Pinball has been a hobby of mine for almost 10 years. “A world under glass” is often how each game is described. There’s something really engaging about watching all the physical interactions of the ball, as it moves around the playfield, up ramps and down again, getting rocked around by pop bumpers, the lights flashing in your face, the “clackity clack” noise of all the solenoids firing. The cacophony of physical interactions with sound effects and lights flashing creates a really unique experience in a world filled with video screens.
With being a physical game, where a large metal ball-bearing is being whipped around at high speed, things will inevitably break.
Sometimes it’s something cosmetic as simple as a piece of cracked plastic. More serious, but not game breaking could be a light bulb that’s out, or a switch that isn’t detecting the ball. More serious than that could be game ending, like your flippers not working.
But sometimes something might break that could benefit the player. Like a piece of broken plastic obstructs the ball from draining, giving the player an unfair advantage in boosting their score.
These are referred to as a “Beneficial Malfunction”.
If you were playing alone, no one really cares. However, if it’s a tournament situation (eSports), the player would not be allowed to continue playing. The game would be stopped so that the Beneficial Malfunction can be corrected by an official, and then the game allowed to continue.
I’ve come to apply the term Beneficial Malfunction to learned behaviors in my life that come from my trauma.
I learned at a young age to compartmentalize my terror and fear. It’s a survival technique. That same technique allowed me to soldier on through incredible adversity early in my adult life. I lived on the edge in a precarious way for over a decade. At those times, it was benefiting me.
However, as I got older, my habit of hiding from my problems began to take over more and more of my life. I was shrinking and hiding from everyone, giving into my fears, real or imagined. The malfunction became untenable, no longer beneficial.
More recently, Beneficial Malfunctions have been revealed in the couples’ therapy my wife and I have been doing this past year. After being together for 24 years, we’ve learned to co-exist in ways that facilitated that, but not always in healthy ways. My fear of anger meant I was twisting myself into knots trying to not trigger a perceived angry response in Robin. It might have been beneficial at one time, but now the malfunction was preventing us from growing as a couple by not allowing us to work through our issues because I wasn’t allowing them to become issues. That’s a lot of weight for me to carry and exhausting.
And that’s the insidious thing about “Beneficial” Malfunctions – they work to your benefit, for a while, until the malfunction itself becomes untenable.
Imagine playing an endless game of pinball. The beneficial malfunction is stopping your ball from draining. After you set a high score, the game becomes not fun to you and a chore to keep playing. And if you were playing against another human, it becomes unfair. Is this really how you want to win the game?
For our couples’ therapy, that means putting myself into situations I find really uncomfortable. That also means on Robin’s side to learn to recognize when the traumatized little boy in me has come out, and instead of continuing an argument, love and hold that traumatized boy, in a way he never received as a child growing up. That is healing, and allows us to grow as a couple in ways we never knew possible before.
That is how we are correcting our malfunctions, that no longer benefit us.
The first step is to recognize that these malfunctions even exist. For most of my life, they were operating in ways I wasn’t even aware of, and by their nature, “benefiting” me. I’m now aware of them as a possibility and look out for them.
Where in your life do your own Beneficial Malfunctions come out and how might they be hurting you now? What steps can you take to correct them?
