Beneath a great deal of what people call toxic sits one quiet mechanism, the need to have the upper hand. It disguises itself as strength and it is the reverse, and the research on what actually breaks relationships explains both why it is so destructive and why the only way to win it is to stop playing.
Beneath a great deal of what people call toxic sits one quiet mechanism, and learning to see it changes how you read a relationship. It is the need to win. Not to be close, not to be understood, not to build something jointly, but to have the upper hand, to hold the better position, to keep, somewhere out of sight, a running score in which one person is ahead. When two people, or more often one of them, organise the relationship around winning rather than connecting, it has become a power game. And the power game is worth understanding carefully, because it is the hidden engine under many relationships that feel wrong without being obviously abusive, and because it disguises itself, to the person playing it, as strength.
The most useful place to begin is with the psychiatrist Eric Berne, whose 1964 book Games People Play established that couples run covert, repeating games whose real purpose is hidden beneath their surface content. Berne's key idea was the payoff: the psychological reward the player is actually after, distinct from whatever the argument appears to be about. Name the payoff of a power game and it turns out to be disarmingly simple. It is the feeling of being ahead. Not resolution, not connection, not even being genuinely right, but the private sensation of having come out on top.
Communication theorists working at the same time gave this a structural description. Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues, in Pragmatics of Human Communication, showed that every exchange between people carries not only content but a relational message about who is up and who is down, and that couples can slide into chronic struggles conducted entirely at this level, a contest over position that has almost nothing to do with the topic they are ostensibly fighting about. This is why arguments in a power game are so strangely unresolvable and so easily reignited: the subject was never the point. The point was the position. You are not disagreeing about the dishes or the text message. You are contesting, move by move, who is on top, and no agreement about dishes can ever settle a question that was never about dishes.
Once you understand that the payoff is the feeling of being ahead, behaviours that seemed baffling resolve into a single pattern, because each is simply a different way of scoring.
A secret kept for no practical reason is a private point on the board: I know something you do not, and that asymmetry is a small, held advantage. Manipulation, the careful line engineered to steer you where a straight request would have done, is a win by definition, because steering you without your knowing is precisely a demonstration of the upper hand, where honesty would have meant meeting you as an equal. The mental trophy cabinet, the quietly maintained record of arguments won, of others who wanted them, of leverage held in reserve, is the scoreboard itself, kept because the score is the reward. And at the far end, betrayal can become a move in this game rather than only an act of desire: an affair is also a secret held over the other person, a way of being permanently ahead in a contest they do not know they are losing. These look like different problems. They are one orientation wearing different masks, and the orientation is always the same: I am winning.
Here is the part the player themselves almost never sees, and it is a finding rather than an insult. From inside, the power game feels like strength, competence, control. Examined honestly, it is the compensation of a person who does not feel strong at all.
Alfred Adler built an entire psychology around this observation. He held that the compulsive striving to be superior is a compensation for a buried sense of inferiority, a way of managing, out of awareness, the fear that without the upper hand one is worth nothing. A person genuinely secure in their own value does not need to keep score against the people who love them, because they are not haunted by the suspicion that in a fair reckoning they would come up short. The drive to win at love is therefore, underneath, a confession of its opposite. It says: I do not believe I am enough as I am, so I must always be ahead of you.
And consider what the victories consist of, because this is where the diagnosis becomes precise. The power player is scoring against the one person who had already offered them trust, who was not even competing, who was occupied with trying to love them. Of all the contests a life offers, this is the least demanding: it costs almost nothing to defeat an opponent who is not playing. There is no achievement in it, no real power, only the repeated, hollow sensation of a scoreboard no one else can see, run up against someone who did not know a game was underway. What looks, from the inside, like dominance is, in the clear light, something much smaller: a person compensating for a fear they cannot name, at the expense of the person best placed to have healed it.
One move inside the power game deserves its own warning, because it is disorienting to be on the receiving end of it and it follows a precise psychological logic. The person running the game will frequently accuse the other of running one. Your honest need becomes, in their framing, a manipulation; your boundary becomes a power play; your hurt becomes a tactic. You find yourself perpetually defending against the charge that you are the schemer, while the actual scorekeeper sits opposite, sincerely aggrieved.
This is the shadow at work, one of the most reliable patterns in human conflict. The traits we cannot bear to acknowledge in ourselves we tend to project outward and perceive, vividly, in others, and the person most committed to a power game is often the one least able to admit it, so they externalise the whole apparatus onto their partner and genuinely experience themselves as the innocent party. When someone whose own conduct is a quiet lattice of secrets, steering, and scorekeeping accuses you, repeatedly, of playing games, the accusation is worth reading less as information about you than as a description, unwittingly offered, of them.
The decisive fact about the power game is not merely that it is unattractive. It is that it is self-defeating, and the research on what actually ends relationships shows exactly how.
John Gottman, after decades of studying couples, identified contempt, the stance of looking down on a partner from a position of superiority, as the single strongest predictor of divorce among his four horsemen. Contempt is the natural residue of scorekeeping. A person who is always tallying wins is, by the structure of the activity, cultivating a running sense of superiority over their partner, and that superiority, expressed in a thousand small signals, is precisely the toxin Gottman found most corrosive to love. The power game does not merely coexist with a failing relationship. It is one of the most efficient ways of manufacturing the very contempt that predicts the end.
Underneath this is a simple error about what kind of game is being played. A relationship is not zero-sum. In a zero-sum game one person's gain is exactly the other's loss, and winning is a coherent goal. But a relationship is a positive-sum enterprise: its value is created jointly, in the space between two people, and exists only for as long as both are building it. On that board, if one person wins, both lose, because what you win, when you win against your partner, is the steady destruction of the thing that could have held you. You cannot dominate your way into being loved, or deceive your way into being known. Every point scored is subtracted from the total the game was supposedly for. The power player is playing to win a game whose only prize is destroyed by winning it.
If the game cannot be won by playing it, the obvious question is how to respond to someone playing it against you, and the answer is the one insight that actually frees people caught in these dynamics. You do not beat a power game by playing it better. If you counter the manipulation with manipulation, match the secret with a secret, and score back, you have simply agreed that the relationship is a contest, and now two people are dismantling it instead of one. A power game cannot be won. It can only be declined.
The move is to refuse the frame entirely. You stop keeping score. You decline the bait of the phantom accusation and refuse to spend your life defending against a charge that was only ever a projection. You meet the manoeuvre with straightness rather than a counter-manoeuvre, and you let the game fall to the floor unplayed. This works because a power game structurally requires two players. The moment one person genuinely will not compete, the moves that felt like decisive victories when they landed on a rival land instead on nothing, and reveal themselves as the small, empty gestures they always were. The scorekeeper, playing alone, eventually becomes visible even to themselves.
That refusal is not weakness, though in a culture that quietly admires the operator it can feel like losing. It is, in fact, the only genuine strength available anywhere in this situation, because it issues from the single place the power player cannot reach: a sense of your own worth that does not depend on being ahead of anyone. And it is here that understanding does its decisive work, in the way it does across all of these subjects. Seeing the power game for what it is, naming its payoff, recognising the projection, grasping that its victories are compensation rather than strength and that they destroy what they claim to win, is exactly what lets you stop being baited by a game whose smallness you have now seen through. Understanding it rightly is what lets you set the scoreboard down, and decide, from solid ground, whether you are with someone who can drop the game and finally meet you as an equal, or someone who will keep score until there is nothing left to win.
The comfortable lie is that the one who wins the power game holds the power. The truer thing is that there was never anything there to win, that scoring points against someone who loves you is the emptiest victory a person can arrange, and that the only one who comes out ahead is the one secure enough to refuse the game, put down the scoreboard, and offer the thing the power player never can: to simply be in it together, with nothing hidden and nothing to prove.
- Berne, E. (1964). Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.
- Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J., & Jackson, D. (1967). Pragmatics of Human Communication.
- Adler, A. Individual Psychology: striving for superiority and the inferiority complex.
- Gottman, J. The Four Horsemen and contempt as the strongest predictor of divorce.
- Jung, C. G. The shadow and projection, in the Collected Works.
What is a power game in a relationship?
A power game is when a relationship becomes covertly organised around winning rather than connecting: holding the upper hand, keeping score, knowing things the other does not, and coming out ahead. Eric Berne described such games as being played for a hidden payoff, and in a power game the payoff is the feeling of being ahead. Behaviours like secrecy, manipulation, scorekeeping, and even betrayal are all moves that deliver that reward.
Why do people play power games instead of just connecting?
Because the need to win is usually compensation for a buried sense of inferiority, as Alfred Adler argued. Someone secure in their own worth does not need to keep score against a partner; the compulsion to be ahead manages an unspoken fear that without the upper hand they are worth nothing. This is why the game feels like strength from the inside while functioning as its opposite.
Why does my partner accuse me of playing power games?
Often because they are the one playing and cannot bear to see it. This is projection, the shadow at work: the traits we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves we perceive vividly in others. A person whose own conduct is a web of secrets, steering, and scorekeeping may sincerely experience themselves as the innocent party. Persistent accusations of game-playing from such a person are frequently a description of them rather than of you.
Why is a power game so damaging even if no one is obviously abusive?
Because scorekeeping cultivates contempt, and John Gottman's research identified contempt as the single strongest predictor of divorce. A relationship is also positive-sum, not zero-sum: its value is built jointly, so if one person wins, both lose, since what gets won is the destruction of the intimacy the game was supposedly for. The power game is an efficient way of manufacturing the very contempt that ends relationships.
How do you deal with someone playing a power game?
Refuse the frame rather than trying to win. Counter-manipulating and scoring back only confirms that the relationship is a contest. Instead, stop keeping score, decline the bait of phantom accusations, meet manoeuvres with straightforwardness, and let the game fall unplayed. A power game needs two players; when one genuinely will not compete, it collapses and reveals its own smallness, and from that solid ground you can see clearly whether the other person is able to drop it.