Perhaps in your relationships at times you find yourself parenting your partner or your adult children, rather than coexisting on a mutually level playing field, and you feel stuck in cycles of low-grade or significant conflict. And these dynamics can happen at work too. There are many therapeutic approaches and theories that can help us unpick these various scenarios for greater empowerment, and ultimately choice, as competent adults in the world. Transactional Analysis Theory TA for some, can be one of the most powerful.
In this blog post I hope to go some way to demystify the Parent-Adult-Child Model of Transactional Analysis , give you another lens in the toolkit for understanding yourself and increase your curiosity for further exploration. Transactional Analysis TA is both a theory and a therapy. Transactional Analysis is a theory of communication, of personality, of child development and of psychopathology.
It offers us a way of understanding ourselves, our childhood, our behaviour and is a valuable tool to improve communication , relationships and personal and professional performance. Transactional Analysis offers us a way of understanding ourselves and our behaviour through the lens of three aspects of personality, which Eric Berne defined as Ego-States. Each of these psychological mindsets encompasses both an experience and certain feelings, and drives our behaviour as a result.
If we are in the Adult ego state we are thinking, feeling and behaving in response to the here and now using all of our grown-up resources. If we are in the Parent ego state we are behaving, thinking and feeling in ways which are essentially a copy of our parental figures or main care-givers. If we are operating from the Child ego state we return to ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that we used as a child.
These might have helped us back then to deal with the challenges we were facing, but could end up working against us as a grown-up.
