Information about Transactional Analysis

TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS - What is it?

Click here for some Definitions/quotations about TA

TA (Transactional Analysis) is a way of looking at what goes on between people and inside people. It can explain human situations in a way that gives insight into what is happening in a current interaction.

Having done this, TA indicates other options which those involved may (or may not) decide to avail of.

TA is widely used in:

• management,

• education,

• politics,

• religion,

• training,

• counselling,

• psychotherapy and

• psychiatry.

TA is also popular because, by and large, it uses everyday language as understood by people of all ages.

TA involves clients in finding solutions to their difficulties, and enables them to work through a contract designed to help them realise their potential abilities.

The ultimate function of TA is to lead people to a point where they can monitor their unsatisfactory experiences, and modify or change their behaviour so as to help themselves to become 'winners'.

TA Ideas and Concepts

Ego States

Inside each person there is a constant conversation, sometimes an argument, sometimes a discussion. When a person makes a decision to do something, what they actually do is very much influenced by what they say to themselves beforehand about the situation.

TA calls these varied ways of being 'I' our ego-states. TA also explains where these different inner attitudes come from.

Ego states can be either Parent, Adult, or Child (capitalised). TA would regard each of these ego-states as having good points in certain situations.

TA aims to help a person to choose to be in a particular inner state, instead of just allowing the current ego-state to dominate feelings, attitudes and behaviour.

Strokes & Transactions

TA suggests that all interactions are made up of strokes and transactions, which we aim from one ego state to another.

A STROKE is a single unit of recognition between two people. Strokes can be verbal or non-verbal, positive or negative, and of varying degrees of intensity.

A TRANSACTION is an exchange of two strokes between two people. The first stroke is called the stimulus, the second is called the response.

Sometimes transactions get 'crossed', or are 'ulterior', causing misunderstandings to occur, and communication to break down.

Life Positions

Another TA concept is that people have chosen basic attitudes towards themselves and others, either positive or negative, or to put it more colloquially: Each person's perception is that either I'm OK or Not-OK, and You are either OK or Not-OK.

Time Structures

TA refers to six different ways of spending our time:

• withdrawal,

• ritual,

• pastimes,

• activity,

• 'games', and

• intimacy.

In Eric Berne's best-selling book Games People Play he revealed how people cause great pain to themselves and to other people by certain habitual unhealthy psychological manoeuvres which can be unlearned.

Games & Scripts

Games and Scripts are ways of avoiding intimacy, learned in childhood, which can be re-decided by adults.

Allied to these stances are the shifting roles we adopt as Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer; and the protective Rackets we set up to confirm to ourselves the validity of the life decision we originally made as to whether we and other people are OK or Not OK