TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

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The use of language suggests adult-to-adult respectful communication with a subtle warning; however, they may have said it with the intent of triggering the receiver’s rebellious child ego state, so they might think, ‘I will show you that I am also very intelligent and can become a doctor’ and thus study harder. The parent ego state contains the attitudes and behaviours that are observed and copied from the individual’s caretakers and figures. In other words the spoken and unspoken rules. The “shoulds’ and the ‘oughts” of life. The individual’s early parent is formed in the child from birth to approx five years and in Transactional Analysis terms is called the parent in the child or the P1. The complete parent ego state or the P2 is formed between the ages of five years to approx twenty years as a result of even more external stimuli from their authority of caretaker figures.

Ertem, M, Y., & Eker, F. (2016). Therapeutic Approach in Psychiatric Nursing: Transactional Analysis. Annals of Clinical and Laboratory Research, 4 (1:56) Which state we are in during an interaction depends on a few factors, such as how we have been conditioned to act or react from childhood, any past traumas that now cause us to act in a certain way during particular interactions or situations, and how the other person we are interacting with is treating us/ what ego state they are in when speaking to us.I'm OK and you are not OK. In this position I feel good about myself but I see others as damaged or less than me and this is usually not healthy.

TA believes that our childhood experiences, particularly from birth to five years, strongly affect our behaviors and our responses in social interactions, so importance is placed on our upbringing and how we were parented. It is important to appreciate that a person can be in a Parent state although not a parent and that the Adult and Child states bear no relation to physical age. A person of seventy years can be in Child frame of mind. The Parent frame of mind (or ego state) Providing eight weekly, 90-minute TA sessions has been shown to improve prisoners’ self-esteem levels when testing 35 prisoners with a self-esteem test before beginning sessions and again after the eight sessions (Torkaman et al., 2020).

The Parent frame of mind (or ego state)

It offers a theory for child development by explaining how our adult patterns of life originated in childhood. [7] This explanation is based on the idea of a "Life (or Childhood) Script": the assumption that we continue to re-play childhood strategies, even when this results in pain or defeat. Thus it claims to offer a theory of psychopathology. [7] With its focus on transactions, TA shifted the attention from internal psychological dynamics to the dynamics contained in people's interactions. Rather than believing that increasing awareness of the contents of unconsciously held ideas was the therapeutic path, TA concentrated on the content of people's interactions with each other. Changing these interactions was TA's path to solving emotional problems. Corkille Briggs, Dorothy, Celebrate Your Self. (1986). Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. ISBN 0-385-13105-4. In many organisations, there is barely enough Nurturing Parent to go around. However, occasionally you meet someone who overuses this wavelength. They are likely to smother you with their concern. They may fuss over you as if you were not capable of managing alone, or even insist on doing the job for you. It is difficult to refuse their assistance when they are so clearly intending to be helpful. When this happens, people are denied the opportunity to develop their own skills. Controlling parent Transactional Analysis is first and foremost a therapeutic tool for positive change and growth. It can be used either in therapy for the individual concerned or on a more surface level for problem solving in everyday life.

The eight sessions led to increased marital intimacy and satisfaction, and the participants reported being able to apply the skills and knowledge learned in TA sessions to other areas of their life also.

This is the beginning of the Adult in the small child. Adult data grows out of the child’s ability to see what is different than what he or she observed (Parent) or felt (Child). In other words, the Adult allows the young person to evaluate and validate Child and Parental data. Berne describes the Adult as being “principally concerned with transforming stimuli into pieces of information, and processing and filing that information on the basis of previous experience” 6 Stated another way, Harris describes the Adult as “a data-processing computer, which grinds out decisions after computing the information from three sources: the Parent, the Child, and the data which the adult has gathered and is gathering” 7 In one counseling session, Berne treated a 35 year old lawyer. During the session, the lawyer (a male) said “I’m not really a lawyer; I’m just a little boy.” But outside the confines of Dr. Berne’s office, this patient was a successful, hard-charging, attorney. Later, in their sessions, the lawyer would frequently ask Dr. Berne if he was talking “to the lawyer or the little boy.” Berne was intrigued by this, as he was seeing a single individual display two “states of being.” Berne began referring to these two states as “Adult” and “Child.” Later, Berne identified a third state, one that seemed to represent what the patient had observed in his parents when he was small. Berne referred to this as “parent.” As Berne then turned to his other patients, he began to observe that these three ego states were present in all of them. As Berne gained confidence in this theory, he went on to introduce these in a 1957 paper – one year before he published his seminal paper introducing Transactional Analysis. In other words, in these statements, there is obviously a distortion of adult reality from the child’s perspective. It is then necessary to cathart the adult. Contamination can also occur between parent and adult and often does; you may even diagnose double contamination between parent and adult and the child and adult ego states.