Transactional Analysis Therapy
Transactional Analysis
Transactional Analysis (TA) is recognised world-wide for its success in facilitating personal change. TA is a theory of personality, communication, and child development. It helps us to understand how people interact and form repeated habitual patterns. One of the benefits of TA is that the concepts can be understood and used on many levels from simple pointers to complex analysis. The cornerstone of TA is deep respect and empathy.
The core beliefs of TA are; people are OK (even when our behaviour is not OK sometimes), everyone has the capacity to think, people can make changes, they can decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed. These beliefs are reflected in the therapeutic relationship where the client and therapist work together and take equal responsibility for achieving agreed goals. Open communication is important in all aspects of the therapy process. The aim of TA is personal growth and change.
TA Tools
TA has a variety of tools and models, which can help us to understand ourselves and others, and which can be understood on many levels. This means clients can learn and use some of these tools practically and appropriately when they want to do so at various stages of treatment. This is an important aspect of taking action and responsibility for their work towards health. We can use these tools to observe and reflect on the way we communicate with people we are in relationship with. As we become aware of our patterns of behaviour, we begin to understand how some past experiences influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviour in the present, sometimes in ways which are unhelpful or even destructive. For example, TA identifies three ego states, the Parent, Adult and Child. An ego state is a consistent pattern of feeling, thinking and behaving. This provides us with a tool to help us examine how we acquired our beliefs and values from our parents and other parental figures, and how being in different ego states affects our daily life.
What TA Therapy can do
Transactional analysis can help with a wide range of problems, including personality difficulties, stress, depression, anxiety, anger, relationship problems, self-esteem issues, loss and grief. Therapy will help to explore the causes of problems and look at how you might be stopping yourself from living a happier life. It will help you to understand your interactions others people so that you can understand your relationships better, and decide what changes you would like to make. You will address your feelings and emotions as well as your thinking and behaviour.