them to slow down, please themselves, stop trying to be so bloody perfect, to work less hard and allow themselves to show some element of what they would see as weakness.

It’s important to recognise that we have these scripts located within ourselves, unconsciously driving and directing our lives, and to understand the harm we do to ourselves when we live according to their internalised dictats. We should also understand what we need to do in order to liberate ourselves from them, for our own sakes, as soon as we can.

It’s often helpful to assume we’ve adopted and internalised two or three of them, unbeknownst to ourselves, and try to assess which ones. We can then get to work on getting rid of them.

Which does NOT mean that we should NEVER try hard, hurry up, be strong, please others, or aspire to doing something perfectly, even if BEING perfect seems pretty unreasonable.

There’s nothing wrong with trying hard when we want to achieve something for ourselves, but there’s a lot wrong with forever aiming to show other people how incredibly industrious, tireless, determined and aspirational we think we should be.

Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with hurrying up when something’s important to YOU, but everything wrong with living life at a relentlessly frantic pace, and aiming to always keep pace with someone else’s expectations.

It’s good to want to please someone when the urge comes from within yourself, but very bad to be forever trying to impress and please others in order to gain their approval, receive rewards, etc. It’s also bad to expect other people to always be aiming to please YOU.

To be forever thinking you should be perfect (in your eyes and other people's), and always be ‘strong’ (i.e. not weak; completely self-sufficient), can only lead to a life of dissatisfaction and probably mental and emotional illness. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve ourselves in various ways, or that we shouldn’t do our best to overcome weaknesses of various sorts. It’s the absolutes that are the killers.

All of this is an argument for balance and integration, for inclusion of positive and negative, which we all contain - of yin and yang, as eastern philosophy would have it.

These are interesting fields for further study - Transactional Analysis and eastern philosophy. Useful starting points might be Zen, Taoism and Confucianism.

But why were these kids in the café not in school, anyway? The whole city was supposed to have started the Autumn term. Ah yes, of course - but not the private schools, which clearly these two kids would have attended. Be stwong darling - it’s almost time for school to begin. And what an awful lot he’s already learned from his sweet, devoted mother.

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Affluenza

In Oliver James’s excellent book he describes the phenomenon of Affluenza - its causes, symptoms and antidotes. For various reasons this isn't the right place to detail what these are, but halfway through the book he has a chapter called “Meet Your Children’s Needs [Not Those of Little Adults]”, and another called “Educate Your Children [Don’t Brainwash Them]”.

Surprisingly he doesn’t mention Transactional Analysis, but he does describe very well the millions of children who desperately strive to Be Perfect, and then become depressed, disillusioned and stressed when they don’t get 100% and straight A’s in exams.

They’ve adopted their parents’ values and scripts, but very often also the norms and values of over-aspirational and competitive peer groups, especially the girls.

“The scientific evidence shows that the methods employed for the transmission of values from parent to child . . . are a prescription for Affluenza. Parents do it in two main ways. A controlling pattern uses rewards, threats, deadlines and hectoring words, pressuring them to think, feel and behave in conformity with parental dictates. Love is conditional upon achievement of goals laid down by the parent - there is no love for the child who does not achieve them. By contrast, supportive care takes the child’s perspective, minimizing pressure and encouraging the child to find out for itself what it wants: self-determination by the child is valued.”

“The child does not realise the demand [i.e. the ‘script’] has been introjected because the process by which the parental dictate has become the child’s compulsion has been going on from before it had words with which to question or analyse it.”

“Supportive nurture has a completely different outcome. In place of pressure, there has been affection and encouragement for what the child wants, and into its own chosen mix the child has welcomed some of what the parent wants. For self-regulation, it has ‘identified’ with them, rather than introjected - made an active choice. . . If this child is a hard worker and high achiever, it has chosen to be so of its own accord; its self-esteem does not depend upon how it is ranked against other pupils, or on living up to parents’ or teachers’ standards.”

Or living according to Government or Local Authority ‘Standards Agendas’ for that matter.

“The inner compulsion driven by introjection is absent, as is the fluctuating and fragile self-esteem, because nothing is contingent on the performance of externally provided goals. The child may be upset if it does not live up to its own standards, but at least they are its own, not someone else’s.”

“Experience will have taught them that the price of love is success, starting with school performance, and usually involving an equation between money and exam success, as in ‘work hard to be able to get a good job and earn a good salary’. The kind of parents who are controlling are . . . likely to have Virus values themselves and to seek to pass them on to their children. If the family is living in a Virus-stricken society, those values will be even more likely to be inculcated in a people-pleasing child who strives to conform to them.”

To combat all of this, James suggests the following 'vaccines':

1. Disentangle your parents’ values from your own.
2. Identify introjected values.
3. Scrutinise how you were persuaded by your parents to accede to their wishes.
4. Colonise your inherited values.

Under this 4th heading he writes:

“ Having disentangled what you really care about from what you were forced to value, you are then in a position to choose. (e.g. Realising that it’s unimportant whether you replace your car with a brand new one, or keeping the house spotlessly clean.) The key is to start work on finding out what really matters to you, not your parents [or ‘society’], and colonise for yourself.”

Chapter 8, Educate Your Children (Don’t Brainwash Them), begins with this paragraph:

“In most of the developed world today, you learn in order to earn. Especially in English-speaking nations, education has been hijacked by business. The goal is to create good little producers and consumers, whereas it should be an enquiring mind, capable of both scholarship and a playful, self-determined and emotionally productive life. The result is Virus distress.”

“Wherever you look in the English-speaking world, a new obsession with exam performance is to be seen. Compared with previous generations, schoolchildren are menaced from ever-younger ages by assessment.”

“The yoking of the wagon of education to business and to money-making, once limited to America, is now found throughout the English-speaking world. . . . The legislation for the new city academies, personally promoted by Tony Blair, effectively permits wealthy individuals to run state schools, often with strongly Selfish Capitalist values and sometimes tied to strong religious convictions. The curriculum of the State system is being increasingly divested of subjects which will not contribute to the economy . . .”

“The key message is that the purpose of education is not to find out what has intrinsic interest for you, but to work hard at school for long-term financial reward. . . . [This] is a prescription for the absence of flow during work, for low self-esteem and a host of other problems. Ironically, on top of that it is death to the capacity to think imaginatively - the foundation of our economic future if the ‘skills economy’ is as important as politicians are always telling us it is.”

By contrast Danish children are "by far the most positive about going to school, and the least likely to be in a hurry to leave".

And the reason? They don’t regard school as something that gets in the way of their “real” lives, and they don’t have teachers who pressurise them to “work hard”.

“The official rhetoric is that education is for creating good citizens rather than economic performance, very different to that of other countries.”

Certainly very different to England, where measurable test performance is all, and almost nobody has cared very much whether children become “good citizens”, whether they have high degrees of social and emotional intelligence, whether they espouse decent values that enhance everyone’s wellbeing, including their own, and whether they have any proper spiritual development or intelligence. The prevalence of teenage gangs and knife crime is an indicator of how well our schools have been developing citizenship and emotional intelligence.

“This rhetoric is reflected in the [Danish] pupils’ emphasis on learning to function well as part of a group. The curriculum is crafted to encourage them to find subjects that interest them and to be pursued in ways that also achieve this. In terms of fostering intrinsic rather than Virus motivation, this ought to result in confident, creative and autonomous children.”

Isn’t it enough to make you want to weep that our children’s education isn’t being driven by the same set of values and assumptions? If not, just think how you and your family and friends would feel if it was your child who was the target and victim of teenage thugs and killers, who think that it's cool or even necessary to carry a knife, who think that it's essential to punch, kick and stab anyone who shows you 'disrespect' or dares to enter 'your' territory.

“The Danish system’s strength is in its emphasis on emotional literacy. Social skills are very valued, recognizing emotions as important.”

“The Danish approach offers an important vaccine which also serves them well economically. In this respect, like the other Scandinavian countries, they are imaginative and innovative. The grinding obsession of parents and government in [most other] developed nations with children’s exam performances is unjustified on economic grounds, and absolutely indefensible in terms of emotional wellbeing.”

“Modern education has been sold under a false prospectus containing three untruths. The first is that it will bring meritocracy, which it has not; and the pretence of it, requiring absurdly long hours devoted to passing mind-sapping, pathology-inducing exams, is hugely harmful to our children’s well-being. The second is that by enabling people to rise up the system, it will confer wellbeing, which it does not. The third is that exam results are crucial for our individual and national prosperity, and that is simply not true.”

“The truth is that in all the countries I visited, except Denmark, education is used mercilessly to put the needs of employers and economic growth ahead of those of children and emotional well-being.”

“The education systems of the English-speaking countries, which puport to be giving children opportunities to become richer than their parents, are actively hostile to the flourishing of creativity and emotional development.”

“Blair presented education as increasing ‘opportunity’ and encouraging ‘aspiration’. What is really meant by these words is ‘to make money, become as rich and famous as the folk on TV’, not to have the intrinsic satisfaction of identifying and pursuing one’s authentic interests, which is the goal of Danish education.”

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My recommendation is that everyone should read this important, stimulating, original and enlightening book - available in Vermillion paperback for a mere £8.99. It’s a key sociological, psychological and philosophical text, but is also clear, engaging, and jargon-free.

As Will Self said in his review, “Oliver James is our foremost chronicler of what ails us. Affluenza should be mandatory reading for everyone, but especially those in politics, business and the media who are intent on upping our society’s dosage of toxic affluence”.
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