Avery's Games and Gimmicks

[megafire7]

Title: Avery's Games and Gimmicks
Major Warnings: Parental neglect. Detrimental family dynamics.
Summary: I finish the Transactional Analysis [TA] posts of our three protagonists by taking a look at Avery and her family. Spoilers up to Dash to Pieces 11.10

 

As most of you know by now, I’m that guy that likes to talk about power dynamics, especially in parent-child relationships. For Pale, I started out looking at some of these dynamics through the lens of Transactional Analysis, or ‘TA’ for short.

Through this lens, I’ve taken a look at Verona’s relationship to the three Ego States Transactional Analysis proposes, and touched on Lucy’s as well. Naturally, both of Verona’s parents also came up, since they’re very juicy sources for this kind of analysis.

But there’s a third member to our trio, and I had always connected with her the least, so I struggled with how to look at her through this lens, despite her family dynamic being so very interesting, even when Snowdrop joined her, and Avery found herself in more of a Parent role. Well, no more! I think I’ve finally found an angle to work from in Dash to Pieces 11.10, but before we get into that, a quick refresher, since it’s been 9 months since I last talked about this.

(Disclaimer: I am not a licensed psychiatrist, nor do I have any formal training in the use of TA. I am merely an interested layman. My primary source for these essays is the Youtube user TheraminTrees , who, as far as I’m aware, is a licensed psychiatrist. Particularly relevant for this essay will be the videos on Games and Gimmicks.)

Transactional Analysis suggests there are three ego states (Parent, Adult, and Child), each with their own characteristics. Interactions between different people are considered ‘transactions’ between the ego states of those people. Stable transactions are complimentary (Parent to Child, Adult to Adult, Child to Parent), and unstable transactions are crossed. Unstable transactions can be resolved by either an ego state Switch or by the transaction ending.

It is possible for more complex transactions to be happening on multiple levels, where the people involved are pretending to have one transaction on a surface level, while actually having another on a deeper level. See, as an example, Verona and Brett, where Brett is a whiny Child pretending to be a strict Parent, forcing Verona to be a responsible Parent pretending to be a lazy Child.

Games and Patterns

One of the neat things about Otherverse stories is the way patterns aren’t just a conceit to make the magic work. They’re often entirely mundane, and no easier to break because of it, just see the struggle it took to get Verona away from Brett. Patterns have momentum behind them, and if you’re not careful in how you go against that momentum, you’ll simply get run over and left in the dust.

One of the core concepts of TA are the games we play with each other. A lot of social transactions between different people fall within certain patterns that people can end up feeling trapped in, because it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly is happening until it’s over. TA calls these patterns ‘games’. As an example, one of the games TA talks about is ‘Why-don’t-you/Yes-but’, where Person A asks for help with a problem, Person B offers solutions to the problem, A shoots each of those ideas down, until B runs out of solutions, at which point A declares B to have been of no help.

When the game is at an end, person B feels like they’ve been had, and has a hard time explaining why. They thought they were being helpful, and instead got that thrown back in their face for no reason they can discern, and this is very frustrating.

In TA terms, what happened was a Switch in the transaction. Where Person A was a Child asking Person B for help, they suddenly became a Parent admonishing Person B for being useless (and remember, this is about feelings, behaviours and relative roles, not actual children and parents). From Person B’s perspective, they went from being the helpful Parent to experiencing whiplash at the switch-up. They might get upset and argue, trying to regain the Parent role while on the back foot, or they might fall into an admonished Child role, accepting the new framing of the transaction.

And once you’ve learned to accept that framing, it becomes all the more difficult to break free.

Meet the Kelly’s

The Kelly family is, let’s face it, a mess. Connor and Kelsey are, despite being quite well off and simply not having the same kinds of problems the rest of the adult cast face, horribly out of their depth and overwhelmed. The home is always too busy, and, as a result, the Kelly’s have adopted a parenting strategy that amounts to ‘putting out fires’, which has actively incentivised their children to exaggerate their problems so they get addressed, leading to a lot of screaming, and an even busier home in which nothing actually gets dealt with structurally.

In each of the kids, we see how they cope with this game the family plays. Rowan takes every opportunity he can to extricate himself from this mess; Sheridan figures she can get away with just about anything because the younger siblings are always the bigger fire that need putting out; Declan figures he can get away with anything by making things drag on until everyone else involved gives up; Kerry realises that the only way she gets any attention is by being loud and obnoxious, and Avery, well...

Avery’s the sucker.

Avery tries to be what her parents say they want, a good daughter who doesn’t make a mess, does her chores, and accepts the responsibilities she’s given. However, because the Kelly parenting strategy in no way actually rewards this kind of good behaviour, she falls through the cracks, fades into the background, and gets nothing (Kerry’s strategy in the game makes a ton of sense, given that she sees how Avery’s treated.)

She’s made to switch between Parent and Child constantly, but doesn’t actually get the benefits of either. With half the family moving out, she’s press-ganged into babysitting her younger siblings, regardless of her own plans, always for longer than promised, and she doesn’t receive any compensation for it, while being told someone else (Stuart or Verona) would be for the same thing, and she doesn’t even get the respect of being believed when she says what happened.

Avery gets forgotten, her needs and wants brushed aside because there’s always something more pressing going on, or because someone else is willing to make a bigger deal of their problem than Avery is.

So, why is Avery never willing to make a bigger deal of things? What is it that keeps her playing her role in this game, even though it’s exhausting and awful and she hates it? Why does this keep going?

Gimmicks and How to Defuse Them

In TA terms, a ‘gimmick’ is a need or a desire a person has, that can be exploited by other people to entice them into playing these Games, like a need to feel superior, or a need to seem reasonable, or, as in the earlier example, a desire to be helpful.

It can also be a need for approval, or a desire to be a good daughter, or a desire to be accommodating.

And those are needs and desires that are easy to exploit.

But I wouldn’t be talking about this if that’s all that happened this chapter. If this was just a pattern that held, a transaction that was stable, well, it’d be an awfully depressing indication of where Avery’s life was headed, wouldn’t it?

Thankfully for us, however, it is not all that happened.

One of the things TA tries to teach people as a therapy technique is how to recognise and defuse your own gimmicks. Learn which needs and desires you have, figure out how they get exploited, and how to stop that from happening.

One way of defusing a gimmick, after you’ve identified it, is to deliberately act against it. If you know you have a need to feel superior, push against it and let yourself take an L when someone tries to take advantage of it, for example.

And if you’re good at that, well, maybe you can end up breaking that pattern.

“Apologize!”

“What was that!?” Dad called up.

Avery and Declan shouted over one another.

Kerry came up the stairs, but Dad stopped her and had her go the other direction.

“What on earth is going on?” he asked.

Again, Avery and Declan talked over one another.

“One at a time,” Dad said.

They talked over one another again, in their effort to get something said.

Don’t be the reasonable one for once.

“Declan, you first,” Dad said.

“Why do you keep putting Declan first?” Avery asked. “You thanked him first for getting his homework done and left me for last, and-”

Don’t let yourself be put aside for once.

“Stop, Declan, stop,” Avery’s dad said, as he kept Declan from charging past him to downstairs. “Avery, is it possible that you got it wrong or you’re making a big deal out of-”

Avery turned, putting her dad behind her. She went into her room. A hand at her back made her flinch, but it was Verona, right behind her.

“Avery, we’re talking!” her dad called out. “Can we please sort this out?”

Avery stormed into her room, navigating the boxes that sat by the foot of Sheridan’s bed. Everything that hadn’t fit in the car and wasn’t going to be useful if and when she came back home before the end of the summer.

Don’t be ‘the good daughter’ for once.

“I’ve told you in the past that things aren’t cool,” Avery said. “That he’s weird with his female friends and his other friends are bad influences, and he’s using awful language.”

“That was half the boys I knew growing up and all of them grew out of it. He will be disciplined, but while we’re in this adjustment process and while you’re dealing with all of this upheaval, my big and primary concern is not just dealing with Declan but also making sure that we as a household can address problems as they come up. You storming out isn’t good or healthy.”

“Me storming out is what I need to do. Will you pay me for tutoring and babysitting?”

Don’t be accommodating for once, and see how that goes. Go against your usual pattern and force people to not just take you for granted, and if they can’t deal with that, tell ‘em...

Fuck you,

“Pay me. I gave you enough hours out of my today and I didn’t get anything for it,”

Comments

[sunlit_skycat]

Is there supposed to be more to this? It ends on a quotebox and an incomplete sentence.

Edit: Okay, on a second read, a comma instead of a period makes sense for unaltered quoted dialogue. I assume there's a cut off dialogue tag afterwards, that's what threw me off.

[megafire7]

That's exactly it, yeah. It's been a while since I wrote this, so I don't remember if I debated on keeping the unaltered quote vs making it fit grammatically and just decided on the former or not.

[viceversailles]

I really appreciate these analyses. It's always lovely when an essay gives you something practical to apply in life going forward. Explaining Gimmicks and Games did that here. Your conclusion is also very heartening, and folds well into a theme of Pale's: how maturity isn't necessarily pretty, quiet or reasonable. Sometimes, the right response to injustice is to yell.