A New, More Logical Therapy Model
This "Games People Play" is actually pretty deep in terms of contemplating some of the relationships in your life.
Been going to therapy recently — because, I mean, why not? — and my therapist gave me two books to read/look at. One was called The Games People Play; it’s by Eric Berne and is fairly famous. (By some estimates, it sold over five million copies.) The other one is called I’m OK, You’re OK; it’s by Thomas Harris and also somewhat popular. I’ve now read the first one and am about to read the second one. This post is related to the broader ideas therein.
Let’s get something awkward out of the way first: when I was 9–10, my mom actually wanted me to read that latter book — because she had read it. I’m not sure I was really read to process said book at 10, but at 34 I’m willing to give it a try. (24 years represents an approximate period of emotional growth, eh?)
Both these books reference what’s called “transactional analysis.” When I first heard that term, I thought negatively of it. First off, the word “transaction” has a negative connotation for most people; when you get asked to do something at work and you think it’s ‘transactional,’ you’re probably pretty pissed off. You want to be doing something with purpose, right? That’s the whole idea? (Very few people even understand this part, though.)
There’s kind of this broad idea with “transactional analysis” that all human interaction is basically a series of transactions — so, for example, your relationship with your mother is the same as your relationship with a car dealer, just at a more intense level. In some ways, this is true. You go through a series of movements/dialogue points with a car dealer. Each of you has a goal. You go through a series of movements/dialogue points with your mother most of the time. Each of you has a goal (usually). It’s really not that different.
I’ll lay out the cornerstone idea of “transactional analysis” and then relate it back to my own worlds a little bit.
The heart of a lot of Berne’s work is this idea of “adult/parent/child.” You can read a little bit about the ideas here.
Here’s a mock-up of what it looks like:
Alright, so here’s the basic idea.
At any given time, you can be operating as an adult, a parent, or a child.
When you’re operating as an adult, that means you think and determine things in the now, external and internal factors, all that. You’re putting things together and contextualizing. This is good.
When you’re operating as a parent, you’re essentially acting or using behaviors that your parents gave you (or some parental figure gave you). Your “parent” is basically the external factors of your childhood writ large. There’s a lot of stuff here like “always” and “never” and “these are the rules.” (Point being: you can run from your childhood as much as you want, but it’ll always be somewhere nearby.)
When you’re operating as a child, you’re expressing feelings and thoughts from when you literally were a child. So if someone criticizes you at work, you get petulant instead of understanding it in the bigger picture of things (as an adult would).
Here’s where it gets interesting.
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