Transaction Analysis
What is TA?
​Transaction analysis focuses on questions such as;
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Who am I?
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Why do I behave in the way I do?
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Why do people treat me like this?
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How has my past impacted me?
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Why have I developed patterns of behaviour?
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How can I improve relationships?
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We will explore your current patterns of behaviour and why this is having a negative impact, focus on the past to understand why you are the way you are, learn about the specific communication and transactions with others that you are currently using and why, develop a realisation of your driver behaviours and use this to gain alternative perspectives and make changes to improve things.
Benefits of TA
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A Better understanding of self
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Enhanced relationships with those around you
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Improved and more effective communication
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Transferable skills for home, work and social situations.
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Positive management and expression of authentic feelings
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The ability to solve problems and make decisions
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The ability to be less reactive and more in control of your responses
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Reduction of stressful relationships
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Healing from the past through better understanding
How was TA developed?
Eric Berne founded TA in the late 1950s.
His ideas for TA developed from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory that childhood experiences greatly impact our lives as adults and are the basis for the development of our personalities and psychological or emotional issues that we suffer.
In the same way, Berne believed that our childhood experiences, particularly how we are parented, affect the developmental formation of our three ego states (Parent, Adult, and Child).
This can then unconsciously cause us to replay the same attitudes and behaviors that our parents had towards us to someone else during a conversation or to respond to communication and interactions with past childhood anxieties and emotions.
Eric Berne proposed that dysfunctional behavior is the result of self-limiting decisions made in childhood in the interest of survival. Such decisions culminate in what Berne called the “life script,” the pre-conscious life plan that governs the way life is lived out.
Changing the life script is the aim of transactional analysis psychotherapy. Replacing violent organizational or societal scripting with cooperative non-violent behavior is the aim of other applications of transactional analysis.