WHAT IS TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS?

Transactional Analysis is a systematic and methodical approach to human behaviour. It includes a theory of personality and a theory of social relationships. It offers us a way to answer critical questions about ourselves and our lives: What is going on? Why is it going on? What is going wrong, and how do I change what I don’t like.
(Adapted from Transactional Analysis for Teachers, Bob Duff, 1972)

Here is a quick rundown on some Transactional Analysis basics:

The foundation of Transactional Analysis (TA) is the concept of ego states. Eric Berne (1910-1970), the founder and primary developer of TA, defined an ego state as “a system of feelings accompanied by a related set of behaviour patterns.” We each have three ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. At any given moment we can be said to operating in one of our ego states.

The three ego states, in brief:

PARENT Your Parent contains all the messages, spoken and unspoken, from your mother, father and other parent* figures (grandparents, uncles, aunts, older siblings, teachers, etc) that you, as a child, observed and internalized. These messages usually have to do with shoulds and shouldn’ts, naughty or nice, criticism and praise, approval and dissapproval. You’ll know you are “in” your Parent when you hear yourself making definitive pronouncements about other people’s behaviour or appearance, when you wag your finger and go “tsk tsk,” or when you are sure you know the “right” way to do something.

*Notice that when we are referring to an ego state we capitalize Parent, Adult, Child, and when referring to actual people we use the lower case, parent, adult, child.

ADULT Your Adult is that part of you that takes in information and processes it in a non-judgmental way, sort of like a computer. The Adult makes decisions upon empirical data and is always subject to change as new information comes in. An active and effective Adult can act as mediator between Parent and Child.

CHILD The Child ego state is where all your feelings reside. Your Child experiences pleasure and pain, love and hate, joy and sadness. It’s the free and active Child that makes life worth living.

HOW THINGS CAN GO WRONG

Because we are totally dependent upon parents and parent figures when we are little, we have to figure out ways to keep them around. After all, our survival depends on having their care and protection available to us. In order to keep the nurturing coming, we must sometimes adapt our behaviours and emotions to parental expectations. Boys, for example, are generally not permitted to express sadness (“Don’t be a crybaby”), though anger is often acceptable (“How like his father”). We call these substitute emotions RACKETS. It’s like the old “protection racket”: Pay me $100 a week and I won’t break your windows. Racket feelings are substitute feelings that take the place of, or protect us from, experiencing the forbidden feeling. The problem is that racket feelings do not resolve themselves; they keep coming back over and over, often causing serious difficulties in our lives. Rackets are an important source of STROKES, because every time we experience a racket feeling, we receive a stroke from the parent in our head. A stroke is a unit of recognition, a form of stimulation. We have to have strokes in order to stay alive. A stroke can be as simple as a friendly hello or as strong as a warm hug (positive); a stroke could also be as hurtful as a critical remark or as potent as a physical assault (negative). If we decide that positive strokes are not available to us, we will have to accept negative strokes.

At sometime in our lives, usually very early, we decide what our life position will be. That is, we choose our favourite place in the OK CORRAL:

Most of us move around in the OK Corral from time to time, always ending up in our favourite position. We can confirm our place in the favoured position by playing a GAME.

A GAME is a series of transactions, beginning with a discount (“I can’t help myself”) and ending with a predictable outcome or “payoff”. It’s the payoff that confirms our position in the OK Corral (“I knew it, nobody likes me” or “Why do people always …”, etc.) You know you’re involved in a game when you experience the same thing (usually unpleasant) happening to you over and over again. For example, every love affair ends in an unhappy breakup, every job ends up in being fired, or every time I have something I like it either gets lost or broken. Of course, in order to work, games have to be played outside of our conscience awareness.

Every time we play a game, we advance our LIFE SCRIPT. The SCRIPT is a story or fairy tale that sets the pattern of our life. The script is set early in life, based on our interpretation of external events. Quite often we base our script decision on attributions or modelling from and by parent figures. (“Oh, he’s just like Uncle Charlie.” Or “She’s such a sweet little thing.”) Uncle Charlie will show us how to be Uncle Charlie, and mother or Aunt Sue may show us how to be a sweet little thing. There are winner scripts, loser scripts, and banal scripts. The important thing is that, when we are in a script, we are playing a role based on adaptations we found useful in obtaining needed strokes when we were little. Writer and psychotherapist Richard Erskine reminds us that at a very early age, we have to answer an important question: “What does a person like me do in a world like this with people like you?” The answer to that question usually determines our position in the OK Corral and the games that we play in order to advance our script.

The purpose of therapy is to free us from the bondage of scripts and games so that we may find and accept the positive strokes, both external and internal, that we need for our Child, with the support of Parent and Adult, to flourish and live life to its fullest. The advantage of using a system like Transactional Analysis in therapy is that it gives both client and therapist a vocabulary and framework with which to examine, discuss, and change mental and emotional arrangements that aren’t working for us.