Transactional Analysis Foundation Year Assignment 






During my training at the Berne, i’ve experienced many major changes in the way i think
and behave generally in various situations i encounter day to day. Each training weekend
and the weeks between them have been full of epiphanies and personal revelations, and
the different models taught during training have been of great practical use.

Particularly impactful on me in terms of of its immediate practical applicability was learning

about the four life positions (Berne, 1975). I decided to print off each of them off (I’m OK -
You’re OK (I + U +), I’m OK - You’re not OK (I + U -), I’m not OK - You’re OK (I - U +) and
I’m not OK - You’re not OK (I - U -) ) onto cards, laminate them put them each into their
own plastic wallet that could be attached to a lanyard necklace, and worn under my cloth-
ing without being visible to others. 



With each card i meditated on how it felt to be in that particular life position, and deliberate-
ly invoked the feelings and behaviours i recognised as being attributes of each, until i was
familiar with each one, with corresponding notes alongside this.


Initially i carried the cards with me and made an effort to notice when i was in each life po-
sition. I quickly discovered that when i was under any kind of stress, that i would generally
go into I + U -, and immediately most people around me would be subject to becoming, in
my mind ‘the enemy’, making judgements about them from my Controlling parent Ego-
State, or believing that the person was not ‘OK’ and making a judgement about them from
my Nurturing Parent Ego State (Experienced as patronising or ‘arrogant’ thoughts about
the individual (‘Oh bless them! They can’t help it because they are stupid’). Most of these
initial observations were made from me walking down my street in a certain ‘mood’ after
something had stimulated a stress response at home. 



At the time of writing i live on a particularly lively street with lots of people living very close
to each other, with very few people having gardens leading to many people hanging out on
the street, both adults and children,it can also be incredibly noisy at all hours of the day
and night. This is something that depending on what life position i am in, stimulates very
different behaviours and thoughts, and it is not always what is going on outside my house
that is the stimulus for this. Sometimes i might encounter my neighbours blocking the en-
trance to my house upon returning home, or a gang of noisy kids outside as i walk up to
the shop. If i was in I + U -, I might think to myself ‘These guys are annoying ,they are al-
ways stood outside chatting noisily and getting in my way when i just want to get into my
house’ or ‘Those kids are no good! Haven’t they got anywhere else to hang out? Their
parents probably don’t even care about where they are!’ . However in I + U +, which was a
life position that i really had to cultivate to experience as a predominant position (As i soon
came to realise was a preferable, healthier position to be in over the other ones), i might
think something like this : ‘I’m glad i live in a lively area where people talk to each other on
the street, its really nice!’ or ‘Those kids remind me of me when i was younger, they are
just having fun and hanging out!’.


I experimented with taking the same walk in different life positions (Which i usually had en-
tered into before i had even left the house) , all of which i found myself in at various points
without having to invoke them deliberately. Potential sources of stimulus, i discovered,
would come from phone calls,internet chat conversations or even just being sat in silence
in isolation. After all, as we learnt in in the second order structural analysis of ego states
(Berne 1961), we have our parental figures in our heads experienced as ‘voices’ and mes-
sages in the form of injunctions and counter-injunctions. found that i could observe a pat-
tern in moving through a hierarchy of the life positions in terms of severity of how they de-
bilitated or enhanced the quality of my life. For example , ‘I - U -’ i identified as being the
position of what i would once have labelled ‘depression’. When i begin to consider what
‘depression’ meant for me, i quickly realised that it was a number of things.



Often it would be the feeling after being rejected, for example perhaps someone had
arranged to meet me and then cancelled without giving me a reason (or perhaps the rea-
son didn’t satisfy me). It could also be that i felt like i wasn’t understood/heard when i was
explaining something to someone, and that would usually be experienced as feeling like i
wasn’t important enough to be listened to, loved, and appreciated , and therefore not OK.
I would often come out of this life position into I - U + (‘I feel sad but about this situation,
but the other person doesn’t care about how i feel, they are probably having a nicer time
without me!) and finally to cope with this, i might think something like ‘actually, i’m OK, i’m
too good for them anyway, they are an idiot and i don’t need them’ ( I + U - ) After this point
i might ruminate on the situation and cycle back through to I - U + and then end up ‘de-
pressed’ back at I - U -.

I have a friend who for a while used to really wind me up because he would never come
and see me (he lived in a different city to me) but i would always make the effort to go and
see him, and if he did arrange to come and see me he would often cancel at the last
minute.

When i learned about the drama triangle (Karpman, 1968) on the course and its stances
of Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor, i recognised a pattern of behaviour in relation to the
situation with my friend. I would call him, and quickly become the Victim (‘I’m bored, why
don't you come over and see me?’) to which he would reply, something along the lines of ‘I
haven’t got enough money! sorry otherwise i would!’. I’d usually at this point move to the
stance of Rescuer and say ‘Ah that’s okay, i’ll pay for the ticket, it’s not that much!’. He
would then decline my offer ‘No it’s fine, i won’t have any money for food or the pub when
i’m there anyway!’. By this point ,i’m getting angry, as in my mind, i’ve payed for train tick-
ets to see him way more times than he has to come and see me. I feel rejected, especially
after offering him money to pay his travel. ‘You’ve always got an excuse man, how many
times have i payed to come to see you, you never come over here and i just offered to pay
your ticket too! You know what, forget it!’ and i slam the phone down. I have moved to Per-
secutor and then finally ended up as Victim again. In game theory (Berne ,1968), this is my
‘Pay-off’, feeling like the victim and that no one loves me, and that my friend is an idiot and
incapable of giving me the friendship i want, but in my head i am also unlikeable and
therefore i am not OK. (I - U -). The cycle then begins, and i move from I - U + (‘It’s okay
for him, he’s got friends in the city he lives him, he’ll just be having a nice time whatever
and i’m here on my own!’) to I + U - (‘I’m alright , i don’t need idiots like him anyway, i’m
fine on my own).

I eventually learnt to accept the limitation of the individual (in this case my friend) and not
take his behaviour to mean that i was in fact un-loveable and not OK, and i have a respon-
sibility to get the strokes i need that i was clearly trying to get by playing the victim in this
situation. I was ‘Bored’ ‘Depressed’ and ‘Lonely’ and when i broke these labels down with
the use of Gloria Willcox’s ‘The Feeling Wheel’ (1982), and upon learning about the Eight
Relational Needs (Erskine , 1997), i realised that the labels i had given to these feelings
actually meant i was deprived of strokes (Particularly Validation, Affirmation and signifi-
cance, as well as the need to have other people initiate contact) It was up to me to struc-
ture my time in a way where i would have more intimacy, even if it did mean moving to the
city where my friends lived, and in the mean time it was up to me to find a way to get the
strokes i needed in the city i currently lived in whilst i was working out a way of moving to
where my friends were. 



I started to go out a lot more and meet people in the city who i wouldn’t normally spend
time with, socialise in new groups, i began to attend meditation classes and i started to feel
a lot happier and healthier. 



Walking down my street became a completely different experience for me, as well as in-
teracting with people in general, as i no longer went into a default paranoid mode that
people were ‘Not OK’ or out to hurt me or mess me around, and i started to notice more
happy and positive things, as well as waking up in the morning with a more ‘OK’ outlook on
life. 



Things got better with my friend as well as i realised that he was just doing the best he
could do with the resources that he had, and so i didn’t see him as being ‘not OK’ any-
more, rather that he was ‘OK’, and looked forward to and enjoyed spending time with him
on the rare occasion that we did hang out. In the mean time i had lots of new friends and
experiences that meant i wasn’t so stroke deprived, which was what led me to my ‘not
OK’-ness in the first place. 



I still occasionally wear my lanyards with the life positions on and have even leant them to
friends and family (When they have asked) to identify their own patterns of behaviour and
life positions.

In Conclusion, I + U + is my preferred life position and i endeavour to embody what it

means, even when i’m not wearing my lanyard.








Bibliography


Berne, E. What Do You Say After Your Say Hello? London: Corgi ,1975
Berne, E. Games People Play , London: Penguin ,1968

Berne, E. Transactional Analysis In Psychotherapy, New York: Grove Press ,1961

Wilcox, G. The Feeling Wheel , TAJ, October, 1982

Erskine, R Methods of an Integrative Psychotherapy in Theories and Methods of an Integrative Transactional
Analysis A volume of selected Papers 28-31 ,1997

Karpman, S. Fairy Tales And Script Drama Analysis, TAB, 7,26, 1968