My high school actually had a mandatory class on transactional analysis, a model of human interactions developed by Eric Berne in the 1950s. I didn’t find it particularly helpful at the time, and haven’t heard much about it since then. But it is interesting:

At the heart of Berne’s model are three ego states that live in each of us: the Child (the most natural, vulnerable, and spontaneous part of our personality, keeper of our creative vitality and our most unalloyed capacity for pleasure); the Parent (the part of us that unconsciously mimics the psychological responses of our parents as we observed them in childhood); and the Adult (the competent and self-possessed part of us capable of making sound decisions in our best interest). All three coexist within us, and all three play into our social interactions…

But beyond the simplest and most complementary exchange — one Adult issuing the stimulus, another Adult giving the response — most of social transactions are a chaos of mismatched and ever-switching ego states. The confusion — the wounding — happens when the lines of communication cross and the interaction becomes not between two people in parallel and consistent ego states, but between one part of one person and a different part of the other: Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Parent-Child, and all the other possible non-equivalences. This basic pattern, a diagram of which became the book’s cover, is what defines a game — “an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome” — a patterned, self-defeating psychological interchange, in which one ego state issues a stimulus concealing the emotional need of another ego-state, then receives a response to the hidden message and reacts negatively to it, frustrating both parties and garbling communication in a way that injures intimacy.

The Marginalian

If I were going to give my younger self advice, I would say don’t assume you know what other people are thinking. Even when you are interacting with others, your thoughts and emotions usually have to do a lot more with what is going on in your own mind and body than theirs. So don’t assume you know what they are thinking or what their intentions are, or what type of reaction they are trying to elicit from you. That’s sounds like funny advice – don’t ascribe intentions to people. People certainly have intentions, but when you try to guess what they are you will often be wrong. See listen and observe, think, and then make up your own mind. Even if they do have malign intentions, which happens more rarely than my younger self would have thought, you still have some control over your emotional reaction and near total control over your own behavior. If you are a person who can be quick to anger, like my younger self, it is better to walk away from the offending person and take some time to reflect than to react in the moment. Some people will take this as a sign of weakness or “nonassertiveness”, but I have learned that reacting in anger is usually unpleasant for everyone, including me, and I tend to regret it later. I will confront that person later in a more rational frame of mind, if I feel the confrontation is worth it, but often I decide it is not. So pick your battles carefully, younger self, and there are not too many battles worth picking.