TIME STRUCTURING When Eric Berne, the "father" of TA who died in 1970, first examined the many ways that people give and get strokes, he did so from several perspectives.  One perspective he used was to view the strokes that people exchanged in terms of their quality - that is, whether the strokes were positive or negative.  A second perspective he used was to view the strokes in terms of their conditionality - that is, whether they were given conditionally or unconditionally.  Yet a third perspective he used was to view the strokes in terms of how they helped people structure their time - that is, how giving and receiving strokes helped people fill in the minutes and the hours of each day in structured ways that were comfortable for them, or at least familiar to them, whether or not these methods served their Natural Child's broader long-term interest in getting on with their lives.  In analyzing the way people structured their time, Berne came up with a list of six different categories of time structuring - categories which he ordered on a scale from one to six, ranging from how people structure time when they use strokes of the lowest "quality" on one side of the scale (by withdrawing, or giving no strokes at all), to how people structure time when they use strokes of the highest "quality" on the other side of the scale (by engaging in what Berne called Natural Child "intimacy," and exchanging unconditional positive strokes).  Berne’s list is significant for several reasons.  First, it calls our attention to the fact that we all need to “structure time” in certain ways when we’re in the presence of other people.  It emphasizes that we simply cannot sit and stare at another person for very long without acknowledging his presence in some way, and that whenever we try to do so, the tension (which arises from the universal need we nearly all feel to exchange strokes in some way) becomes too great to withstand.  Secondly, it points out that whenever we finally decide to acknowledge the presence, or “existence,” of another person, and we decide to give him a stroke (if only by saying “Hello”), we have a choice as to what ego states we will use, a choice as to what, if anything, we hope to accomplish by giving the stroke, and a choice as to what ego states we hope the other person may employ in responding to us.  In a generic sense, most of us make broad-based categorical decisions regarding these choices when we are quite young, and we merely repeat these patterns when we grow older and are confronted with various social situations that are similar to the ones we experienced in childhood.  Yet once we learn how to use TA, we find that we need no longer be constrained by our past, and that we can make new decisions based not only on what ego states we decide to use, consciously, to give and receive strokes, but also on what ego states we decide to use consciously when we “structure our time,” based on a more complete understanding of the full range of possibilities available to us provided by Berne’s list.   The six categories in Berne’s list are: withdrawal, rituals, activities, pastimes, games, and intimacy.  Their descriptions are as follows:    Withdrawal  Withdrawal, as its name implies, involves the act of withdrawing from any social or business setting in order to be alone.  It represents a temporary decision to not provide strokes to other people in any way whatsoever.  We can withdraw physically, by getting up and leaving the room, or we can withdraw mentally, by ignoring our surroundings and by daydreaming and leaving the room emotionally.  Some of us withdraw from social situations because we feel uncomfortable in the presence of other people – possibly because we have never learned how to engage in social pastimes.  Often, we withdraw to avoid discomfort, and prevent ourselves from leading more fulfilled social lives in the long run.  Others of us withdraw from social situations because we already lead fulfilled lives, and we hope that by withdrawing we will find something more interesting than the current social situation we find ourselves in.  For example, we may withdraw because we are process-oriented, and we prefer to engage in improving our athletic or artistic skills, or to engage in some process like drawing architectural plans for a new building, writing a book, preparing engineering specs for a new bridge or engine, and so on.  Whatever our reasons, our decision to withdraw indicates that we have no immediate interest in either giving or receiving strokes from other people.      Rituals  Rituals enable us to be present with people in a physical sense, but to remain withdrawn, emotionally.  Most churches, businesses, and other organizations (including PTAs, clubs, knitting groups, labor unions, fraternities, branches of the military, and so on) engage in rituals that are passed down over the years from one generation to the next - sometimes formally, and sometimes informally.    For the most part, rituals are preprogrammed by the collective Parent of our society, and are engaged in by the Parent of the participants.  Those of us who are reasonably comfortable engaging in rituals are comfortable, also, in Parenting ourselves from time to time to “keep quiet” or to “stop feeling restless.”  (That is, our Parent tells our Adapted Child to “keep quiet” and to “stop feeling restless,” and our Adapted Child complies in some accommodating, or compliant way, by “doing what it is told to do,” and by “behaving properly.”)  Yet, even though our Adapted Child may have some small role in a ritual (our Adapted Child may occasionally nod or smile, and utter adaptive phrases like, “Yes, I agree”), our Natural Child usually has no role at all.  Thus, those of us with an especially active Natural Child tend to avoid ritualistic situations (weddings, funerals, baptisms, staff meetings, orientation programs, awards ceremonies, and the like), and typically speak of them as “not being any fun,” or as “being boring.”  No matter what our age, our Natural Child is inclined to resent being forced to attend them.   The stroking that occurs in ritualistic situations is mostly stroking of a ceremonial sort – stroking that goes on between the Parent of one person and the Parent of the next, as we all stand, sit, rise again, nod, look serious, and occasionally utter some pre-programmed phrases.  Even though rituals play an important role in our society, providing an institutionalized structure for dealing with our many rites of passage – the coronation of a king or queen, the swearing in of a President, the induction of members into a club or fraternity, and the like, they provide limited opportunities for us to stroke one another because our Natural Child and our Adult are rarely involved in them.      Activities  Activities provide us with another safe way to structure time, and if we want, to avoid intimate involvement with other people.  Those of us who are uncomfortable in social or business settings can avoid dealing with others by engaging in activities like helping a hostess prepare and serve food and drinks, or helping a seminar leader pass out brochures, schedules, or pads and pencils.  Finding “something to do” can provide us with an excellent way to relieve our anxiety over “what to say next.”  By engaging in these kinds of activities, we can avoid intimate conversations in a manner that is socially acceptable, and we can avoid intimacy without turning anyone off.  Essentially, we can talk about the food and the drinks, discuss the brochures and the schedules, and then move on to the next person.  In business, the most common activity is known as work.  Work, of course, is something that we can engage in without ever getting to know the rest of our associates or co-workers other than in relation to the tasks that we perform.  Those of us who use work to avoid intimacy can go for years, or even decades, without ever learning very much about our co-workers.  At times, when we happen to run across our co-workers in a different setting, such as at church or at our local supermarket, we can find ourselves at a total loss as to what to say after we say “hello” (other than to say “goodbye”).  In general, however, activities provide many more opportunities than rituals do for us to find ways to stroke one another, and they can open the door to a much wider range of more intimate, closer relationships.  For example, school activities that are organized to bring children together offer youngsters the opportunity to get to know each other on a much closer level than when they’re stuck sitting side by side in a classroom.  Such activities provide young people the chance to make friends with other kids their own age who they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to meet outside such an informal setting.  Many corporations provide their employees with similar chances to “socialize” by organizing bowling and softball leagues, golf tournaments, recreational trips, and the like.  These kinds of activities, which are much less structured than “work,” offer many more opportunities for the development of high-quality, Natural Child relationships than work normally does.  Employees can “make friends,” introduce their new friends to their spouses and families, and find many more relaxed ways to broaden their relationships than they can usually find in more restrictive business environments.    Pastimes  Pastimes, as their name implies, provide us with comfortable ways in which two or more people can pass the time with each other, but not say very much.  If people are strangers, or just barely acquainted, the pastimes that are available to them are limited to semi-ritualistic discussions of commonplace things like the weather, current events, or families (wives, husbands, and in-laws).  People who cannot engage in pastimes at will are not socially facile.  Pastimes can be thought of as a kind of social probing where one seeks information about new acquaintance in an unthreatening, non committal way.  When a pastime is in progress, the people involved will often use it to assess the future potential of the other players.  They will use this information to decide whether or not to continue, broaden, or terminate the relationship.  Skill at pastimes vastly influences one's ability to meet people and make new friends.  For example, Keith and Joel, two accountants at the same firm who had never met before found themselves standing in line together for the first time in their downstairs cafeteria.  Keith turned to Joel and smiled.  “I understand you're new with the firm.”  Joel nodded.  “I was just hired last week.  I moved down from New York.”  Keith smiled knowingly.  “Just in time to help out on our firm's biggest audit.  Hope they don't work you too hard.”  Joel nodded again, but didn't reply.  He grabbed some iced tea, and shuffled ahead in the line. Keith tried again.  “Have you found time to visit the new shopping mall?  It's the largest in town.”  Joel paused for a moment.  “I haven't been there myself, but my wife took the kids yesterday.”  “Oh?  How many kids do you have?” The conversation then turned to family and kids, and continued quite comfortably as the two accountants moved through the line. As with rituals, the structure of our pastimes is usually Parented, or preprogrammed, in carefully defined and limited ways, yet the participants often find a way to transmit some Adult reality data. Some pastimes last only a few minutes, while others can go on for hours, particularly if they are about sports, knitting, politics, and the like.  Still others can go on for days, especially if the participants are engaged in some activity that relates to the pastime – like fishing together in some stream in the Northwest.  Think of the many opening lines that are available, and consider how long two fishermen can go on talking about the same subject!  (“What flies do you use?”  “Do you make your own?”  “Where's the best part of the stream?”  “Did you catch any today?”) Whatever the subject, people use pastimes to structure time comfortably and informally when little else is available to them.  Those who are more experienced at pastimes use their skill as a springboard to develop more complex, or more intimate relationships.  Those who are less experienced are often content with their limitations.  (All they ever do is talk about fishing, sports, quilting, and the like, even when they’re chatting with their best friends, but it’s okay with them.)    Games  Games, in their TA sense, represent the most complex, and also the most dysfunctional, method of structuring time on Berne’s list.  Unlike rituals, activities, and pastimes, TA games are stroke-intensive.  When two or more people are engaged in a TA game, they use lots of energy and exchange lots of stokes.  More often than not, the players are mesmerized by each other.  Typically, no matter what other distractions they may face, each player focuses all his attention on responding to the moves the other player has made until such time as the payoff has been reached and the game is concluded.  A game, in its TA sense, is a sequence of transactions with a definite pattern and a set of unspoken rules and regulations.  It is different from our normal understanding of the word, however, in that it is not necessarily either enjoyable or interesting.  Games are differentiated from other groups of transactions by two chief factors.  The transactions themselves are ulterior (with a surface meaning as well as a secret meaning), and, there is always a payoff.  The payoff, usually identified as a feeling (either a ‘good’ feeling or a ‘bad’ feeling), signifies the end of the game.” We all start playing games early in life, and, depending upon how dysfunctional the rest of our lives are, we can continue playing them all the way to our graves.  Here's one way that our game-playing gets started:    Freddy, age four, and Billy, age five, were sitting together in Freddy's backyard late one day.  It was getting dark, and they were getting tired.  After all, they'd been playing all afternoon with their dump trucks.  Loading and unloading.  Loading and unloading.  It had been fun, but it had been hard work.  Freddy sat back to survey their accomplishments.  He was not only tired and dirty, but was beginning to feel hungry.  He was also depressed, because Billy, who was slightly older and larger than he was, seemed to have stood up much better under the strain.  As Freddy contemplated the situation, it occurred to him that even though he didn't feel too great at the moment, he really did have a neat dump truck.  He decided to point this out to Billy.  “My dump truck is better than yours,” he remarked offhandedly.    Billy, knowing this to be true, but hearing in Freddy’s statement the secret message, “I am better than you” (and that makes me feel better), couldn’t accept it.  “Oh, no it’s not!” he replied.  Stunned by such a lack of appreciation for the facts, Freddy went on to insist, “Oh, yes it is!” The conversation continued, “No, it’s not!”  “Yes, it IS!”  “NO, IT'S NOT!”  And, at this point (as we might expect), Billy shoved Freddy down into one of the piles of dirt in which they had been playing, and Freddy started crying.  The game was over!  “Mine Is Better Than Yours” is one of the very first games children learn to play.  It can be seen in many forms:  “My dad can beat your dad.” “My house is bigger than your house.” ‘My doll is prettier than your doll.” “My job is better than your job.”  It is even played in a more “civilized” form by “nice” people who engage in a version called I’m A Better Person Than You Are (kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more honest, more understanding, more forgiving, more thoughtful, more generous, and the like).  Sometimes, “nice” people lash out at each other in another version called I’m Nicer To You Than You Are To Me (kinder, gentler, more compassionate, and so on) – a version in which each player bombards the other player with a list of all the nice things he has done for him, but neither person listens thoughtfully or appreciatively, and neither acknowledges the importance or value of the nice things he, or she, knows the other person has done.  Each is too intent on proving that he, or she, is “better” than the other person.    NIGYSOB  AND  KICK  ME In his best-selling book Games People Play, Eric Berne identified somewhere around thirty different TA games people play.  In the decades since Games was published, other TA specialists have identified many more. Yet of all these games, none is played more frequently or by a greater number of us than the pair of games called NIGYSOB (an acronym for “Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch”), and Kick Me.  In fact, people use these two games to structure time so frequently, and in so many different situations, that the cumulative negative effect these two games produce on the personal lives of those of us who play them, and the cumulative dollar value they represent in terms of lost time and wasted effort on the part of both executives and employees who play them at work, are virtually incalculable.  Many of us spend our entire lives playing them, rather than deciding to lead self-actualized and fulfilled lives.  So many people in business play them, that the games themselves act as a giant sieve, siphoning off billions of dollars worth of time, energy, and other resources from tens of thousands of corporations, many of which can ill afford such extravagant excess.  NIGYSOB and Kick Me are discussed in greater detail in our sub-section on TA Games.    Intimacy  The last, and by far the most functional method of structuring time on Berne's list, is what he called intimacy.  Even though this form of intimacy can include sexual intimacy, it is far more wide-reaching than sexual intimacy alone is.  In TA terms, intimacy involves thinking, speaking, and acting largely from our Natural Child and Adult, and engaging in transactions mainly with the Natural Child and the Adult of the people around us.  It involves being open, trusting, and caring, and providing “straight” feedback to another person whenever he asks, or even if he may not yet have asked for it, if the time seems appropriate (with due regard for the need to minimize any negative impact the feedback may have on his Adapted Child – so he doesn’t “feel so bad” in the face of negative information that he stops functioning).  Intimacy involves being free to say what we feel, so long as it doesn’t place demands on another person.  (Intimacy does not involve saying what we “think,” when that “thinking” involves judging and imposing a lot of stern Parent demands on another person.)   Intimacy is what we engage in when we give up our TA games, stop searching for strokes in negative or dysfunction ways, turn off all the Parent/Adapted Child programming that no longer serves us, and make moment to moment decisions in our lives based on what our Natural Child wants to do and upon how our Adult tells us is the most useful or practical way to do it.  Even though Eric Berne described at some length what people did when they structured time by engaging in intimacy, it was the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow who described the personality characteristics of a person who engaged in intimacy as a matter of course.  It was Maslow, also, who explained what such a person strived to accomplish in leading his life the way that he did.  Maslow called it self-actualization, or leading a fulfilled life, and pointed out that this “self-actualization” appears to be a single ultimate value for mankind as a whole, a far goal toward which all men strive.   This goal, Maslow said, was called different things by different people – things like, self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but all these people agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, or everything that the person can become.  More about intimacy can be found in our sub-section on Self-Actualization.       Time Structuring TA Games Life Scripts Life Positions Parent Drivers Injunctions Self-Actualization    Your Free Tour Continues