Lecture for happiness matters symposium 25 4-2016
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The document introduces Transactional Analysis (TA), a psychological approach developed by Eric Berne that examines human behavior through concepts like life scripts and ego-states. It explains how early life experiences shape our self-perception and interactions, influencing our emotional messages to ourselves and others. Ultimately, the document emphasizes the importance of fostering positive self-talk and emotional states to enhance self-worth and contribute to a happier world.
Lecture for happiness matters symposium 25 4-2016
- 1. 1 A Very brief Introduction to Transactional Analysis. Brandlove’s Happiness Matters Symposium – 25th and 26th April, 2016 at the Vineyard Hotel 1. What is TA? TA is short for ‘Transactional Analysis’, a way of looking at human behaviour and experience developed by the American Psychiatrist Eric Berne in the middle of the last century. Eric Berne gave it this name because he developed it as a tool to analyse the transactions that take place between people when they interact with each other. 2. There are two aspects of this approach which to my mind make it a work of genius: The Concept of Life Scripts and The Concept of Ego-States. Together they make a powerful contribution to our understanding of why we and others behave the way we do, and why people have the emotional effect on others that they do. 3. Life Scripts. Eric Berne says that in the first 5 or so years of our lives we write a script for the drama of our life, and spend the rest of our lives living out that script. The broad outlines of it are provided by the injunctions we received in earlier life as to what, if anything, we can expect from life, and what value, if any, we have as a human being. Those injunctions come primarily and initially from the things our parents said to and about us – things like, “You are such a lovely little girl (or boy), I love you. You will achieve great things when you grow up.” Or “You stupid fool. Why did you do that? Don’t you think? You’ll never amount to much in anybody’s life”. They also come from the ways other people, and particularly our parents, behave towards us. The parent who never cuddles, hugs, and kisses their young child, who never plays with them or reads to them, is sending out a strong message to their child of, “You’re not lovable”, while the parent who does those things is communicating loud and clear, “You are a wonderful, lovable little person who brings joy to my heart”. The achievement of profound personal growth and development often requires the uncovering and making fully conscious of those fundamentally positive or negative judgements we have made about the really good and the not-so-good qualities we possess, derived from what other people have said about, and to us. Once made conscious, we can then rejoice with more unrestrained joy in what we know in our heart of hearts are our really good qualities,
- 2. 2 and vigorously reject those negative judgements which were made by our parents and other significant persons in our past which came not from whatever wisdom they possessed, but from the anti-life baggage they had collected in their own far from perfect past. The next step is then to replace those negative injunctions with often- repeated positive affirmations which assert exactly the opposite of what the negative injunction claimed to be the case. 4. Eric Berne’s Structural Model of Human Personality. The key concept here is that of the ‘Ego-state’, a name derived the Latin word ‘Ego’ which means ‘I’, and Sigmund Freud’s use of that word in his rather different model of the structure of human personality (as consisting of the Ego, the Superego, and the Id). An Ego-state is a state of being, a state of ‘I-ness’ which comprises a collection of different ways of behaving, believing, and feeling. According to Eric Berne there are 6 of these ego-states the embryonic beginnings of which lie in our very early childhood, but which remain a permanent part of us – they are, though, constantly modified in detail throughout our later life. We all start out in the Spontaneous Child Ego-state in which our behaviour is driven entirely by our biological needs. But from the moment of our birth we are observing and experiencing the effects of Adult behaviour – everyone around us, even our ‘big sister’ or ‘big brother’ is an adult compared with our newborn selves. We observe their behaviours, and with our biologically-determined wonderful propensity to imitate, gradually begin to tentatively move into the Adult ego-state ourselves. However being extremely observant little creatures we observe that not all adults are the same – some enter into our lives briefly, never, or hardly ever to be seen again, but others are constantly appearing – in most cases our mother and (hopefully) father. In all but the most tragic cases we begin to notice that the presence of those figures is always associated with pleasant feelings in ourselves. Those special adults called parents do things which lead to the satisfaction of our needs for nourishment, physical comfort and cuddling, and the radiation of positive emotional energy towards us. So the concept of a Nurturing Parent begins to form within us. Sadly however, even with the kindest and most loving of parents that paradisiacal, ‘Garden of Eden’ state does not last for ever, and one day we learn for the first time that parents are not always in the Nurturing Parent ego-state, that there is another side to them. One day we do something which a previously always kind and loving parent did not want us to do, or failed to stop doing something that
- 3. 3 our parent wanted us to stop doing, and the parent then withdraws the love and approval they had previously been showering us with, and probably eventually does something to hurt us, at least psychologically, and sadly sometimes physically as well. This is our first encounter with the Critical-Controlling Parent Ego-state, and although we almost certainly cannot consciously remember it, we got what has probably been the greatest shock of our lives when it first happened. What did we do when we first encountered the Critical- Controlling ego-state? We froze. We almost certainly stopped doing whatever we had done and very probably started to cry. We were taking the first steps to suppress our own Spontaneous Child behaviour in an attempt to meet the demands of the most powerful people in our little universe – the Adapted Child Ego-state was beginning to form within us. But giving up our own wishes and desires does not come easily to us. We have a strong biologically- based determination to ‘be our own person’ and to fight against those who try to prevent this from being the case – we move into the Rebellious Child Ego-state. Where we go from there depends very much on the further behaviour of those adults with whom we are interacting. There isn’t time or space to go into those further details here, nor of a description of what those embryonic ego- states mature into in our adult lives. That whole subject is discussed in some detail in my Releasing the Energy of the Organisation, a copy of which you will probably have discovered by now in your Goody Bag! 5. Crucially importantly, whichever ego-state we are in at any particular moment both as an adult and as a child, we are sending out two extremely powerful emotional messages – How we feel about ourselves (either “I’m OK”, or “I’m not OK”) and how we feel about the other person we are interacting with, or about people in general when we are not interacting with anyone person in particular – either ‘You’re OK’ or ‘You’re not OK’. The three Spontaneous Child, Adult, Nurturing Parent ego-states all have in common that they are giving out messages of “I’m OK, You’re OK”. I like to think of those three states as lying on The Axis of Pure Joy. By contrast the other three ego-states all have a “not OK” component in them: when we are in the Adapted Child state we are feeling “I’m not OK, You’re OK”, in the Rebellious Child state the messages are “I’m not OK, but neither are you. You’re not OK”. When I first encountered TA I used to think that the emotional
- 4. 4 messages emanating from the Critical-Controlling Ego-state were “I’m OK, You’re not OK”. After some years of trying to help people who wanted to improve their communication skills I came to realise that in fact the truth about being in the Critical- Controlling ego-state is that when we are in it, what we are feeling is, “I’m not feeling OK but at least I’m better than you – You’re not OK, so I don’t need to feel so bad about myself.” The more time we spend in these ‘contaminated by not-Okness’ states, the less joy we get out of life. I like to think of the three of them as lying on The Axis of Sheer Hell. (If there is time illustrate with Lessons from Geese, The Myth of the Sun and the Wind, and perhaps The Rabbi’s Gift.) 6. But we don’t just communicate our thoughts, opinions, and attitudes to others, we also talk to ourselves, and powerful though the effects of the messages, verbal and non-verbal that we get from others are in affecting our sense of self-worth, it is the messages we get from our self-talk that have the strongest effect on us. There is nothing in the world we want more than to feel good about ourselves – that we are ‘an OK person’. Every time someone tells us in so many words that they regard us as just that – an ‘OK person’, or behave towards us in ways which lead us to believe that that is what they feel about us, the stronger our sense of self-worth becomes – the more our self-esteem rises. On the other hand, every time other people do things which lead us to believe that they think that we are a ‘not-OK person’, the lower our self-esteem sinks, and the more we are inclined to think badly of ourselves. And the more we do that the less the world seems to be a place of joy and delight – a gift to us from ‘the universe’ where in order to be deeply happy, all we have to do is to effortlessly ‘untie the ribbons’, as Greg Anderson rather beautifully put it in his The 22 (Non-Negotiable) Laws of Wellness.1 If despite the awareness of our faults (and we all have at least some) we predominantly feel “I’m OK, and are communicating with ourselves from the ego-states which lie on the Axis of Pure Joy (the Adult, Nurturing Parent, and Spontaneous Child states) then negative criticism and nasty behaviour from others towards us will have relatively little effect on us – we shall be able to see that their unpleasantness springs not from some objectively-assessed evaluation of our personality, but from the baggage they are carrying from their own less than perfect childhood. 1 Anderson, G. (1995). The 22 {Non-Negotiable} Laws of Wellness. HarperSanFrancisco.
- 5. 5 On the other hand the more we are constantly bombarding ourselves with messages from any of the ego-states which lie on the Axis of Sheer Hell (particularly the Critical-Controlling Parent one), then the more devastating any negative judgements coming to us from others will seem to be: when that happens we probably say something to ourselves like, “You’re right. That’s exactly what I have always feared: I really am a bad, useless person – a total waste of space”. When people behave hurtfully towards others it is almost invariably because they are feeling hurt, and bad about themselves. They are then hypersensitive to any even mildly critical messages they receive, or think anyone is sending to them, and lash out against the source of that real or imagined criticism. They probably feel that the person they are lashing out against is “making me aware of my faults and therefore making me feel bad about myself”. All too commonly such attacks are met by a counter- attack from the ‘accused’ person’s Critical-Controlling Parent ego- state, and a battle royal may well ensue. The person who is skilled at handling conflict will remember that, “We never need love more than when we are at our most unlovable”, and will respond to the attack they are experiencing from a mix of the ego-states that lie on the Axis of Pure Joy. 7. For me the major practical message which comes from an appreciation of the truths contained in the TA approach is the importance of, as frequently as possible sending ourselves the kind, gentle, forgiving-of-any-wrongdoing, “You’re OK” messages which liberate within us the constant, effortless and spontaneous sending of “You’re OK” messages to others, and through that, making a major contribution to making the world a happier, better place. 8. Read “Implications for Business” on pages 93/4 of The Psychology of Business Excellence, then do the exercise on raising our self- esteem on pages 95/6, ending my talk with the last paragraph of the book (on page 105), namely: “Particularly in the light of the above discussion of living on the ‘Axis of Pure Joy’, there seems no better way to end this book than to repeat the end of the last sentence in its first chapter: ‘It is the desire to feel good about ourselves which is the ultimate driving force behind all our actions’. The more time we succeed in spending in that blissful ‘I’m OK’ state of inner calm and peace, the more we shall find ourselves radiating
- 6. 6 an exuberant goodwill towards ‘all that is’. And the more we do that, the more we shall find ourselves manifesting those qualities which Winston Churchill identified as some of the defining properties of excellence: “Excellence is…caring more than others think is wise; Risking more than others think is safe; Dreaming more than others think is practical; Expecting more than others think is possible.”