Developing Transactional Analysis Counselling

Ian Stewart

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780803979024
• eBook ISBN: 9781446226506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

`This is an excellent book. Whilst specifically aimed at the "newer counsellor", this book contains much that will be of interest to experienced practitioners both within and outside of TA... this book is an excellent guide to implementing TA techniques and treatment planning particularly from a process model perspective. It incorporates many new ideas which will make it refreshing and inspiring for both new and experienced counsellors and psychotherapists? - ITA News

This concise workbook provides 30 practical suggestions to help practising counsellors develop and enhance their Transactional Analysis (TA) counselling skills.

After a brief introductory section that summarizes the essentials of TA theory and technique, the book covers crucial aspects of best practice in current TA, many of them unavailable in book form until now. Presenting new and wide-ranging material, each of the 30 suggestions - which are supported by useful case examples - encourages both experienced and trainee counsellors to think carefully about their work and how it can be made even more effective. Ian Stewart provides much-needed practical guidance to such key areas as contract-making, time-frames and the Process Model.

II	Thirty Ways to Develop your TA Counselling

First Principles

There are two reasons why I have called this section ‘First principles’. The topics it covers are all central to effective practice in TA. They are all, also, things to think about early in the process of counselling.

The first four Points in the section are about attitudes and ways of thinking, rather than techniques. I know this book’s main purpose is to offer you practical recommendations to help you develop your counselling. But to my mind, acquiring an attitude is just as ‘practical’ as learning a technique, and just as useful.

In fact, you could argue that acquiring an attitude is the more practical. When you learn a technique, you get just that one technique, no less, no more. When you have acquired an attitude, you can use it to generate many techniques.

1	Presuppose the ‘one-session cure’

Eric Berne used to urge his students to ‘cure their patients in one session’. In this first Point, I am suggesting that you open your mind to this ideal of Berne’s, the ‘one-session cure’.

Some traditionally-minded professionals might find Berne’s recommendation startling, to say the least. They might feel that it trivialises the long and tortuous process which (for them) marks out the true course of personal change. Indeed, some transactional analysts have sought to make Berne look more ‘respectable’ by pointing out that this was just one example of his trick of making valid points through the use of exaggeration. Everybody knows, they say, that it is usually not possible to cure people in a single session; Berne was just finding a striking way of pointing out that the counsellor needs to be proactive in her approach to treatment.

Indeed, this was part of what Berne was doing. But I think he was doing more. In his demand that we ‘cure our patients in one session’, he was presupposing two other statements:

1. People can be cured;
2. Cure can be quick.

My first counsel to you, then, is to keep your mind open to these two presuppositions of Berne’s. As you begin working with each client, do so on the assumption that people can be cured. Assume, too, that they can be cured quickly.

This is not the same as old-fashioned ‘positive thinking’. It is a way of framing what you know, or think you know, about how you can help people to change.

Why is this presupposition valuable?

If you start each case by presupposing that people can be cured quickly, two outcomes are then possible: either your client will be cured quickly, or she will not.

If, on the other hand, you begin the case by presupposing that people cannot be cured quickly, then it is certain that your client will not be cured quickly. One obvious practical reason for this is that you will not have been aiming for speedy cure anyway. Why should you, a responsible professional, aim for something that you are presupposing to be impossible? Indeed, even if your client were to get better quickly, then you would have to judge this a purely chance event, since you have presupposed that your treatment could not have been the cause.

In other words: you and your clients have everything to gain, and nothing to lose, if you choose to presuppose that quick cure is possible.

Presuppositions do not pre-empt facts

In inviting you to ‘presuppose one-session cure’, I am not suggesting that you should use presuppositions as a substitute for proper diagnosis and systematic treatment planning. On the contrary, as I stress in several of the coming Points, these factual procedures are essential to your effectiveness.

Presuppositions are not about such factual issues; they are sweeping, generalised beliefs about ‘what can be true, what cannot be true, what must or must not happen’. Presuppositions are usually not subjected to factual investigation, because they are held to be non-controversial. Indeed, factual investigation begins where presuppositions leave off.¹

Open v. closed presuppositions

Eric Berne chose his two presuppositions, ‘People can be cured, and they can be cured quickly’, because he wanted to counter two opposing presuppositions that he often heard put forth by the psychoanalytic establishment of his time. They were:

1. ‘People are never cured through counselling or psychotherapy; at most, you can expect them to “make progress” or “gain insight”.’
2. ‘Effective treatment must take a long time.’

You will notice that both these statements are absolutes. They presuppose that ‘cure never happens,’ and that effective treatment ‘must be slow’. Thus, both these statements close off possibilities. I call such statements closed presuppositions.

By contrast, Berne’s presuppositions talk of ‘what may happen’. He does not suggest that people are always cured by coming to counselling, but that they can be cured. Likewise, he does not assume that cure must always be achieved quickly, but rather that it can be. Both statements open up possibilities. Thus I call them open presuppositions.

A few more presuppositions

To conclude this Point, I shall copy Berne’s habit of throwing out thought-provoking ideas with little comment, and list another four closed presuppositions. I have heard all these being put forth by the counselling and therapeutic ‘establishment’ of our time (in TA as well as elsewhere). In each case I shall suggest an open presupposition to put alongside the closed one.

My purpose is not to prove that the closed presupposition is necessarily ‘wrong’, nor to argue that the open presupposition is always ‘right’. Like Berne, I am simply inviting you to examine each presupposition, and be aware how far it has been an influence on your own practice as a counsellor or psychotherapist.

l(a)	Closed presupposition: To be effective, counselling must deal with the person’s past.
l(b)	Open presupposition: Effective counselling can focus mainly on the present and the future.
2(a)	Closed presupposition: To work effectively as a counsellor, you must ‘be yourself’.
2(b)	Open presupposition: When you work as a counsellor, you have a choice between many different ‘selves’, all of which are authentic. You can choose which ‘self’ to be, from session to session and from moment to moment, in a way that best meets the needs of your client.
3(a)	Closed presupposition: Effective counselling must rest wholly in the relationship between counsellor and client.
3(b)	Open presupposition: Effective counselling can be accomplished through technique as well as through the relationship.
4(a)	Closed presupposition: Profound personal change in counselling must be painful, as the person faces up to distress and discomfort held from her childhood.
4(b)	Open presupposition: Profound personal change can be comfortable, easy and fun. The person can simply choose to let go of childhood pain and discomforts, leaving them where they belong: in the past.

Self-supervision: presuppositions about personal change

1. Take a large piece of paper and write at the top: ‘Effective counselling must…’. Then write down all the ways you can think of to finish the sentence. If you are working in a group, you may choose to ‘brainstorm’ sentence completions.
2. Next, go through each of the completed sentences. For each sentence, now write another sentence that begins ‘Effective counselling can …’ and which ends by saying the opposite to your original sentence. For example, if you had first written ‘Effective counselling must take place within a close relationship’, you would now write something like: ‘Effective counselling can take place without any close relationship.’
3. For each of these ‘opposite’ statements, make out a case why that statement might be true. For example, could it be that counselling without a close relationship might avoid some of the pitfalls of transference?
4. Finally, go through the pairs of statements, and consider for each pair: rather than ‘either-or’, could the situation better be described with ‘both-and’? For example, could it be that effective counselling demands a close relationship with some clients, but a distant relationship with others?

Key point

Be aware of your presuppositions about personal change.

Keep them under review, and be ready to open out any that you find to be rigid or limiting.

1 A full account of the nature and logic of presuppositions would take me far beyond my practical brief in this book. For a fascinating discussion, see O’Hanlon and Wilk 1987.

2	Stay aware of time-frames

The three time-frames are: past, present and future. In this Point, I recommend that as you work with TA, it pays to stay aware of these three time-frames. I shall suggest how you can use them and how they can constrain you.

Time-frames and TA

The time dimension is a central organising principle in TA theory. It is at the heart of the ego-state model itself. Parent and Child ego-states are both echoes of the past: Parent represents ego-states borrowed in the person’s own past from her actual parents or parent-figures, while Child denotes ego-states replayed from the person’s own past, that is, her childhood. Only in the Adult ego-state is the person responding to the present with her full present resources.

The ego-state model has no place for the future time-frame. However, the central TA principle of treatment direction represents a way to work with the future. In the light of the person’s past history, her present wants and resources are directed contractually towards a clearly-defined future outcome that she desires.

The upside-down tree

When I am running TA psychotherapy or training sessions, I often put up on the wall a poster that I have designed. It is shown in miniature in Figure 2.1. As you will see, it pictures a tree upside down. Among the roots of the tree, at the top of the picture, are the words: ‘Your roots are in the future’.

Half-way up the trunk of the tree (so half-way down the picture) are the words: ‘Action is in the present’.

Among the branches at the top of the tree (thus, at the bottom of the picture), the poster says: ‘The past is for information only’.

Why is the tree upside down? For two reasons. First: as a picture of personal change, it turns many traditional attitudes on their heads. Second: it portrays a process of change in which the client dynamically pulls herself upwards towards a future outcome, rather than looking downwards at a muddy bog of past problems from which she must struggle to free herself. It is this process of ‘pulling upwards’ that is represented by the three slogans on the tree, ranged upwards from past to future.

There is a way in which all three of the phrases on the poster are self-evident in their meaning. However, I think it is worth while to underline some of their implications for the process of change in counselling.

‘Your roots are in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I Principles of TA
• II Thirty Ways to Develop your TA Counselling
• Afterword: Living the Therapeutic Relationship
• References
• Index