Survival Games Personalities Play [Paperback]

Eve Delunas (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0931104351 | ISBN-13: 978-0931104350 | Publication Date: December 1, 1992

When people don’t feel safe in their relationships with others, thy are likely to play survival games. Whether a person plays the game of Blackmail, Complain, Robot, or Masquerade depends upon that individual’s personality type. Using case examples from her practice as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Delunas describes the games associated with each of four personality styles and explains the reasons why different types of people are likely to employ game tactics. In addition, she outlines those methods that have been most effective for helping individuals, couples, and families to stop their survival-game-playing.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Eve Delunas is a psychotherapist, speaker, and author who worked for over ten years with Dr. David Keirsey, co-author of the best-selling book, Please Understand Me. Dr. Delunas has taught at five major universities in the U.S. and Europe, and she offers workshops internationally. She is also the author of Breaking the Spell of the Past: Entering the Joyous Now and a set of four compact discs entitled: Guided Visualizations to Break the Spell of the Past and Enter the Joyous Now.

Product Details

• Paperback: 283 pages
• Publisher: Sunflower Ink (December 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0931104351
• ISBN-13: 978-0931104350
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,348,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

129 of 131 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Extends Type theory to explain negative behavior pattern, July 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Survival Games Personalities Play (Paperback)

Rather than rehashing MBTI type theory, Delunas extends it. She claims that each of the 4 different types has basic needs. For example, quoting from a figure on page 8: Artisans or SPs need to: be free to follow their impulses, demonstrate skillfulness, make an impression. Guardians or SJs need to: belong, do their duty, be responsible. The Rationals (NTs) and Idealists (NFs) have different sets of needs. When these basic needs are not being met, the personalities tend to repond by playing survival games, what Delunas identifies as "people's desperate attempts to defend themselves in overwhelmingly threatening social environments" (Delunas, 19). A figure on page 26 summarizes these 4 basic survival games, each of which has several variations. For example, Artisans play various "Blackmail" games to excite the self and punish others. Guardians play Complain games to excuse the self and entangle others. According to Delunas, many of the self-de! feating behaviors that people can get into could be best diagnosed as symptomatic of these specific needs not being met. For example, she suggests that most victims of spousal abuse are either SPs playing a Blackmail game called "shocking," or SJs playing a game called "doormat". The point of this model of behavior is to allow you to perceive the destructive behaviors as symptomatic of something else. This allows you to make a more productive response, either to change to address you own unfilled needs, or those that interfere with your relationships with other people. Delunas worked with David Keirsey for several years, and includes several case studies in her book. Highly recommended. Fascinating reading.

87 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Profound food for thought, November 29, 2001

By 

Kate McMurry "Young Adult Author" (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Survival Games Personalities Play (Paperback)

Dr. Delunas has practiced individual and family therapy in California for many years. The ideas contained in her book are rooted within an impressive lineage of psychotherapeutic theory, including: (1) the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), as explicated by her mentors, Dr. David Keirsey and Dr. Marilyn Bates; (2) Transactional Analysis (TA), the movement begun by Dr. Eric Berne, author of Games People Play, and carried on by Dr. Claude Steiner; (3) cognitive therapists in the school of thought of Alice Miller (Drama of the Gifted Child).

The concept of neurotic defense mechanisms rooted in childhood abuse and neglect seems to be one of the few areas of Freudianism that continues to wear well historically, remaining firmly perceived as a useful construct in virtually all sub-specialties of psychotherapy in the U.S. today (rape and general trauma, addictions, grief, anxiety, deviance, violence, identity, childhood emotional and learning disorders, marriage counseling, family systems, etc.). Thus, a book devoted to this topic couched in the combined language of Myers-Briggs (MB), Jung (via MB) and TA is bound to be an exciting find for a great many therapists.

Dr. Delunas offers a typology of unconscious "survival games" (neurotic defense mechanisms in action) based in the four MB types: Artisan (SP), Guardian (SJ), Rational (NT) and Idealist (NF). Each of these type-specific games shares distinct qualities: (1) They are destructive and potentially deadly if carried to extremes. (2) They are unconsciously chosen in hopes of improving serious life situations, but, instead, cause new problems worse than those they were supposed to fix. (3) They are based in feelings of worthlessness due to poor adjustment to life trauma, usually severe childhood trauma. (4) They invariably continue until the player is able to master the original traumatic event symbolically in a present relationship by responding this time around in a healthy, functional way (stop compulsively hurting himself or others in the same patterned way, in an unconscious, neurotic attempt to restore the painful past).

I believe the MB type most likely to be enthusiastic about Dr. Delunas's ideas is the INTJ, for these reasons: (1) Observing your clients carefully in order to assess where they fit into MB allows you get to sit back quietly and analyze in a clear, systematic manner. (2) Identifying whether your clients are involved in any of the four survival games, how intensely they apply them and how firmly they are entrenched in them, allows further orderly armchair analysis. (3) Designing interventions, such as guided visualizations, for ending your clients' destructive games allows for additional analysis, with a fun fillip of N creativity thrown in. (4) Approaching your clients (in a standard cognitive-therapy manner) in the role of instructor/parent by assigning "homework" at the end of each session involves actually talking to the client, but it is still pretty safe for the introverted NT, because it allows you to maintain a position of superior, scientific detachment.

As an INTJ/INFJ myself, I was, not surprisingly, initially quite attracted to the validation I found in Dr. Delunas's work. I always experience a strong hunger within my INT self to learn as much as possible about my clients (often, unless the client is also an N, far more hunger than the client will ever feel him/herself). So I was understandably comforted at being reassured that a drive for incessant information gathering on the part of a therapist is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, I find it difficult, based on professional and personal experience, to agree with why Dr. Delunas thinks it is so great: (1) While claiming to dislike the vast majority of Freud's ideas, most cognitive therapists continue wasting enormous amounts of valuable (and very expensive) therapy time digging around in their clients' pasts looking for childhood miseries to explain present neurotic behavior--an approach Dr. Delunas directly and indirectly encourages. I have come to agree with opposing thinkers such as William Glasser, who states that the only practical reason for digging around in a client's past is in order to come up with success stories of when clients managed, without harming themselves or others, to get their basic human needs met. (2) The approach recommended in this book is paternalistic, and, therefore, inevitably, even in cases where the client is a child, patronizing. This is so, because the therapist is doing for clients what they desperately need to learn how to do for themselves: become aware of their actions, think objectively about them, and make better choices for future actions. Unfortunately, when the therapist is the one doing all the thinking and choice-making, as Dr. Delunas recommends, the client is reduced to a docile, obedient child.

Having said all that, you might well ask, why am I rating Dr. Delunas with 4 stars when I disagree with her this much? Because her insights on the defense mechanisms of the four basic MB types are brilliant. I rate this portion of the book at 5 stars. However, her paternalistic therapy techniques rate, in my view, only 2 stars. I averaged these two scores to get 3.5, and bumped it to 4 because her thinking on survival games is extremely well written, fascinating and innovative.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good for the Psycologist / Personality Typewatcher, November 16, 2001

By 

JK - See all my reviews

This review is from: Survival Games Personalities Play (Paperback)

As an Idealist it was EXTREMLY enlightening for me to read about the loved ones in my life and the "games" that we play with each other.

Eve Delunas does a good job at identifying and disecting the different games that each personality is likely to play, and gives ideas on how to stop the "game playing" that is going on within yourself and the loved ones around you.

Using her examples you can easily identify what games are being played and what you can do to take control and stop / counter them in an effective fashion.

Easy to read with little background knowlege needed, this book is a must for everyone - parent, spouse, sibling. I recomend it highly.

It alowed me to see the hidden agendas going on underneath the surface facade that we present to the world... A definite 5 stars!!!