the.com/mind games
Chess where the board is someone else's self-esteem and you never admit you're playing.
means Manipulative psychological tactics used to unsettle, confuse, or control someone, often without them realizing it's happening.
from A straightforward compound of 'mind' and 'games,' gaining its modern psychological edge in mid-20th-century English — 'games' here carrying its sense of manipulative strategy rather than play (as in the much older idiom 'to play games with someone'). It rose alongside a growing postwar vocabulary of popular psychology, which gave everyday speech terms for subtler, invisible forms of manipulation.
- core move
- make them doubt their own memory
- clinical cousin
- gaslighting is the extreme edition
- tell
- the rules change once you start winning
- best defense
- naming the game out loud kills it