Games Alcoholics Play

This is still the best understanding of what alcoholic thinking aims to accomplish and why it is so hard to give up. There are easier ways to ask for forgiveness but this one achieves several major satisfactions in one life pattern. Berne is a genius. Read him and learn.

The first ninety-nine pages are an introduction into Transactional Analysis. I thought, at first, that this was excessive, but the payoff is in really understanding the different types of alcoholics and how they manipulate others around them. This book is excellent for the person dealing with an alcoholic in their own family and trying to understand and deal with the damage that person has done to the family.

I first read this book 25 years ago when I was entangled in my family of "executive drinkers"- -and found that I was repeatedly dating and working with alcoholics.The theory of the origins of alcoholism may or may not be accurate. What saved my life was reading the scripts. They describe the behavior of the alcoholic, those around her/him, and the inevitable results of denial.I saw myself, my family, my whole lifestyle. I saw the danger that I was in . . . .and I acted.I changed my location, my profession, and recreation preferences.Recalling the scripts in this book have kept me from again becoming entangled with destructive people. I have had a happy and productive life ever since.I can't recommend this book enough.

An AA friend loaned me this book about 20 years ago. It made me aware of all the excuses I made for wanting to drink. I heard all of that mumbo jumbo about Alcoholism being a disease but I never bought into it and I'm glad I didn't because that would be all the excuse I would need to keep drinking until I died. Steiner's other book, Life Scripts was a life saver also. After reading that book it didn't take me long to realize the script I had been acting out most of my life, that started when I was an infant taking the drug, paregoric, that contains opium and alcohol, that set me up for my addiction later. Even when I was young I was some what intoxicated because I was consuming excessive amounts of sugar, trying to recreate the feeling I got from the paregoric and the human body makes alcohol from sugar and fat. Then I got my first beer when I was 17 and I was off and running. The script was being played out again and I repeated it constantly until I discovered that I was acting out. Another book not mentioned here is Choices. I am of the opinion, based on my own personal experiences, that using alcohol in an abusive manner is a learned behavior, not a genetic predisposition. All you have to do is look at all of the advertsing for alcohol, all of the social outlets that include drinking, etc, to see that it is a big part of our social lives. What is a Football or Baseball game without a big cup of beer and a footlong hotdog? I think it is just a social disease, perpetuated by Corporate America!

I liked how the author approached Alcoholism as a choice and not a disease. He approached the matter with the idea that alcoholics have responsiblities. They are responsible for their own actions. It shed new light for me on alcoholism.