[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ScDQx5ndw&feature=related]YouTube - Transactional Analysis 1: ego states ....[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bf8c1vMKiE&feature=related]YouTube - Transactional Analysis 2: transactions ....[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsPbFB8wVUc]YouTube - Transactional Analysis 3: games ....[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAzUhQfb9P8]YouTube - Little Girl Lost with Brian David Phillips[/ame]

(re the third clip)...I couldn't get past the dudes wolf tie. No idea what he was saying..just couldn't take my eyes off the wonder of the wolf tie. Bizarre.

I know nothing about transactional analysis. Does it involve clothing to induce deep states. Is this the tie induction?

Damn ! You caught me ! HOW did you pick up on the embedded weird tie trick ? NOBODY noticed that before...

This might add a little perspective:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTSrRdiU8s4]YouTube - Transactional Analysis Therapy Video[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7cwa5X6zgk&feature=related]YouTube - Psychotherapy with the Unmotivated Patient, with Erving Polster Video[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PU-hTdkzg8&feature=related]YouTube - Simpsons Shorts-Family Therapy[/ame]

Bufo Marinus wrote:

YouTube - Transactional Analysis 1: ego states
YouTube - Transactional Analysis 2: transactions
YouTube - Transactional Analysis 3: games
YouTube - Little Girl Lost with Brian David Phillips

I know it's popular in NLP circles to bash TA -- Richard likes to bash it himself -- but I find what I know of TA to be tremendously valuable.

I'm not a big fan of the parent-adult-child model, but mostly because I think it could have been codified better. What I like is the games-scripts-etc. model. Games People Play was invaluable to me in learning to identify patterns of behavior; Berne's other books, and some by Claude Steiner, were great too.

I feel TA is too much of a content-based model, although PAC has a structure, but the rest is all specific contents. Also, during therapy, they do a lot of mind-reading and try to fit in the client's communication into ideas they know. There's always a lot of interpretting going on.

That said, like Michael, I too am a fan of Eric Berne and his Games model. "Games People Play" was a real eye-opener for me. The book shows the genius of Mr. Berne in understanding patterns of behaviour and communication that we could normally come across in the context of relationships.

Vivek.

There may be useful, interesting, and innovative ways to rework the TA idea into a process based model that captures the best features of each.

What if we examined the internal representations of each state, the submodalities that support the Parent, Adult, and Child state as ways of marking which set of interactional processes have been engaged ?

Time linear TA interactions, such as games and scripts might be decoded as unconscious accessing and toggling between these internal states... so then we are free to shed the content heavy approach but use the PAC marking as a way of framing interactions....

Proposed exercise.... make as careful a full description of your P state, your A state, your C state... learn as much as you can about all the submodalities, location of voices, internal movies, and so on...

The operator will make clean anchors for each state... access and anchor...

Then practice consciously toggling between states until PAC choices begin to install...

If "client' is comfortable and congruent, then have third party make a statement to the client, while operator fires anchor for one of three states...

HOW was the statement perceived in THAT state ? Repeat for the other two until being in one of the three positions at choice has stabilized...

Then practice state chaining.... say, hearing the input, the moving from parent to adult, repeat moving child to adult, until one can flexibly, say, move across any pattern of three ego states... consciously or unconsciously as needed...

Then you have a nice Emotional Intelligence piece w/o a whole lot of therapeutic baggage...

Hi Bufo,

I have generally appreciated your clips and thoughts since you started posting on the forum.

Bufo Marinus wrote:

There may be useful, interesting, and innovative ways to rework the TA idea into a process based model that captures the best features of each.

What if we examined the internal representations of each state, the submodalities that support the Parent, Adult, and Child state as ways of marking which set of interactional processes have been engaged ?

Time linear TA interactions, such as games and scripts might be decoded as unconscious accessing and toggling between these internal states... so then we are free to shed the content heavy approach but use the PAC marking as a way of framing interactions....

Proposed exercise.... make as careful a full description of your P state, your A state, your C state... learn as much as you can about all the submodalities, location of voices, internal movies, and so on...

The operator will make clean anchors for each state... access and anchor...

Then practice consciously toggling between states until PAC choices begin to install...

If "client' is comfortable and congruent, then have third party make a statement to the client, while operator fires anchor for one of three states...

HOW was the statement perceived in THAT state ? Repeat for the other two until being in one of the three positions at choice has stabilized...

Then practice state chaining.... say, hearing the input, the moving from parent to adult, repeat moving child to adult, until one can flexibly, say, move across any pattern of three ego states... consciously or unconsciously as needed...

Then you have a nice Emotional Intelligence piece w/o a whole lot of therapeutic baggage...

However I fail to see the advantages of this proposal.

I agree with you that the Transactional Analysis model is somewhat out of date, and may benefit from a remodelling from a meta or process perspective. An update of TA for the 21stC is on my yet to be written books list with a working title perhaps of "I'm OK: Not sure about you."

I do not see how NLP would benefit from such a descent away from process and into description, however. Even if agreement could be made about accuracy (which I doubt) I do not see how such a model could inform NLP intervention or application without inevitable limitation.

My biggest reservation is however that the "Parent", "Adult" and "Child" parts never did and still do not really exist. To make them up and act as if seems like a real limitation given what we all know now that Eric Berne did not, (or if he did, he did not promote). I agree that the "life scripts" idea can be useful, but we also work with the client narrative in hypnosis and NLP do we not ?

If we are going to have made up parts to inform our analysis or description and interpretation of interpersonal interactions let's also have parts coded as "Reptilian", "Feral", "Spiritual" or "Savage". Such a list could go on forever. Maybe we could call them X, Y and Z , or Red, Green and Blue, or "Tiger", "Elephant" or "Wolf", or has that already been done centuries ago ?

Interesting proposal though Bufo. The pragmatic advantages elude me however even if technically possible.

Regards

MH

Well, we are talking about models here, nothing absolute, fixed in stone... and those models are built on other models... sometimes a new discipline like neuroscience (one should say a rapidly evolving old discipline) chimes in and resets the frameworks of other schools of thought... I'm really struck by the ramifications off the original NLP core... some of which might be labelled para-NLP or not-NLP... I've dropped in and sampled their wares from time to time.... and often found that although they were not-exactly-NLP they frequently DID have another enriching perspective that has greatly deepened my own understanding, sort of like having a toolset that includes both metric and fractional gauge tools, and a few special purpose oddities that come in handy at unexpected moments.... I guess that the larger frame that began to shape up in my mind was that taking an inclusionist, let's see what this thing might be good for, intellectual bungee jumper's approach simply had a higher rate of return over time... not to say that there weren't a few outright misadventures along the way that WERE richly educative in their own frightening ways.... seems like every field has its own Orthodoxy-Heterodoxy tensions built into their DNA.... every new development (to the Heterodoxists = opportunity for growth, to the Orthodoxists = contaminating impingement ) is in some way destabilizing... so maybe the most useful question is to ask oneself, what philosophical stance ought we take toward non-traditional, impure, outside the box conceptualizations ?

Hi Bufo,

More thought provoking posting from you.

Bufo Marinus wrote:

Well, we are talking about models here, nothing absolute, fixed in stone... and those models are built on other models...

Well sometimes, yes. Some other times new models just blow the old ones away. Flat earth to round earth, Genesis to Natural Selection etc.

I too have found TA both interesting and at times useful in the past, but as Stafford Beer (Viable Systems Theory) stated in a 1973 lecture,

For the moment,
you may find it tough enough to hear that just as
the computer is used on the wrong side of the variety
equation to make instability more unstable, and possibly
catastrophic, so are telecommunications used to raise
expectations but not to satisfy them, and so are the techniques
of cybernetics used to make lousy plans more efficiently

lousy.(my emphasis)

Now I would not quite go as far as to describe TA as lousy, but it is a content based model, and its interventions kind of prescriptive. If we take a systemic meta-model like NLP and apply to a content model, we get a buffed up content model, that may well represent a valid application of NLP to many, but is not really a model based on modelling processes extracting behavioural skill/state/strategy etc from an excellent person in their field.

This is only a personal opinion of course, but my enduring facination with NLP seems to lie for me primarily in the latent wisdom of the greater mind and working in a way where the content, descriptions and prescriptive advice are kept to a minimum, with an emphasis on simplicity rather than complexity where possible. Similar and different perhaps to the tensions you describe when you write,

.... seems like every field has its own Orthodoxy-Heterodoxy tensions built into their DNA.... every new development (to the Heterodoxists = opportunity for growth, to the Orthodoxists = contaminating impingement )

but we are already into linguistic descriptions and distortions, so who can really tell?

so maybe the most useful question is to ask oneself, what philosophical stance ought we take toward non-traditional, impure, outside the box conceptualizations ?

I would be brave to seek to define that one on a forum. To me it's just about choice and where my congruence and ecology feel right. What feels most right for me generally is to keep my problem solving and content ridden head out of other peoples' process as far as I reasonably can.

Regards

MH