Transactional analysis

What is transactional analysis?

TA emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Eric Berne came from psychoanalysis and was looking for a language simple enough for anyone to understand. That is how terms like Parent, Child, or “games” came about. Many who walked the path with him developed TA further, among them Claude Steiner, Stephen Karpman, John Dusay, Franklin Ernst, Taibi Kahler, and Robert and Mary Goulding.

Its view of human beings rests on three basic attitudes:

The great aim of TA is autonomy. Berne describes it with four qualities: awareness (being in the here and now), spontaneity (having options to choose from), freedom from games (saying openly what is), and intimacy (allowing closeness without fear of rejection).

The three ego states

The heart of TA: every person has three ego states, each a coherent unit of thinking, feeling, and behavior.

In the Parent ego state, you think, feel, and act the way your parents or other early caregivers did; this is where adopted rules, values, and judgments live. In the Adult ego state, you perceive the present and think things through consciously. In the Child ego state, you think, feel, and act the way you did as a child; this is where aliveness and creativity live, but also old adaptations.

In the functional model, the Parent and the Child are further subdivided:

No state is good or bad in itself. It gets difficult when someone reacts from a state that doesn’t fit, for example when an adult turns defiant in response to matter-of-fact feedback, like a ten-year-old. Ego states can be recognized by voice, posture, and facial expression, by your own reaction to them, by a person’s life history, and by inner experience. Such assessments always remain assumptions that you check in conversation.

Transactions

A transaction is the smallest unit of communication: a message from one ego state and the response to it.

Ulterior transactions are the stuff psychological games are made of. A deliberately crossed transaction, on the other hand, can be useful for interrupting a stuck dynamic.

Strokes

In TA, strokes are the basic unit of human recognition, as vital as food. They can be positive or negative, conditional or unconditional:

Anyone who gets too few positive strokes would rather seek out negative ones than none at all. A lot of conditional praise feeds the belief “I’m only OK when I perform.” Unconditional appreciation strengthens the sense of being fundamentally OK. You’re allowed to give yourself strokes, ask for them, and accept them, and you’re allowed to refuse strokes that aren’t good for you.

The OK positions

How does someone fundamentally assess their own worth and the worth of others? TA describes four basic positions:

Franklin Ernst developed the OK Corral from this. The punchline: we often act unconsciously in ways that get our position confirmed again and again. Anyone who believes they’re not OK finds a surprising amount of evidence for it.

The drama triangle

Stephen Karpman describes three roles that people take on in psychological games:

The Persecutor criticizes, blames, and applies pressure, often so as not to feel like a victim. The Rescuer helps without being asked and gains self-confirmation from it. The Victim feels helpless, hands over responsibility, and gets attention and help in return. The drama begins when the roles switch:

Games always run on ulterior messages and always contain a discount. Anyone who often ends up in one of these roles usually hasn’t learned well how to express their needs directly, and that takes a lot of energy.

Drivers and allowers

Drivers are inner guiding messages we take on as children: “If I behave like this, I’m OK.” Taibi Kahler describes five. Each one comes with an allower, a short sentence that loosens the condition:

Every person carries all five, to varying degrees. They become a problem when they always have to apply, automatically and without choice. Behind them there is often a quiet “I’m not OK” that you try to disprove through achievement. What matters here: the old solution had a good reason. Acknowledging that gives you strength instead of having you fight against yourself.

Feelings that aren’t shown

TA recognizes four authentic feelings: anger, fear, sadness, and joy. Each has a function, and when you follow its message, it resolves. In order to belong, a child adapts to what is allowed in the family. This is how rackets come about, learned substitute feelings: anyone who hears again and again “You’re not angry, you’re just tired” later feels tired where anger would be. Pushing the real feeling down takes energy, like holding a beach ball under water.

Trading stamps are collected when a feeling is felt but not expressed. Instead of saying something, you inwardly paste a stamp into your book. Once the book is full, it gets cashed in, no matter what the situation is about: as a big outburst or as a silent withdrawal.

Script and contract

The life script is an unconscious life plan that a child derives very early from its experiences. It decides out of a kind of “feeling-thinking” and generalizes: the way it is here is the way the world is. Later, reality is often interpreted so that it fits the script. Stepping out of the script means letting go of the childlike hope that someone else will fix it, and deciding anew, consciously.

In TA, every collaboration begins with a contract. It clarifies goals, expectations, and responsibility, and in this way it helps prevent games. A good contract is phrased positively, manageable, and worthwhile for both sides.

Common misunderstandings

TA is a model, not the truth about you. Its terms are maps, not labels: anyone who classifies you as a “Victim” or a “Rescuer” is describing, at most, your behavior in one situation, never your worth. In acute crises or illnesses, support belongs in the hands of doctors or psychologists.