Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #558707 in Books
• Published on: 1992-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 283 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

An absolute GEM for personality assessment
Expanding on the work of Keirsey & Bates, Eve Delunas has not only managed to create a guide that offers highly effective methods of establishing a subject's psychological type with extraordinary clarity, but also provides a fantastic look into how differently each temperament reacts under stress. As if that weren't enough, Delunas then reviews viable treatment options before presenting eight case studies which allow the reader to put all of his/her newly learned skills to the test.

I must say, this book left me impressed. Delunas' discussion of the weaknesses of each personality and how they deal with excessive mental pressure results in a truly unique piece of work that is an invaluable source for anyone eager to discover typology.

And a sequel?
With the knowledge I gained from this excellent book, I plan to follow this with the classic, "Personality Games Survivalists Play," by the Donner Party family.

Profound food for thought
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.