Transactional Analysis Counselling in Action

Ian Stewart, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781446253281
  9781446253274
• Edition: 4
• eBook ISBN:
  9781446293201
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Selling over 25,000 copies across three editions, this book provides an unrivalled introduction to the core concepts and basic techniques of Transactional Analysis (TA). Ian Stewart guides the reader step-by-step through the successive stages in using TA to create therapeutic change, building understanding of the way the approach works in real-life practice.

Key features of this new edition include:

-a single extended case study running through the book

-?Key ideas? panels to summarize the main ideas in each section

-Detailed discussion of ?closing the escape hatches?: TA?s distinctive approach to resolving the issues of suicide, self-harm or violence

-Practice Checklists offering suggested questions readers can use to appraise their own work with clients at strategic points in the text

- Space for Reflection sections and Further Reading lists to conclude each chapter.

This bestselling textbook offers trainee and practising psychotherapists and counsellors a concise, hands-on exploration of current concepts and techniques in Transactional Analysis.

Ian Stewart is Co-Director of The Berne Institute, Nottingham. He is the author of Eric Berne (SAGE, 1992) and Developing Transactional Analysis Counselling (SAGE, 1996), and co-author of TA Today (2nd edn, Lifespace, 2012).

PART 1

The TA Framework

1

Counselling with TA

• Practice and Philosophy in TA

• The Effective Counsellor

• Space for Reflection

• Further Reading

This chapter gives you an overview of TA work and TA skills. In this first section I outline some distinctive features of TA practice. The second section discusses some personal and professional qualities of the effective counsellor.

Practice and Philosophy in TA

TA practice is founded on a set of philosophical views about people and the goals of change (Stewart and Joines, 2012: 6–8). The philosophical assumptions of TA can be summed up in three statements:

• People are OK.

• Everyone has the capacity to think.

• People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.

From these assumptions there follow two guiding principles of TA practice:

• Contractual method.

• Open communication.

People are OK

Everyone has worth, value and dignity. This is a statement of essence rather than behaviour. At times, I may not esteem or accept what a person does. But always, I esteem and accept what he or she is.

In the counsellor–client relationship, this implies that you and your client are on an equal footing. Neither is one-up nor one-down to the other.

This assumption will be familiar to you if you know person-centred counselling, since it implies Rogers’ ‘unconditional positive regard’ (Rogers, 1961: 62; Mearns and Thorne, 2007). The TA assumption also underlines the need for the counsellor to maintain unconditional positive regard for himself (‘I’m OK’) as well as for the client (‘You’re OK’).

Everyone has the Capacity to Think

Everyone, except the severely brain-damaged, has the capacity to think. Therefore each person has the ability to decide what she wants from life. She carries ultimate responsibility for living with the consequences of her decisions.

Decisional Model

Each person decides her own behaviour, thoughts and feelings, and ultimately her own destiny. No one can be made to act, think or feel in particular ways by other people or by the environment, except by physical coercion.

From this decisional model of human action follows TA’s emphasis on personal responsibility for feeling, thought and behaviour.

The decisional model is also at the root of the theory of psychopathology in TA. The young child is viewed as deciding his or her responses to environmental pressures. This has implications for the process of personal change in adult life. Because dysfunctional patterns were originally decided upon, rather than being forced upon the individual, they can be changed by making new decisions.

Thus TA holds that people can change. This change can be genuine and lasting. Change is not brought about merely by achieving insight into old patterns. Rather, the person can actively decide to replace these patterns by new ways of behaving, thinking or feeling that are appropriate to her grown-up abilities.

Contractual Method

From the assumptions that people relate as equals and that everyone is personally responsible, it follows that you and your client have joint responsibility for the process of change. To facilitate this, you enter into a contract. Your client states the goal he wants to achieve, and says what he is willing to do to help bring this about. You say whether you are willing to work with the client to achieve the chosen goal, and undertake to use the best of your professional skills when you do work together.

Open Communication

In TA practice, you keep your case notes open to the client’s inspection. This open communication helps your client take an equal role with you in the process of change.

Treatment Direction

The phrase treatment direction implies an informed choice of treatment procedures, decided upon in the light of psychodiagnosis and systematically followed through in the service of the contract goal. Current TA practice lays great importance on the need to choose and maintain direction in treatment.

It is important to register that the word ‘direction’, here, does not imply that the practitioner somehow ‘directs’ the client rigidly through the process of counselling. The ‘direction’ we are speaking of in TA practice would fit in the sentence ‘This signpost shows us the direction to London.’ It would not fit in the sentence ‘I gave my employee a direction to complete the job.’ In TA counselling, every step in treatment direction is decided by agreement between counsellor and client.

Treatment planning – the informed choice of treatment procedures – is always a deliberate and explicit process for the TA practitioner. It includes decisions on treatment sequence, the order in which various stages of the treatment process will be carried out. There are certain steps which the transactional analyst will usually follow in sequence when carrying through his treatment plan. These stages of treatment will be described one by one in the successive chapters of Part II. Chapter 2 introduces this with a bird’s-eye view of the typical treatment sequence.

Process Awareness: ‘Thinking Martian’

TA stresses the need to stay aware of the process of communication as well as its content. That is, you need to pay attention to how people say things as well as to what they say.

Eric Berne urged TA practitioners to ‘think Martian’ (Berne, 1972: 100–4). He pictured a little green man from Mars arriving on this planet to study Earthlings. The Martian has never been conditioned to accept what human communications should mean. He simply observes them and considers the results which follow. From this he deduces what these communications do mean. The practitioner, said Berne, needs to redevelop this skill of ‘thinking Martian’: observing human interaction without preconception. It is a skill every infant possesses naturally. As part of the process of growing up, most of us are systematically discouraged from using that skill (‘It’s rude to stare, dear!’), and we lose it through disuse.

In TA work you therefore re-learn to pay close attention to your client’s non-verbal clues: breathing signals, bodily tensions, changes of posture. You observe these signals over short time-spans, since they change from one split second to the next.

You pay attention also to the person’s choice of words. This is part of judging how things are said. For example, you would interpret the statement ‘That makes me feel bad’ as having a different meaning from ‘I feel bad about that’. (I explain the difference in Chapter 9.) You will choose your own words with equally close attention.

Social Level and Psychological Level

As part of ‘thinking Martian’, TA distinguishes two levels of communication: the social level and the psychological level (Stewart and Joines, 2012: 70–4). The idea behind this is that when people communicate, they often convey more than one message at the same time.

As an illustration of this, consider the following exchange between counsellor and client:

Counsellor:	So will you complete the assignment we’ve just agreed?
Client:	[Breaks eye contact, shakes head slightly] Yes, I will.

Intuitively, you feel the client is communicating something more to the counsellor than the literal meaning of his words would indicate. The ‘Key Ideas’ box below sets out the ideas that TA uses to explain this kind of exchange. I shall illustrate each of them by this same example.

Key Ideas 1.1

Social-Level and Psychological-Level Messages

1 All communication proceeds at two levels: the social level and the psychological level.

2 The social-level message is the meaning of the communication as it is conventionally understood in the social circle of the people concerned. In our example, the client’s social-level message is that he will complete the assignment.

3 The psychological-level message is the communication’s real meaning, the ‘Martian’. You will pick this up initially by intuitive judgement. Usually you will follow up by asking the other person whether this judgement is accurate. The counsellor in the example might judge that his client’s ‘Martian’ is conveying ‘No, I won’t do it’ or ‘I’m very doubtful if I’ll do it’.

4 Often, but not always, the social-level message is conveyed in the literal meaning of the words and the psychological-level message is conveyed by non-verbal signals. In our example, the client’s headshake and breaking of eye contact signal the psychological-level message.

5 If the social level and psychological level convey the same message, the two levels are said to be congruent. This is not so in our example. To make his messages congruent, the client might have maintained eye contact with the counsellor and made a slight nod of the head instead of shaking it.

6 If the message conveyed on the psychological level is different from that conveyed on the social level, there is said to be incongruity between the two levels, and the psychological-level message is said to be ulterior. In the example, the client’s headshake belied his agreement to doing the assignment, and thus was a signal of incongruity. The possible ulterior messages conveyed by the incongruity have been suggested in (3) above.

7 The behavioural outcome of any communication is determined at the psychological and not at the social level.

Eric Berne (1966: 227) put forward statement 7 above as a ‘rule of communication’. You will note that he wrote ‘is determined’, not ‘may be determined’. Berne is asserting that the psychological-level message is always the ‘real message’ in this sense. In our example, this is to say: if the counsellor wants to know what the client really means by his communication, he should pay attention to the client’s ulterior message and not his social-level message.

At first ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• SAGE Counselling in Action
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• PART I   THE TA FRAMEWORK
• PART II   THE PROCESS OF COUNSELLING WITH TA
• References
• Index