Transactional Analysis (TA) psychotherapy was devised by Eric Berne. Berne was a Canadian psychotherapist who started the first group therapy sessions for veterans in the 50’s and early 1960’s. TA psychotherapy is built to “do no harm.” When learned, it slows reactive fight, flight or freeze reactions brought on by trauma, which helped addicted veterans recover their autonomy, and self-awareness, and move away from the military groupthink.

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In TA psychotherapy, individuals think about their behaviour, gaining control to do the next right thing, rather than flailing in negative unconscious behavior patterns. Transactional Analysis (TA) child development theory is the method of analyzing interpersonal relationship dynamics in a family. TA theory does not diagnose mental illness. The language of TA is based on Attachment Theory and will provide key principles for raising healthy children. To be brutally honest with your kids is important, but there are ways to provide insight without ending the conversation or the relationship. The language from TA psychotherapy is meant to increase thinking and provide words that encourage individuals to grow up to meet expectations.

 

TA helps people become aware of their internal working model of attachment. No person is all or one kind of category of attachment. There are diagrams provided, meant to educate and create discussion. People oscillate between behaviours, especially at the beginning of a learning cycle. “What is the beginning of a learning cycle?”: It’s a gestalt; It’s a move; a break-up; a different job. It’s when you’re starting all over again and developing a new identity. Many gestalts happen between birth and 5 years for the child. A gestalt is the change the child must make to survive and meet the situations that arise in life.

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Giving a person a diagnosis may lead to a debilitating life script. TA does not diagnose learning disabilities or prescribe medication. TA means looking at your family script. The behaviour of the individual can be described without labeling the individual into a category of illness. The decision-making process is patient-led and involves exercises that give the individual permission to take responsibility for their actions as parents while simultaneously investigating the script permissions from parental figures from the past. This guideline is for you, not your kids. If things go well, what you learn here will be passed on to your kids.

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It may take a few years to really get TA, like any philosophy, sport, or occupation, but it’s worth it. TA’s goal is autonomy for the individual from groupthink. Autonomy is the recovery of awareness, intimacy and spontaneity. Autonomy is the path away from groupthink and the path toward self-esteem. Factors that develop self-esteem are both internal and external; we are a product of inventive survival techniques taught by grappling with family and cultural expectations.

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The following pages contain case studies, gestalt terms, and the language of developmental psychology. A glossary is provided for the reader. 

 

I was raised on Transactional Analysis (TA); my mother taught nursing and practiced gestalt/TA therapy in groups in remote hospitals in northern Alberta. She lives with me and reads my work. I have a son who is on the spectrum, and I do not use the word autism to describe him. I simply describe his behavior to him, as I do with all my five children. 

 

Here is my own story regarding my 11-year-old daughter. It is an example of what you will learn in this guideline about giving the right messages to kids at the right time. “Adolescents with persisting gender dysphoria (persisters) and those in whom the gender dysphoria remitted (desisters) indicated that they considered the period between 10 and 13 years of age to be crucial. They reported that in this period they [the kids] became increasingly aware of the persistence or desistence of their childhood gender dysphoria.”[36] For young children, and even into adolescence, attempts to compensate for feelings of insecurity are often displayed in regressive behaviour.[37]  If a 10-year-old, for example, is in a state of mistrust, look for triggers that have precipitated the situation.[38]  Why is she hiding? What is she mistrustful about? In becoming a person, in the first stage of development, trust vs. mistrust, children are very dependent on a few persons. Attitudes and responses greatly affect children. Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy (TA) explains that parental modeling often transfers our own attitudes and unresolved issues onto our children, leading to script decisions that manifest themselves in various areas of their lives.[39] 

 

My daughter needed time with me to bond because she had started at a new school, and she was feeling mistrust about her community. Because of the anxiety about school and about being nagged by her brothers, she started making masks and pretending to be different animals. It was pretend and play, which is OK and not OK. It is a script she made up in her head about being an animal from something she saw on the internet. A mask, and this culture is full of them. The push for non-binary and transgender and other magical identities, like animals, in school and media, caused me to question her about her growing interest in being a ‘therian’ and how that related to the Pride flag. As we did a craft costume together, she asked which flag represented furries. A Furry is a person with an interest in animals with human qualities. It is childish behavior that comes from having inappropriate rules and the relevancy of rules not being understood. It's important at this stage to learn about structure and install our own internal structure.

 

When she told me she wanted to be a therian furry, someone who identifies as an animal, first I explained to her why people wear masks. Masks help us pretend and hide in plain sight, I explained. I explained that a mask hides your own thoughts from yourself when you pretend to be something you’re not. A furry identity is play. Play at home doing crafts, like masks or sock puppets, is okay. All children play with different identities. I asked her to tell me about her anxiety - when she said, “It's not a problem,” I could see from her body language that there was a problem. She knew that there was a problem by my body language. I became very serious and explained that adult men parade naked at pride with animal masks; that is the other part of the story. She shrugged it off, discounting my objection.

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Pretending that an important issue doesn’t matter is called a discount. a cue that something is developing that you may want to pay attention to. My daughter was discounting the importance of herself, my seriousness, and the importance of her anxiety. Eventually she talked about all the things that were bothering her.

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A parent who provides a strong sense of what is expected provides security. Happy children feel secure. Processing the many options that lead to family or career (or not) can be stressful. Children are doing this all the time between the ages of 6 and 12. This may be why the Amish kids are so happy; the cultural options are stoic and traditional, and community support is high. Too many options can take away a child’s sense of security.

  

When a child wants to obliterate the past version of themselves, they are blocking out memories. Making a premature decision about an identity is a desire to obliterate who you are. Why do children change so suddenly? Pretending to be Emo or a Goth Girl is also wearing a mask. It is part of normal development but also indicates a loss of awareness, purposefully by an adolescent. Preferring fantasy to reality, when kids start a new chapter in life, they imagine before they achieve. Often, going back to revisit earlier development tasks is helpful to make connections in the brain. This teaches a child how to re-parent themselves, rather than make dangerous decisions. Kids start all over again, all the time, and then talk themselves through it. Identity is constructed in a child this way, as kids erase who they were and become who they are in an ongoing unfolding of character, often affirming and reworking of tasks from earlier developmental stages is the solution for the child. 

 

The early task my daughter revisited was a 5-year-old development stage (pretending to be a dog, fox, or cat). We played together, pretending to be animals, until she became bored and moved on. But at that time, she needed extra attention and 5-year-old play. We still make masks together, but she understands that the furry identity is inappropriate now and why.

 

At the same time, rebellion, which is normal, became more frequent. I affirmed and supported this as a positive move, as her move out of childhood. But in crafting, I was supporting her need to regress at the same time, to an earlier developmental stage. Children regress so that they can get their needs met from an earlier time.

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So she also re-learned the times tables and began thinking about dance and music lessons again at the same time. This is the stage when children start to develop life-long skills. Encouraging children to find personal goals is a protective factor for sensitive kids.

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When we disagreed about the safety of a furry identity, I explained that it is a sexually inappropriate identity, that some adults who do that have not matured and are not maturing when they do that - it isn’t possible to grow up and become an animal, I explained. That is a fantasy. People become artists, engineers, and writers. That masked person will stay stuck rather than learn what they need to learn about human relationships. Fantasy is created by people to ignore some part of reality that is causing anxiety, like putting on a brave face.

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In conclusion to this story, my 11-year-old can disagree with me. It is OK to have contentious discussions with kids; they won’t break. I say, "I love you, even when we disagree," and mirror good behaviour. This is called an appropriate developmental affirmation for separation. This affirmation is from a list that I have on my wall, showing me what a child needs to hear at the right stage. Many messages for bonding and individuating must be given to children. Adolescence is a time of testing and being affirmed in a safe psychological separation from mom. The solution is to talk with your children about their anxiety, giving them permission to process it with love and attention.