Understanding ourselves with Transactional Analysis

As we move towards spring my mind turns towards thoughts of increasingly warmer days, sunshine and growth. Like plants people can be affected by their environment in their capacity to grow into healthy, fully functioning human beings. In the same way that seedlings planted in poor soil do not flourish, when someone’s early environment lacks the necessary conditions for healthy growth it is unlikely that they will thrive. However, like adding plant food and fertiliser to improve soil there are things that can be included to improve a person’s quality of life.

The problem for most people is that they tend to repeat habitual patterns, so rather than developing and growing they remain stuck in well-worn ruts. In Transactional Analysis (TA) we can use a model of ego state’s to understand what happens to create these habits. The ego state model is a way of understanding how we operate in the world (in terms of our perceptions, thinking, feeling and impulses to behave). In TA we talk of 3 ego states, which are shown below:

Parent – as others were in our past

Adult – direct responses to the here and now

Child – as we were in the past

One way of thinking about the Child ego state is that this develops like rings of a tree. As we grow up we incorporate new experiences that are stored away in the child ego state. When we have more difficult experiences, in the same way as a tree creates a knot in the wood, we incorporate a ‘lesion’ in the rings of experience (as shown below).

When we experience something in our everyday life that resonates with a lesion from our past we can trigger back into perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting or wanting to act like we did when we had the original experience. This process can be further intensified by the responses we received from other people at the time of the original incident. Their response will be stored in our Parent Ego State and can often be heard as an internal voice when we start to resonate with a previous difficulty.

So to give an example, if we think about a young child on their first day at school, this can be a potential difficult experience for most children; what they need at the time is soothing and reassurance to help them manage this experience without it becoming a lesion. If a parent is dismissive of the child’s fear, perhaps telling them “Don’t be a baby! You’re making a fool of yourself! Pull yourself together!” this experience of the other is stored in Parent. Later in life, when experiencing a situation involving being alone and meeting a new group of people for the first time the voice in our head starts repeating this message.

Like growth in nature, people require support and nurture to thrive. When we receive these we are then more able to deal with difficulties in later life. Yet it is never too late to provide ourselves with the necessary psychological nutrients for healthy life. As a first step, awareness of how our individual background’s influence us now. This can be achieved through an understanding of Transactional Analysis, amongst other approaches. From this we can identify more healthy ways of managing our past and present difficulties.

Transactional Analysis is an approach that is used to understand ourselves and relationships in organisations, education, counselling, psychotherapy, and parenting as well as many other fields.

Mark Head MSc (TA Psychotherapy), BSc Hons (Psychology), CTA (P), UKCP Reg. Psychotherapist, TSTA (P), Chair of the Accreditation and Assessment Committee for UKATA (United Kingdom Association for Transactional Analysis ).
Mark is an internationally qualified trainer, supervisor and Psychotherapist and a Mindfulness trainer, he is Director of the Link Centre www.thelinkcentre.co.uk a training centre based in Newick, Sussex that offers courses in personal and professional development as well as longer term courses in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Mark’s passion is to facilitate people’s self-awareness to enhance their quality of life.
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