Psychotherapy (Transactional Analysis)

Transactional Analysis sounds complicated, but is an easy way of describing:

• Relationships, how they work and don’t work
• How our past relationships affect our current life and problems
• How we can use TA to become more aware and make better choices

Transactional Analysis was developed by Eric Berne in the late 1950’s. Eric Berne was a Canadian-born psychiatrist and the son of a doctor. He believed that psychiatry and counselling should aim to cure people, not leave them with lifelong incapacity.

He wanted to develop simple tools and ways of explaining things that everyone could understand, and therefore use. He did not believe in ‘psycho-babble’. 

His philosophy (and the philosophy of TA) is simple:

• People are OK (even if their behaviour may not be). Each and every person is important and worth respect. This includes You, and it includes Me.
• All people need positives from themselves and other people in order to feel OK. In TA these are called ‘positive strokes’, such as ‘well done’, ‘fantastic’, and even ‘Hello’. Smiling is also a positive stroke.
• Everyone, with the possible exception of the severely brain-injured, has the capacity to think. This means that you can think (even if it doesn’t always feel like it).
• If we can think, then each of us has the capacity to choose, to make choices
• We often made choices earlier in our lives (in childhood) in response to what was happening to us then. These choices may have protected us or kept us safe. We may make the same choices now automatically (for example, not to trust others, or to never say no), but they do not serve us so well now.
• By becoming more aware of our choices, why we made them and how we grew as individuals we can use tools within TA to make changes