Transactional Analysis was amazing for me. by Kenneth Udut

Transactional Analysis was amazing for me. My mother had a copy of I’m OK/You’re OK sitting on the back of the toilet growing up and later on, “Scripts People Live”. Sitting there, bored, I’d read them. This is before I went to Vail-Deane in 1986-1990.

I totally absorbed it. I was 12-14 years old then and I’m 43 years old now.

My entire adult life so far, I’ve seen the things people do and say as a series of movie scripts they’re repeating (like roleplaying/acting) – and they don’t even realize it – AND I catch myself when I’m in the middle of a script.

Then I try to stop it. I change my part of the script so that it leads to a diplomatic “everybody wins!” solution.

It also lets me predict people’s group behaviors. When I recognize the script they’re on, even if I don’t know the people, I know what they’re going to say next. Makes me seem smarter than I really am, but really, I use it to resolve conflicts when I see it. Sometimes I use it to inspire somebody by appealing to the Joseph Campbell monomyth. Everybody likes to be a hero that’s battling an impossible foe and I play the role of the Trusted Advisor (the Obi Wan Kenobi, Mr. Miagi, whatever) that gives them encouragement and then vanishes, leaving the encouragement with them, and then I wait ’til I hear of their progress later on. It’s truly a force for good.

Life-changing stuff.

 

I’m very glad you posted this and that Facebook’s algorithms were intelligent enough to know that I’d like your post and showed it to me because it allowed me to speak straight about something that’s been important to me for a long time, but I rarely talk about it directly. It’s always good to have an opportunity to tell a personally meaningful story. One’s own personal narrative, while not the “everything” of “who we are”, nevertheless, is the easiest to work with and one that people readily understand. Helps me put my own life into perspective and allows me to share at least a part of who I see myself as with others.

Thank you Zoey smile emoticon I can’t say how TA will affect you, because we’re all unique and on different journeys, but at least now you have a perspective from somebody who was positively affected by it.

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