The Art of Authentic Communication

0:00that if i have the awareness to understand myself and that enables me then to make healthy spontaneous choices in the moment is that means that i will experience more intimacy in my life which means i will experience relationships of greater health where i can be vulnerable with people and so i don't need to play the games anymore so really that is what burn is inviting

0:31us to do is to become more aware so that we can be more spontaneous and experience greater intimacy and therefore become an autonomous person who is able to make healthy choices in the moment rather than getting hooked into the games hello how's it going welcome back to the spiritual psychology of acting podcast this week we are continuing our mini-series on transactional analysis a powerful tool for

1:04understanding human behavior and communication we build here on the concepts you looked at in last week's episode so if you haven't listened to that already go back and familiarize yourself with it before launching into this one in this episode we begin by exploring the idea of strokes those essential units of human recognition that we all crave why do we need them and how do they shape our interactions next we look at the different types of transactions that can occur between our ego states we then break down cross transactions where miscommunications often arise and ulterior

1:40transactions where hidden agendas come into play and that leads us nicely into a brief look at the psychological games people play which will be our main focus for next week's episode finishing with some tips on how we can achieve authentic human connection and intimacy with the people in our lives so whether you're an actor looking to deepen your character work or simply curious about the intricacies of human interaction this episode promises to be a thought-provoking journey into the heart of transactional analysis let's jump into it

2:13so this is our second part of our mini series on transactional analysis and very pleased to say we're joined again by Sarah Lowe's to help us along with that how you doing today Sarah i'm doing very well it's a real pleasure to be back it's good and how are you John yeah very good i really enjoyed the last episode we recorded with Sarah this is a fascinating topic so it's going to be good to

2:46hear more and thank you so much Sarah for joining us again it's a pleasure so in the second part we're going to talk more about the game as people play but first it would be good to talk more about transactions the actual transaction part of transaction analysis and really what transactions are so as far as my way of transactions are basically they take the form of a stimulus and response right and then that response then forms part of the next stimulus it basically as a conversation develops yeah so i mean essentially a transaction is a unit of social discourse if you like what in more

3:20ordinary parlance we might talk communication and it breaks a unit of communication down into as you've just said a stimulus followed by a response so a very basic example would be i mean in you know one sense a bit like we've just done you know we arrive on the call you know i say hello to you stimulus you say hello back response they can also it doesn't have to be verbal you know if you pass a friend um you know you're walking down the high street and you see a friend of yours on the other side of the road

3:54you wave that's a stimulus they wave back that's a response you could also say you know same scenario you see them you wave stimulus they see you they don't wave back that's still a response you know there's still a unit of communication that's being completed there so when we talk about transactional analysis what we are doing whether you're doing it in therapy in coaching or in the rehearsal room is you are analyzing the units of communication that are being exchanged and what that reveals

4:32about the underlying relationship dynamics you know transactional analysis is fundamentally looking at relationships and communication and how the communication builds the subsequent relationship and how what's going on for each of us internally influences the way that we communicate and therefore influences the relationships that we go on to develop right yeah and then the so the in the transactions themselves they constitute strokes right each transaction has a bunch of strokes you talk about what strokes are and and why we have a need for them as human beings so um burn uh talked about

5:08the fact that as human beings we have um four basic hungers that that need to be met as we go about the business of of being a human being and and those are um uh one of those hungers is that um a hunger for stimulus so you know to um a need for physical and mental stimulation in one way shape or form um there's also a hunger for recognition which is to have my very existence recognized so that you

5:39know i know that i exist and i know that other people know that i exist there's also a hunger for structure which is about how to structure my time so that i'm not just you know looking at four walls 24 hours a day seven days a week but you know that i need i have a need to do something with my time and then the final hunger is to do with position which links us back to what we spoke about in the first episode around life positions you know a need to have an overall framework for interpreting how i understand myself and others and how you know what's my position in relation to the others

6:15around me now strokes come in and relate to the hunger for recognition the hunger to have my existence recognized and strokes are a unit if you like of recognition of the way that we acknowledge each other and i mean a bit like the example that i just gave for the transaction you know saying hello that that is a stroke in and of itself even in the example where the person doesn't wave back that you know we will take negative strokes in the place if we can't get positive strokes it's better to it's a bit

6:50like better the devil you know it's better to get negative strokes than to get no strokes at all so strokes can be verbal or non-verbal in the way that they are delivered and they can be positive or negative and they can also be conditional and unconditional so for example a conditional stroke would be something like well done that's a good picture you've drawn so i am i've done well because of how i drew that picture um an unconditional stroke is is maybe simply saying you know

7:25i think you're fantastic it's not dependent on anything it's just an acknowledgement of the fact that you know you know saying i love you to someone you know is an unconditional stroke it becomes conditional i love you because you put the dishes away my love for you is conditional on the fact that you've done this thing for me so so yes that's a basic sense of we seek strokes in order to have our existence recognized and if we can't get positive strokes we will take negative ones in their place because at least i'm being recognized and again we might probably come back to that when

8:00we talk about games later um because often that's an exchange of negative strokes and we stick with the game because we'd rather play the game than be left by ourselves right like in crime you know a life of crime isn't that seeking negative stroking yes the risk of being caught yeah yeah and and sometimes actually the maybe fundamentally there's a desire to be caught you know because ironically and come back to one of the other structures often i mean this is a stereotype but

8:32you know often people who end up in a life of crime have often grown up in environments without a lot of structure where maybe there's only been negative strokes in terms of their recognition available and whilst um you know prison probably still gives them a fair few negative strokes my word does it provide them with structure in their lives and for some people when they leave prison after a long time it's very difficult to figure out how to live in this world um scenes from Shawshank Redemption come back to my mind you know how do you cope in this life when suddenly you've had every minute of your day

9:04being organized for you and then you're left out in the world and now you've got to figure this out for yourself again and so you know if you've never learned how to structure yourself growing up can be quite difficult and challenging to do that as as you as you get older right so so the stroke then is it could be when you say negative so if you insult somebody that is a stroke because it's a unit of a transaction yeah so if um let's say somebody you know in a work environment i also had the the

9:36queen vic in the east enders you know coming to my mind let's say you know somebody serving behind the bar and you know maybe they're new or something like that and they either pull the pint and it goes everywhere or the glass slips out of their hand and it smashes if somebody in response to that just goes oh you effing idiot you know in one sense it's an unconditional negative stroke because them as a rather than criticizing the behavior the fact that you know god you know you've dropped to the glass that's not helpful what the person has done has criticized them as a human being they've called

10:10them an idiot because they've you know broken a glass right but is what causes that in the person who says you're an effing idiot is that really come from a lack of strokes themselves potentially potentially i mean it you know it depends on all of our own individual sort of life experiences and the decisions that we've made about ourselves i think the where i would connect it to again with what we spoke about previously is life positions is that sounds to me like you've got somebody who's in

10:41a one-up position and and perceives others as a one down so they move very quickly to criticism because what that does is it reinforces their life position that i'm okay you're not and why people develop a life position of i'm okay you're not can be for any one of a number of reasons but it might be you know one option could be what you were just talking about john right but doesn't that i'm okay you're not is it always like a layer over i'm not okay there i think there is often people would

11:16often say that i'm okay you're not okay probably masks a deep rooted vulnerability that actually i've got to sort of justify sometimes sometimes it can be you know somebody who was maybe raised to just believe fundamentally that the sun did shine out of their backside you know and everybody else is less than so it can maybe be rooted in uber confidence that's boiled over but i think my experience is often when i meet people like that my sense is that something is being masked we sometimes talk about i

11:48can't remember if we mentioned this last week driver behavior which is ways that we behave when we feel actually i might not be okay around here but if i behave like this i'll be all right and one of the driver behaviors is be strong i'll be okay around here if i behave in a way that makes me look strong and i think you you will often see that in people with a life position of i'm okay you're not that there's an element of that what they're doing is presenting a very strong exterior um you know where they probably don't reveal too much about their own inner thinking or their or reveal too much about

12:21their own emotions as a defense mechanism maybe from feeling that if actually i show those emotions i really won't be okay around here it's like toxic masculinity isn't it i guess that's where that comes from is the sense that i can't show that i'm i'm weak or have emotions or i'm sensitive yes absolutely i mean i the be strong driver i mean you know all of the drivers um there there's five in total you'll see them in in all genders i i grew up with a very strong desire to be able to do things myself i'm the i'm the younger sibling so i've got an older sister who's three years older than me

12:54and i never understood why did that mean that just because she was three years older that there were things that she could do and i couldn't so i grew up with a mantra that's often quoted back to me of i'll do it myself and i think that has also to a degree led me at times with a be strong driver because i want to look competent and i don't want to look like i don't know what i'm doing so i'm aware sometimes now if i'm delivering a training course for the first time and something goes wrong i find it really difficult to ask for help i want to sort of keep this mask

13:25on that everything's fine and nothing's going wrong and i'm not at all worried or anxious about anything so so it it can be present in women but i think you're also absolutely right that in you know factors to do with toxic masculinity that it may well be a factor as well this sense that it's not okay for me to show vulnerability and actually that's weakness if i show vulnerability right so but this idea of like compensating for a lack of stroking so i often um with with clients

13:55and with students i ask them the question if all the care nurturing and support and love you needed to get from the age of zero to 21 added up to a hundred percent that would have been perfect parenting on your parents behalf how much did you get and then they'll come back and they'll go you know some will say 20 some will say 45 some will say oh god my mother 110 you know it was it was

14:30do you see what i mean it was too much the size measure would be 100 and then say say they come up with a number like i got a 45 i've got 45 yeah then i say well well therefore there's a stroke deficit of 55 well potentially if we follow the analogy potentially what you could say is there's a positive stroke deficit of 55 and what you might have done was plug that 55 gap by accepting negative

15:02strokes in this in the place of getting positive ones so you might still get your your 100 it's just that more than half of them was was actually coming from negative strokes rather than positives right okay yeah this is new to me this idea of um a stroke being a negative or a positive yeah i've been i've taken the liberty to sort of create a little bit of language borrowed from eric burn of an anti-stroke yeah which you know and if if a stroke is a expression of libido it's a caring

15:37nurturing thing yeah how are you um or you look you look nice today you know this that that's a caring that's an expression of the libido the anti-stroke would be an expression of mortido mm-hmm so uh you know like the game of blemish like oh is that a spot you've got on the end of your nose or something like that and it's um and i got this term from eric burn i think it's from eric burn he talked of siphoning off the mortido yeah you know passive aggression like an

16:12example always resonates with students when i say that when you when you're scrolling through social media and you might deny somebody a light yes absolutely how very they're never going to know whether you saw the post or not yeah so you deny it and in a way that's a little bit of spite you know that's a bit of mortido or you know you might um instead of uh loving their facebook post you might just like it oh oh i know it's just a serious i guess okay you also got the the more

16:47passive aggressive version is on whatsapp or on certain mobile phones you can see when the blue ticks like it's been read so this person's seen the message they definitely seen it and then there's been no response so you know they've seen it but they've chosen not to respond that's that's the more passive aggressive version that i guess yeah right so no response is a response in that way in other words it's the delivery of in in in the language i've been using is an anti-stroke but what i wonder with the question of you know how do you compensate for that missing 55 percent that might

17:21be through expressing the mortido through going around insulting everybody putting everybody down making people feel bad but that would be based on the missing 55 percent yeah i think think you could certainly play with that as an idea there's also um claude steiner who um you know worked with burn in the early days of uh transactional analysis theory and um wrote a book which is quite well known in the ta world called scripts people live sort of really looking at how you know people

17:53behave he also came up with this theory called the stroke economy and in in one sense building on your idea john that that we trade in strokes and that when we're trading in strokes it's not necessarily it's you know they're not usually unconditional positive strokes it's it's a bit like you know if you unconditionally love someone you know you simply love them and you simply offer them the positive strokes because that feels right to you when we move into conditional territory there's a trade going on and he had i'm going to read these out just so i don't forget them he had five sort of

18:27there are five statements in the stroke economy and those five statements are don't give strokes when you have them to give so that's a bit like you know not liking or or or you know i i will admit i shouldn't say this probably on a podcast but sometimes i've seen a message come into my whatsapp on the front of my screen and deliberately not opened whatsapp so it doesn't look like i've read the message even though i have because i've seen half of it on the whatsapp screen so don't i know i'm giving all my trade secrets away so don't give strokes when you have them to give don't ask for strokes when you need

19:02them don't accept strokes if you want them don't reject strokes if you don't want them and don't give yourself strokes so this it's almost like this sort of economy of the way that we trade in strokes that will certainly in the life positions usually keep somebody whether that's us or other people in a one down place where somebody's not okay in this scenario so i'm holding on to my strokes or i'm not accepting them even if i want them in a way that keeps me in a in a negative position it's

19:33like we reserve strokes and hold them up and sometimes we'll trade in and after the second world war there were often what they called stamp books where you would like collect coupons and was it what they called green shield stamps that used to get them i remember my dad in the 70s we'd stop and he'd get green shield stamps and then you'd fill the book and then you could cash it in for i remember i got a wigwam i was a child and there's in early writing there is talk about trading in your stamps which you can do from a positive if you've you know got a book full of positive stamps you might

20:04trade them in by doing something really lovely for somebody else but also sometimes you can collect your negative strokes if somebody's been unpleasant to you or has particularly done something you know nasty it's like you collect all of those stamps and then at some point you explode there's some big payoff or you get really angry with people like you know i know people where they seem really calm and they can seem to be able to take anything from everybody but then everybody remembers the one or two times they have really blown their stack in front of someone where suddenly they've gone absolutely

20:37livid gone absolutely ape with someone because they've they've they've held on to all of these stamps and then they've chosen this moment to cash them in and just really express all of this sort of tension that's been held up in people again i think you could collect the strokes and then cash them in for a homicide yeah yes yes or you could collect the strokes you could collect the as a i know this isn't the the anti-strokes yes and cash them in for a suicide yeah yes those are sort of extreme

21:13the end of the line examples but but yes you know again we'll come on to this later but they are extreme examples of the payoff in a game that people might have been playing i think one of the more farcical examples that comes to mind is basil faulty in the in the scene where he uh gives the car a damn good thrashing with the branch it's like it pays off in the most ludicrous way yes absolutely you know and and in one sense that's such a hopeless way because you watch that you know faulty towers most of his anger is is really to do in the relationship with his marriage but he very rarely

21:46says anything actually to his wife it comes out in his behavior and all other sorts of weird and wonderful ways which are wonderful for a comedy drama but not necessarily great for a healthy relationship you know right well it's that tension isn't it it's the tension it's the discrepancy between his desire to be acknowledged and be respected and be considered and how he really feels that creates the tension and that's what creates all the sarcastic jibes and you know yes because in

22:19that relationship he is so often invited in that in that relationship with the character of sybil into a one down position she's constantly putting him down or making him feel you know like he can't do something or he's going to mess it up or he's got something wrong and he's constantly trying to find ways in one sense of getting positive strokes but does it in such an inept over-engineered farcical way that all he ends up getting at the end is is a shed load of negative

22:49strokes because once again he's ended up in the one down position having done something completely ridiculous you know so has he essentially married his mother well i mean i'd need to sort of meet his mother to find that out but there's a potential well there must be a relationship between sybil and her position and his mother's you see what i mean because he allows himself to be treated like that he must get a payoff from it yes so i think again this is something we will probably talk a bit more about when we come to talk about script but usually when we find ourselves in relationship

23:24with people whether that's romantic relationships you know platonic friendships work relationships we meet people we get close to people who can further our own life script so life script just in brief for now are um decisions that we make about ourselves and about what it means to be me in this world and what sort of person i am you know what sort of life position am i a one-up sort of person in terms of the life position is it i'm okay you're okay or is it i'm okay you're not okay or i'm not okay you are or nobody's okay we make those decisions about what

23:59we think our life position is very early we start making that decision before we're verbal before we've really understood actually what life is and how it all works and if that life script is never challenged if it never becomes conscious because we write it subconsciously we make these decisions about ourselves so for example if basil faulty were a real person i do believe from documentaries that john cleese did base it on somebody he met yeah that um you know whoever that person was that potentially they grew up with an early life script which said you're not quite good enough

24:33everything you do is probably going to go to hell in a handcart at some point and so he is likely to meet people whose own life script will help to reinforce his so likely to meet people potentially like sybil who seems to think that she's got it all sorted she's okay she's not the problem it's everybody else is and once again she's got to come in and sort it out because basil's got it all wrong that so they have met and married because their life scripts complement each other they might not

25:04complement each other in a particularly positive or pleasant way but it's familiar and therefore there's a level of comfort it's easy to be with this person because they affirm what i know to be true about myself which is either i'm inferior or i'm superior and therefore that's a match that will work so yes there is likely to be something whether it's to do with the mother or other people but something in that person that he's married that reaffirms for him who he believes himself to be and how he has come to believe that life works for him right and even in his choice of being a hotelier

25:41that he's in a subservient position to his guests yes absolutely so he can be putting in he's he's in but he's frustrated with that because he's an absolute snob at the same time yes but also he's subservient to all this riffraff yes they're the problem yeah completely unless lord and lady so-and-so turn up then he's altogether different isn't he so there's one episode where someone's a lord and and he doesn't know what to do with himself no yeah well talking about the relationship between

26:14a husband and wife that's kind of a inappropriate mother relationship a lot of my research has come from the i'm okay you're okay book which is really fascinating read but in that they talk there's a whole chapter on analyzing the transaction so i thought that might be good to talk about the specific transaction so people understand they can be behaving or responding or giving a stimulus to someone from a certain ego state and one of them is the is is parent to child and the description they put in the book is let's say a husband from his child is sick and is looking for care and

26:47attention and the wife acting in parent is willing to mother him and that's incredibly similar to the the plot of phantom thread the paul thomas anderson film with with daniel day lewis it's they said set in 1950s london he's a quite obsessive and controlling fashion designer called reynolds woodcott fantastic name that he has yeah he starts a relationship with this younger foreign woman this waitress who becomes his kind of muse and he's had a lot of these in the past and things really start blissfully but then

27:19eventually turns out when he begins to see her as a bit of a distraction and this is you know potentially a bit of a spoiler for the film so if you do want to watch it maybe skip ahead 30 seconds but um her kind of response to that is uh is to poison him with wild mushrooms that she forages to make him sick so that he stops for a while and just kind of recharges the batteries and he having this he's got this very strong connection to his deceased mother he always keeps kind of parts of him secrets hidden in the clothes and the fabric of the the clothes he makes and he

27:51he wants to be mothered and cared for and kind of he's got this very strange relationship with his mother and she kind of fulfills that function so he plays this sort of game with her where he he allows her to poison him so that he can be sick and they kind of get this it's this kind of very complimentary like in a life transaction i guess and that could essentially go on forever and ever until one of them isn't okay with that anymore yeah but that's a great way i guess of seeing how even in a marriage people can be operating from parent and child it can it can go on and people can be okay with that yeah so as you know we spoke about ego states last time all three ego states

28:28parent adult and child are available to us at all times they're not linked to our age in one sense you know they develop as we grow but they would say even from when we are little we are developing our parent ego state as we're figuring out what it means to sort of you know be in charge around here and we we can step into and use those ego states at any time and when we are in communication when we are offering a transaction where we're offering a stimulus we're starting a unit of communication

29:00outside of conscious awareness unless you've just done a training course or you've been listening to a podcast about transactional analysis most of the time outside of conscious awareness when we offer a stimulus we are operating out of one of those three ego states this is what the theory puts forward and we are aiming at an ego state in the other person so you know in that example he is operating

29:31out of his child in um ego state aiming at the nurturing parent in this woman it's are they married so they they aren't to begin with but then they do become married and things start to get better but then start to get worse and this is kind of the the solution to kind of have the play this strange game yes so he's operating out of his child ego state offering that invite to you know initially his partner and then his wife to you know look after me and care for me and a complementary transaction by definition is one where the ego state you were aiming at

30:05in the other person is the one that responds to you so he was aiming at parent in her and it was her parent that responded so that's a complementary transaction and burn had three laws of communication and the first one relates to the complementary transaction and again you alluded to it and what you just said jordan is that unless somebody changes that transactional pattern that people can continue to operate that complementary transaction whether it's parent to child parent to parent adult

30:36to adult whatever can continue to operate in that way for years you know that communication because complementary transactions are comfortable we know the groove we know how this works i behave like this you respond like that i then respond like this and this is how we communicate i'll often say to people you know i have lived most of my life as an independent woman you know i look after myself i care for myself i do what i need to you know to do i go back to my parents house which bear in mind is not

31:11actually the literal house i grew up in but it is the place where my parents now reside and i can just feel myself slipping much to my sister's irritation into sort of the child ego state and just allowing my mom to run around after me my mom would argue i don't let her help me enough as an adult and she's probably got a point going back to what i said before about me being relentlessly independent and so when i go back home i can just feel myself slip into that child groove where i suddenly seem unable to even make myself a cup of tea or i suddenly seem unable to clean up the dining room table after myself

31:44you know these are patterns that were very present when i was growing up when i was a young child and so if i'm not mindful of it which i am because of what i study i could easily slip into ways which are not actually resourceful in the here and now you know i can help my mom i can make a cup i could make her a cup of tea how revolutionary would that be you know so so yeah your point is absolutely right is that when we're in a complementary pattern of transacting with people it we can get into the way where he potentially is never making use of his adult or his parent ego state in healthy functional

32:20ways in his relationship with her and she is never drawing on the other ego states in ways that actually might be useful and might invite that relationship into a much healthier dynamic you know where actually they can be in relationship to each other and both of them can be well that's why they say if you think you're enlightened go and spend a week with your family yeah absolutely because then all the triggers are there aren't they all those old complexes and you know like you were saying like they're wanting to be helpless to be cared for and

32:54all that kicks back in absolutely and as i said last time in terms of ego states the parent and the child if we step into them from as i said before that from the adult ego state so we're making a conscious choice to integrate some of what's useful in those ego states the playfulness of the child and its creativity they you know the nurturing of the parent that's providing care they can be really useful things to do but if you're only operating out of either one of those those two ego states in

33:25their origins are archaic they're not based on here and now reality we're playing out behaviors that either we've been demonstrating for years which sounds like him in this relationship he has been sick he has been cared for his whole life so he's drawing on behaviors that have been with him since a kid rather than drawing on functional useful behaviors in terms of who he is as a grown-up in the here and now and she's being invited to step in archaic behaviors around being a what it means to be a parent or a mother which probably relate back to the maternal role models that she was surrounded by

33:58as she was growing up so neither of them are actually behaving in ways that are rooted in here and now both of them are drawing on behaviors which are based in archaic storytelling yeah and it's the goal is this right though is it but it is if it's uh you know none of these ego states are right or wrong they all they're they're just as they are they're they're just three ego states but having said that are we in terms of our own you know psychological development and and our own you know coming to

34:30maturity and then hopefully to self-actualization and eventually self-realization yeah so is it the point of the work is it to become more in the adult ego state yes so a lot of people in the um ta world these days would talk about the integrating adults that like this rather than it being a fixed state the adult ego state is like this sort of pulsating orb that's constantly drawing in and integrating what's useful from the parent and the child ego states in response to what's happening in the here and now

35:05so it might be that you know a more healthy way of this guy behaving is acknowledging from his adult ego state that there is a part of him that needs care and it might be from the sound of it part of him that needs a whole lot of therapy if he needs to sort of you know get over the relationship with his mom but still there's something in the here and now that acknowledges that i have a need for care but also acknowledges that sometimes the way i demonstrate that need is not appropriate so how do i find in the here and now appropriate ways of expressing the need that i want that i would like some care but but that's not about me asking this young woman to behave like my mother

35:40so so i would say that's the aim is that is to operate primarily out of the adult ego state not to the exclusion totally of the parent and the child but just drawing in the behaviors and the role models and the experiences that i have from my past that are useful to me in the here and now rather than sort of unconsciously replaying behaviors or behaving like role models from the past which actually don't serve me in the here and now you know you know i've not seen the whole of that film i've seen bits of

36:15it and he's there's something about him as that character there's a lot of strength and a lot of capability and you think god if you weren't playing this seemingly ridiculous game imagine what you could achieve in the world if you were putting some of that energy you put into being sick into actually building effective relationships with the people around you so i'd say that's the aim is to make sure that you are operating out of that i would say integrating adult that's drawing on what's useful from the history and that's useful to me in the now but let's go of stuff and acknowledges there's some

36:48we talk about you know when you offer a transaction that stimulus um could be a stimulus into healthy communication or it could be a hook into old archaic ways of behaving which are not terribly useful to me and i think it's about using our adult ego state to say is this an invite i want to accept or is this a hook into something that actually i want i want to start to do differently i want to start to communicate with this person in a different way and just to say one of the ways that you do that if you realize it's not what you want to do is to do what we call a crossed transaction and a crossed

37:24transaction is when the ego state that you were aiming at is not the one that responds so if you know you've got somebody who's going child to parent go or look after me potentially somebody might come back from the adult rather than the parent and say you know what support do you feel you need or what you know how might you help yourself it's it's asking for information in the here and the now about what's going on here what is it that means you feel like you need me to help you it's mining for information rather than immediately slipping into carer mode yeah yeah yeah i've noticed there's there's uh my my daughter just reached 18 so recently i've been

38:02kind of mindful that my job is to help her to be independent so she'll come to me as you say dad can you do this or she'll do something helpless and she'll say i've got a problem i'll go uh yeah you've got a problem there yeah so yeah i rather than respond with with the um with the parental ego state it's just i just adult to adult so yeah yeah you've got a problem you need what are you going to do to solve it what might you do about that what are your ideas absolutely and that's encouraging her to realize she has the capacity to parent herself actually you know we can use our

38:36own parent ego state in relation to ourselves hi i'm martin delaney and i'm here to tell you about the upcoming seminar for the spiritual psychology of acting i ended up studying the full course and it really helped me to develop as an actor and most recently to prepare for a major film role that i was involved in following on from the teachings and techniques of the great

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39:37acting and if you're looking to up your game you can sign up via the spiritual psychology of acting website or click the link in the description and enjoy the many benefits the seminar will offer you and best of all it's completely free so sarah i was wondering about um intimacy this model i often find that where you're most intimate and the most free is when you're having

40:14like a child to child transaction with somebody when you meet that level with somebody but both you know behaving like children yeah it is is first of all it's the most fun and it's the most intimate with is that true or is is an adult to adult transaction what's the difference between an adult to adult and a child to child well essentially you know child to child is will you come play with me yes i'll come play with you which you know as children can be do you want to come and play

40:45with me in the home corner let's do dress up let's draw pictures together but as as grown-ups it's more into you know will you be intimate with me you know i fancy you do you fancy me i love you do you love me um you know i i talk in a professional context with clients that building rapport with somebody getting to know them is a child to child exchange of complementary transactions if we think about particularly the free child we said you know in the last session that free child is about me being who i fundamentally am you know being my free natural self and therefore when we're building

41:19relationships if we want to build relationships which are functional and healthy then you want to get to know that free child you want to know who is fundamentally the person that you potentially if it's a romantic relationship you might end up sharing your life with you want to get to know who they really are so i mean with the way i look at it i would say yes it's a child to child activity but perhaps with some adult knowing that you know this is not just about being playful this is actually there's something serious for me and i really want to understand who this person is and find out who

41:51they are and i want to know that i am safe enough to be vulnerable you know to be really healthily intimate with someone that requires a degree of vulnerability and to feel safe enough with this person that i can be my true self and that won't be used against me that it won't to come on to what we will talk about um soon it won't get turned into a game where suddenly i you know reveal my innermost darkest secrets and somebody goes oh well i knew you i knew you were worthless or something like that but i think the child to child interactions can usually be pretty good at sensing you know if

42:27somebody's not quite being their true selves with them and that there is probably an element of the adult knowing in that the adult awareness of is what i'm picking up on here does that feel genuine in the here and the now or is there something potentially something else going on here that i need to explore yeah right and also the i guess they're talking about the importance of the adult in the i'm okay you're okay but they give a few examples of child to child say an old couple walking on the beach is a child to child but it also took their adult to make the arrangements for that experience on the same way

43:01that you can have a you know a couple on a roller coaster holding on tight and enjoying the exhilarating ride that's child to child but they also needed the adult to pay for the theme park tickets and and kind of take themselves to that and saying that a child to child relationship can't actually last long without the adult being present it's kind of an essential part of it i think talking about the whole kind of like sexual experience like child to child is is that pure kind of pleasure but then the best kind of sex is the one that is the adult is present as well in which they're saying yeah i'm

43:33here to you know make sure that you're pleasurable not just self-satisfied yes and if this doesn't sort of screw with people's mindsets too much you could also argue that potentially there's an element of parent involved in it this doesn't sound too ick um in the sense that actually sexual intimacy can be an act of showing care to somebody else that you want to meet their need that there's an element of nurture in that which might come through from that parent ego state about what is it that you need

44:03from me in order to be able to get the most out of this so you know you could potentially make that argument as as well from an image point of view many people might not want to go there at all but you know so i think there are there are you know for me again it comes back to the integrating adults that the ego states model is helping us to think what behaviors do i need to draw in in order for this to be a healthy interaction in order for this to meet my need and to meet their need to ensure that everybody's getting what they want what do i need in order to be able to voice what it is that

44:38i want and what and what is it that the other person needs in order to be you know satisfied by this relationship and by this communication that we're having whether that's a sexual relationship or a professional relationship or a familial relationship yeah but if someone was like stuck in their parental ego state they're stuck in that and all their reactions are coming from actions are coming from the parental ego state and then you go into a child ego state and you relate to their child often what i found it kind of knocks them out of that parental ego state it reminds them of that i mean it can piss

45:13them off as well but well it's so abrasive or they can they can remember you know they can lighten up so what you're describing there john is if you've got somebody who's maybe used to communicating from parent and let's say maybe they're used to communicating from their parent to the child of other people so they're the person in charge they're doing all the sensible grown-up stuff and somebody then offers an invite to their child you're crossing the transaction you're inviting a change in the relationship and burn second law of communication which related to cross transaction is

45:48when you cross the transaction communication cannot effectively continue until somebody shifts to get back into a complementary pattern of transactions so you so cross transactions cannot continue for very long and and one of the things i i think is helpful about cross transactions is you feel them i mean if you were to do that to somebody who only ever offers from parents it's almost like they would physically feel it it's like almost the sort of metaphorically stumbling in the communication because they're so used to you know i put this foot forward and then you respond like

46:23that so i now put this foot forward and if you've just effectively taken their feet out from underneath them because you've not responded the way that you were meant to it it can be shocking sometimes what might happen is what you might find in response to you doing that john immediately what happens is they up the parental ante so what they they go even more strongly into their parent ego state because what they're effectively saying is no no no no no no that's not how this works i behave like they say childish yes precisely yes precisely that's probably what it would say in the literal script you know get a grip

46:57don't be ridiculous you know this is how it works but if you were to continue to offer that invitation in extremist we would say one of two things happen either they'll just stop talking to you because you're not communicating with them the way that they like or what they might do what you were talking about is eventually accept the invitation and join you in that child to child state what i would say would probably aid the transition is if you were to step into perhaps adults with them for a moment and say look i know this

47:28is not how we usually communicate but for whatever reason i feel it would be helpful if we started to communicate with each other differently i don't i feel like you you're always being the responsible one and i don't think that actually serves you i don't think it serves our relationship and i want to free you of some of that responsibility so come play with me you know so that's the potential of how we might you choose to use a cross transaction is to invite somebody into a different way of being with us and to disrupt that pattern of transaction and once it's when i'm back at my parents i have to cross

48:02my own transaction where i can feel myself slipping into the child and inviting my mother to look after me is to step into my own adult and say come on you know yes mom can make me a cup of tea but i can also help with tidying up let's get this back into a you know healthier way of working together but the important thing to remember is we want to be in complementary transactions with each other because that is comfortable and familiar and and if the transaction is broken then we will look to try and replicate complementary transactions some way either will change the way we've been transacting to stay in

48:34relationship with you john if you've offered me something different or i'll start ignoring you and go off and find somebody else who will transact with me in the way that i like yeah i was in i was in a situation where um having dinner with with some people and and they were talking about uh christianity and islam you know heavy sort of dinner conversation and there's one one person in a parental ego state said well whatever it says in the quran i believe it seemed a little bit ridiculous to me but but uh and i thought i didn't i didn't like where this conversation was going and it was

49:07like not really the spirit of the evening so i jumped in with okay yeah but if muhammad and jesus had an arm wrestling competition who do you think would win and the others some of the others got into the child and started playing the game oh well i reckon muhammad would win or i reckon you know jesus would win or you know whatever and they started playing along with the game but the person the main player in the parental ego state just just looked very disorientated and just shook their head and just withdrew but it did change the atmosphere

49:43yes and then i did manage to get the child out of her later do you see what i mean to get her to shift from the parental back into a child you know eventually she accepted the offer yes to to shift from where she was yeah yeah we started reminiscing about the 70s so it went into child to child's thing and there we found a happy compatible transaction absolutely absolutely absolutely and and something that you could where you could communicate in a complementary way yeah absolutely yeah well just to cover the other

50:16complementary transactions before we move on to the more kind of uh complicated stuff uh the adult the parent we've not talked about an example i had was it's like a man who wants to lose some weight so he has a lot of adult data about you know if he cuts out all the sweet treats that he indulges in then that'll be beneficial for his health so he uses his wife's parent state to hold him accountable so he'll he'll ask her to hide the treats from him or you know tell him off if he tries to the snack etc and obviously that that can be quite helpful and beneficial it's probably a more

50:49healthier um way to use the parent than it is parent and child to to cover the adult to adult as well if people haven't quite got the hang of it the whole kind of point of adult is it's very fact based isn't it that kind of these kind of transactions just stick with the facts they don't there's nothing judgmental or they're overly emotional in responses there's neither parent or child getting in the way of that um one of the um i can't remember if i mentioned this last week but there's a sort of a development on from the ego states model called functional fluency um which is essentially talking about the similar thing but it doesn't use the terminology

51:23of parent adult and child and the adult ego state um sort of in that version is referred to as the accounting mode so what you are doing is you are accounting for what is happening in the here and the now and that might be being aware of what's going on for me internally you know am i aware at the moment that there's perhaps a bit of a hook for me to behave in a way that's not functional that somebody said something that that's perhaps irritated me or angered me or made me feel uncertain also my ability to account for how do others seem to be reacting in this moment how is this information

51:59landing with other people so in the example that john was just talking about his awareness in the moment that a the conversation was moving in a direction that he wasn't entirely comfortable with but also when he'd made his offer to move it into a more child place he was aware of the impact on the person who was still very much caught in that parent ego state and started to problem solve which again is another adult accounting behavior around and what might i do about that how might i actually begin to draw her back into the conversation and in relationship with us so it's not just about

52:33data orientated it's about problem solving about awareness of what's going on a rational response to what's going on and in fact response is a word that we tend to very deliberately use about the adult ego state or accounting that enables us to respond to what is happening in the here and now rather than react rather than it being a knee-jerk reaction where we've got hooked into a way of behaving you know subconsciously where suddenly i'm ragingly angry and i don't quite know how i got

53:05here i just know i'm pissed off you know that sometimes our emotions can seem to catch us out you're not connected with your adult ego state if you find yourself in that position we often say sometimes therefore the adult ego state can be the hardest one to spot because a lot of it is going on internally we talk about using our head our heart and our gut to sense what's going on here but it also can in an adult to adult transaction become overt so you might say look i'm uh you know let's say imagine it's a team meeting and you know an issue has just arisen somebody might say look i'm i'm

53:39not entirely sure how we manage this situation i'm mindful that we've got to consider the impact on this client i'm also mindful that we've got a couple of people who are going off on holiday next week and so we're going to be down on resources in terms of dealing this and i was wondering whether we need to you know approach it in this way or that way but what do others think and so it's drawing other people in to get a sense of from a rational grounded point of view what is going on here what do i think is going on here what do others think is going on here and then we work

54:10together to figure out a plan of action yeah right very rooted in the here and now yeah for the for the adult to adult i guess a few good examples are like person a says can you pass the salt person b says there you there you go you know or person a says that's a lovely looking dress b says thank you very much we've talked about the the cross transactions where if somebody says can you pass the salt it could be like oh no none for you fatty i could have been there or that that's a lovely looking dress and i guess it's someone who's in a not okay position can often read into a comment

54:42like that and say like oh well i got it from a charity shop but not everyone can afford fancy clothes like you you know that's the that's the cross transaction what the other transaction that we're going to get to is the ulterior transaction that's going to be really helpful in understanding the game section could you talk about about ulterior transactions yes so ulterior transactions they reveal burns third law of communication which is based on the fact that when we communicate we communicate we communicate on two levels okay so those two levels are there is the social level

55:18message so the literal meaning of the words that we're using so you might ask me how i am and i say fine in response so so that's literally saying i'm fine but at the same time there's also a psychological level message which is what i really mean so if you ask me how i am and i say yeah i'm fine now you know you guys can see my you know body language but you know i'm using quite a positive

55:49tone of voice it's quite upbeat how i really am seems to match hopefully if all of my acting skills have not left me you know how i what i'm actually saying it's matching the words that i use but if you ask me how i am and i go yeah i'm fine the word i've used is exactly the same but you may again depending on the quality of my acting skills get a slightly different sense of how fine i actually am

56:19and burns third law of communication is that where there is a mismatch between the social level meaning the literal meaning of the words and that psychological level message the behavioral response of the receiver is always to that psychological level message we respond to that psychological stimulus that is saying to us there is something else going on here we might not know what it is but we smell the rat we know there's something going on underneath the surface this is why

56:52it's quite topical at the moment um you know we get irate with politicians when they're on the tv because we know they're not answering the flaming question we may not know what the actual answer is but we know they're fudging it and so we get cross you know the literal meaning of what they're saying might be fine but we get the sense there is something else going on underneath the surface and ulterior transactions are what drive what we talk about in the in the transaction analysis world as the games that we end up playing psychological games that we play often i mean 99 percent of the

57:25time outside of conscious awareness which are about getting strokes getting our needs met but without actually volunteering our vulnerability there is something in this relationship or in this situation which means i do not feel comfortable quite being myself but i still want my need to be met so i'm going to try and see if i can get it met in this relationship but without actually voicing what is truly going on for me and that's what sort of famously in the ta world is referred to as the

58:00games people play which is the title of a book that byrne wrote in 1964 which is really what made him famous because it was for years it was the top of bestseller lists right and so what's the definition of a game so there's many different factors that define a game the first thing about a game is it's repetitious that you know it doesn't happen just once it's if you like it is a repeated pattern of ulterior transactions that we get into the habit of exchanging with maybe an individual or it might be

58:35that we get into a habit of exchanging in sort of similar situations so we we might play this game with several people we might start playing this game in the way that you know we relate to our siblings and then we also replay it in the way that we relate to supervisors uh you know when we first go into the work environment we might replicate it in the way you know we play in marriages and relationships and such so partly it is it's it's about it's repeated they are driven as i've said by ulterior transactions so there is always something that is not being said something that's being concealed something that

59:11maybe is sort of slightly dishonest and manipulative about that about what's going on here and also they end up in what we would call a payoff which is where the sort of final act of the game serves our script it serves to prove what we believe to be true about ourselves about life about you know the things that always happen to me there's something about the game that reinforces that belief for me either about myself or about others and that's why it's repetitious because you know

59:46we want repeatedly to in one sense to be proved right whether that means that you know we're proving right that actually i've got it all right all right and i'm sorted i'm in that one-up position that i'm okay you're not okay life position or it might be the opposite it might be that actually my belief is that i'm not okay and so i get involved in games that reinforce that message to me it's also important to note as well that these aren't like obviously the term game sounds fun but these aren't enjoyable games to play either these are the more often than not they're pretty psychologically hurtful i guess or

1:00:19because of that ulterior nature there is always a destructive quality to these games isn't there not they're not fun fun games to play they're always unhealthy some people might enjoy them more than others depending on the life position that they've got you know if you're if you're in an i'm okay you're not it might seemingly be a more enjoyable experience for them but yes absolutely there it's a psychological game you know again i think it's important to remember 99 of the time unless you've just listened to this podcast this is happening outside of your conscious awareness but it's one of the things that can be useful to explore you know we all i mean certainly i know in my life i've had

1:00:53those moments where you think why does this always happen to me why do i always find myself in this situation and and one thing that i suppose started to move me more towards sort of you know studying i mean having some counseling and some therapy but also studying these sorts of things like transactional analysis is i had to admit at some point the common denominator in these situations was me i was the you know continually the protagonist in this scenario so what was it that was going on

1:01:23i seem to repeatedly find myself in situations where things weren't working and so understanding games and the roles that we can end up playing you know can be a very helpful way to begin to figure out actually how to stop playing the game and people may well have heard of and come across perhaps on training courses that they've done something called the drama triangle burn when he wrote games people played started sort of analyzing typical games that people might get into you know whether that's ways in which we might play games when we're socializing with people

1:01:57and ways that we might play games typically in a marriage sort of stereotypical situations we might find ourselves in and a chap called stephen cartman in the late 60s who was he worked with burn analyzed these games by sort of almost like comparing them to fairy tales and the fact that if you look in a fairy tale there's some consistent roles that people occupy which he then mapped onto all of these games that burn had identified and he identified three key roles that turn up in most fairy tales and

1:02:30also turn up in these games people play and these roles are the role of so this is not us being these things but we step into the role of in a game persecutor which means that we have an attitude that i know better than everybody else i'll do it or i'll make you do it it's an attitude that discounts the competency and capability of others and assumes more responsibility for the situation than is appropriate the other next role is called the rescuer who rather than saying right i'll make you do it goes don't worry i'll do it for you and again also assumes that they're more competent than the

1:03:04other people and also assumes more responsibility for the situation than is necessary but takes more responsibility on themselves than they should do and sort of you know literally i mean well hopefully only ever metaphorically you know puts their underpants on over their trousers and a little red cape off the back and flies in to sort the situation out without actually asking anybody if they wanted their help in the first place and then the third position on the drama triangle which is drawn inverted so the top edge of the drama triangle is pointing towards the bottom like the head of an

1:03:35arrow the bottom position is the victim role and this person discounts themselves and their own competency so their sort of tagline is i'm hopeless i'm helpless i can't do it and if you can we can map that into the life positions that you know somebody's in that victim position they've stepped into an i'm not okay place the persecutor and the rescuer are usually in the i'm okay you're not position because that means that they can then play games with the other people on the on the drama triangle from the comfort of that life position so yeah so the so the victim position discounts themselves

1:04:09discounts their capability and is looking for other people to come and sort it out and often what happens with a psychological game is that it is kicked off by somebody either stepping into that persecutor role or the victim role so somebody either starts going oh i can't do it it's terrible i'm never why does this always happen to me and what they are doing in the way they are transacting usually what if we map this to ego states as well there's usually they're operating from the negative

1:04:41of the child ego state probably the negatives of the adapted child i can't do this i can't do this they're sending a very strong invite to somebody's parent and to the negatives of that parent to either step into the negatives of the controlling parent and persecute them go don't be ridiculous get a grip this is what you need to do or to step into the negatives of the nurturing parent and provide inappropriate cake oh don't worry darling leave it with me i know you're stressed i'll sort it out for you and people can transact like that around that drama triangle for you know

1:05:13ages and ages and ages but using that drama triangle map can be quite useful to help to understand what's the role i'm playing in this relationship at the moment and then perhaps in a moment we can think about how you might get off the drama triangle so the game is initiated when somebody takes the position of being either a victim or a persecutor yes it tends not to be initiated by somebody who who is likely to step into the rescuer role because by the very nature of the rescuer there needs to be

1:05:44somebody to be rescued first before they enter the game so so yes it's usually kicked off by somebody stepping into that persecutor role or that victim role and i know previously we've had chats about the the series baby reindeer you know if you think about the in the opening interaction at the very beginning of that series where the character of martha walks into the pub and there's something about her that seems lonely and friendless and you know maybe something about her to be pitied what that seems to hook in the character of donnie initially is that rescuer role where he keeps offering her drinks for free

1:06:21and which means that she keeps coming back in and because he continues to feel bad for her he keeps offering her free drinks and suddenly he finds in this relationship actually she can switch on him and this is another characteristic of a game is partway through the game there is a sudden switch of roles where people move around the drama triangle and certainly in in you know what happens repeatedly in that series is martha switches from victim to persecutor if donnie suddenly starts to do something that she doesn't

1:06:52like she i mean she doesn't just get cross i mean she's raging and in a lot of those scenes which then means he flips into the victim position or there are other times in in the in that story where you know he's been victim but then he fights back slips into persecutor sometimes they're fighting each other from that persecutor position sometimes when he goes persecutor she goes victim so you know there can be these slightly confusing moves around the drama triangle where people switch roles but in in each time the game is

1:07:26played that when that switch of roles happens usually what it does is it breaks the communication down in that moment in that interaction in the game and that's when people get the payoff that they were looking for in their script that suddenly things change and this is where you know some of the game titles like you know i was only trying to help you you know um that that's when people get the the script belief is sort of a stroked if you like is reaffirmed and you know i can leave feeling like yes i'm okay and everybody else is rubbish or i can leave feeling god yes aren't i a terrible person

1:07:59because nobody can ever help me it's in that moment of the switch that the script belief is reinforced yeah she plays rescuer as well yeah when his his comedy act is dying and she turns up and she interacts she rescues him from his dying comedy act and also when they go out and there's a scene in a cafe they're having seen in a cafe and she says somebody hurt you didn't they and who was it and it's like now i'm gonna i'm she's taking on the role of i'm gonna rescue you

1:08:31and i also think there's elements of that in i remember that interaction because i also thought actually there was something in that just a moment i think there are many of these moments in that series of authenticity uh where i felt to me like actually she was really seeing and responding to a vulnerability in him and the positive version of the drama triangle which was developed in the in the 1990s by transactional analyst called ac choy says that rather than stepping into the role of

1:09:02persecutor what we can do instead and this is slightly different sort of language but it um the language of lacy choy's model often gets changed to keep the p at the r and the v the same because certainly for the likes of me it makes it easier to remember but so rather than stepping into the role of persecutor what we do is we step into our potency and that we respond in terms of what we see is going on in the situation and rather saying this is what you're going to do we say this is how i see it this is what i think needs to happen it's not about forcing people to do what we want but acknowledging what we think

1:09:34needs to happen rather than stepping into the rescuer role what we what we do is we are responsive to the other person so we rather than saying to leave it with me i'll sort it say look i can see there's a need there what do you need me to do what is it that you want from me and this is what i feel able to do so they don't take on inappropriate amounts of responsibility and then rather than stepping into the role of the victim what we do is we volunteer our vulnerability rather than playing games to master the vulnerability we call it ourselves and we use our vulnerability as a strength and say

1:10:07i'm uncertain i don't know what to do here um you know i'm feeling scared or anxious or nervous but we don't say that from a aren't i a terrible person because i don't know what to do it's simply an honest reflection of what i am feeling it's a sort of an adult accounting acknowledgement and there was part of me thought that in that interaction that this it felt to me like martha was responsive to something that she could see of donnie's vulnerability in that moment that she in one

1:10:37sense that's a very brief moment where she sort of cuts through the crap and just acknowledges something happened to you probably because not that it's explored but dear lord something must have happened to her in her own history that leads her to be behaving the way that she does you know games can increase in volume and intensity and certainly some of the games that she invites him into are incredibly intense but it just felt to me like that was a real moment of authenticity when she really

1:11:07witnessed his vulnerability and simply responded to it she didn't rush to say oh there let me make it better which would be the rescue it was just a responsiveness of somebody hurt you um which i think was a really striking moment in the drama yeah well that was an adult transaction was it or is that yeah yeah so the winner's triangle you're operating off adult you might be integrating some of the healthy stuff from parent and child but absolutely if you're operating on the on the winner's triangle you are responding to the here and the now something that you have become aware of in the

1:11:39moment rather than just sort of playing out archaic patterns of behavior yeah in that scene there's a wonderful in that when she first comes in at the beginning you suspect that she's actually she's suffering because of you know the the person she's been stalking something's gone wrong there and it's like that game's come to an end yes and she goes into the pub it's really good because there's a moment where you there's a shot of her where it's almost like she assesses him yeah because he cares for

1:12:14her right so she's rescuing where she suddenly projects the whole game onto him she's like ah i found someone new to play the game someone to play with yeah and it's a really clear shot you know in in the drama that the directors directed it really well you see her have the thought and project her unfinished thinking onto him but i find what's so fascinating about the thing is his part in all of it yeah it's what he wanted yes he wanted this he you know finally somebody acknowledge and gives him the

1:12:51recognition that he's always wanted yeah yeah we play games with people who will help us to further our own script so there is something that both of them get out of that interaction and and the other thing about that moment where she walks in and clocks it and you know i say games are repetitious they can you know if if this is happening outside of our unconscious awareness we can play these games over and over again yet for years and years either with the same person or with different people and the sort of final scene of that series i mean had my jaw on the floor when in one sense that opening

1:13:26scene replicates itself but donnie's now in the martha role and it's so he's the one sat the other side of the pub in need and somebody offers him a drink for free and there's part of me thinking whoa he switched positions but we're playing this game again we're going back around this merry-go-round and and it is the stuff of drama it's the stuff you know that how we try and get our needs met when we're not able to be sort of really open and honest with people about what's really going on yeah it's a brilliant ending because we don't know whether he's going to whether he's got awareness to play or not is he

1:14:02going to start the whole cycle but now he's going to become the victim and end up stalking the guy in the bar or whatever you know he's learned a whole set of transactions from martha he's learned how to play the game essentially hasn't he absolutely absolutely and you're absolutely right there is that there was part of me thought no no don't end it here i need to know that he doesn't do that that there's not more of this that's going to go on but this is the thing that you know we learn patterns of behavior from people we absorb those patterns of behavior when we're very young and we're growing up and then we can keep playing them with different people throughout our lives

1:14:36until such time as we might become conscious of the fact you know what this isn't serving me and through whatever means begin to think about well how do i get off the drama triangle how do i actually learn to you know i mean there's so many dramas about you know i always choose the wrong person to go on dates with and i always choose people who you know don't treat me well well you know how do you find your way onto the winner's triangle which so much of it comes back to how comfortable can you be with voicing your own vulnerability right there's a wonderful bit at the

1:15:07end of the games people play where he says um eric burns says that if you've read my book and you've come to the conclusion that i'm saying to the most part for most people life can be reduced to playing games you know meaning um using ulterior motives ulterior transactions in order to gain certain payoffs in order to pass the time between the cradle and the grave he said you've understood my

1:15:40book yes in other words that is that is what what he's saying time yeah yeah which is you know which is quite depressing you know is to decry you know that looks at existential the problem of of life and and the human race however i think it is important to note that he does then go on to say however there are three things which go beyond playing of games yeah yeah could you talk about what those three things are absolutely ben talked about the fact that the ultimate aim of transactional

1:16:12analysis i mean the aim of transactional analysis is in in essence to understand that we do play games to see that we play games and then find ways to be able to connect with others more authentically and he talks specifically about the fact that the ultimate aim of transactional analysis is autonomy so that rather than getting hooked unconsciously into reacting to situations where we play these psychological games where there's some element usually of manipulation going on where we're masking

1:16:44vulnerability rather than being honest what he wanted is for us to be able to live autonomously and that there are three key qualities that lead to us being autonomous and and the first of those qualities is awareness that we develop the awareness to understand our own behaviors and to begin to be able to see sometimes how i might react to situations in ways that aren't healthy and don't help me and don't help other people either so it's partly autonomy is about awareness he also said that autonomy is

1:17:17also about spontaneity and what we mean by that is being able to make healthy spontaneous choices in the moment that rather than reacting to a situation and getting hooked into a game i have the spontaneity the capacity to choose a response in the moment that serves me and serves other people and then the final key quality for autonomy or for living an autonomous life is intimacy that if i have the awareness to understand myself and that enables me then to make healthy spontaneous choices in the moment

1:17:52is that means that i will experience more intimacy in my life which means i will experience relationships of greater health where i can be vulnerable with people and so i don't need to play the games anymore so really that is what burn is inviting us to do is to become more aware so that we can be more spontaneous and experience greater intimacy and therefore become an autonomous person who is able to make healthy choices in the moment rather than getting hooked into the games and that and if you experiencing

1:18:26real intimacy then that's the there's no need for the games yes the games are all there to compensate for a lack of genuine intimacy absolutely it's you you're into you know the nirvana of i'm okay you're okay you know i can be with you and be well with all my vulnerabilities and that they can be one of my greatest strengths and one of the most important and potent things about me they're not things to be hidden away they're a valuable part of who i am as well as all of the strengths that i come with so absolutely there's you know there are there's hope folks there is a route out of the games and

1:19:01it's the route via autonomy by via awareness spontaneity and intimacy and they kind of come in that order as well don't they you have to start with the awareness before you can have the freedom yes you know it's the awareness to be able to make choices consciously rather than just to be a slave to your own subconscious patterns of thinking and then that that leads to a greater intimacy yes absolutely it's that's fun it's you know the spontaneity i think is key it's that ability to catch the hooks well the awareness i suppose is also partly about catching the hooks and then thinking right i'm

1:19:35going to make a different choice because i want to not because i feel i've got to but because this is a choice i am making to live a healthier life to live a more fulfilling life and to experience relationships whether that's with myself or with others that actually serve me in a healthy way and also serve the community i mean there's um these days in the ta world we don't just talk about autonomy we also talk about homony so um h-o-m-o-o-n-y rather than just autonomy and that's about being mindful of the

1:20:07fact actually autonomy if it's got a shadow side is it could potentially lead to well my focus is me and my own health and what i want homonymy is about saying let's remember that there's a wider community in a world out there so it's not just about how do i serve myself but also how do i serve people around me there's the african phrase of ubuntu i am because you are that's what homonymy is all about so it's not just about me serving my own purposes but me being the best most autonomous version of myself so i can be there to serve the wider community um around me and to and to be able

1:20:45to connect yeah and and you know you could say well could you do you agree with this that much of you know mental illness and sickness is people's inability to connect properly well i certainly think that that can feed into people becoming unwell or feeling unwell i was listening actually to a um a transactional analyst on the the ta podcast where i'm part of the host team it's not an interview i did but i listened to the episode he's talking about the impact of social media on the way that we relate to each other and how we build connection

1:21:20because there is the risk i mean there's a lot of wonderful things that come through social media in the way that can enable connection but also it runs the risk of people only connecting through social media which means that they don't have you know the physical intimacy and touch of relationships with human beings and therefore that can lead to a lack of health because we're not connecting authentically autonomously with each other and connecting with a phone he made the point you know what's the what's the first thing that you touch when you wake up in the morning you know

1:21:53how for how many people is it the fact you pick up your phone and check what time it is or check what phones you've got you know what's the last thing you you know that you put down before you switch light off at the end of the day your phone you know that we're so connected now into these tiny little mechanical objects giving off god knows what heat and blue light and all this kind of stuff that actually gets in the way of the natural human to human contact and you know development of relationship that can come with with true intimacy yeah well and somewhere in there is it true that

1:22:25that that when you have the babies in the orphanage that don't get nurturing and caring the fluids in their spine begin to dry yes there's there i cannot remember immediately the name of of the illness but it's literally that the the spine disintegrates and that comes back to where we started on this episode about the one of the basic hungers is stimulation and part of that is physical stimulation of being physically held and touch it helps our nervous system to develop and so yes those children who

1:22:56grew up in romanian orphanages who were to be fair having some of their basic needs met they were changed they were given food they had a roof over their head at night but they had little stimulation other than that and they had nobody just simply holding them for the pleasure of that physical contact their spines disintegrated there's a rocking right as well they do a kind of uh they self-soothe in that way don't they because there's yeah there was an orphanage where they were just completely like on autopilot just doing that because yeah they needed it so they would give it to themselves

1:23:28stimulation available to them yeah and which in one sense says that is such a basic fundamental need that we have but but again it comes back to that thing the importance of human to human contact um you know for us to be happy healthy functioning connected human beings who were able to be a part of humanity not just in an autonomous way for ourselves but in a harmonious way in terms of you know serving our part in the human community yeah and so the ultimate virtue in that sense there is kindness yeah well there's so much of that i mean on social media at the moment there's so many things which

1:24:04are saying you know if you can't you know if you're going to be anything be kind you know and it is it's a part it's an unconditional stroke you know something very genuine is to be kind and considerate of other people be aware that you never know what's going on for others well even the word kind it means like isn't it kindred is like it's recognizing you know the self in me recognizes the self in you the human and team recognizes that and then that's what generates my transactions well it comes back to that phrase i shared with you earlier ubuntu i am because you are you know we cannot exist as humans

1:24:39without the existence of others and we get into very dangerous territory when we start to sort of you know eliminate that thank you for listening to the spiritual psychology of acting podcast thank you to sarah for providing her expertise in this mini series she'll be back again with us next week as we'll be taking a closer in-depth look at the psychological games that people play until then

1:25:12as we spoke about in this episode be kind and have an excellent week

1:25:42so you you you you you