What is Transactional Analysis? 

In other words, Transactional Analysis (TA for short) is a way of understanding how we think, feel and relate to other people. It offers a clear, everyday language for making sense of ourselves, our patterns and what happens in our relationships.

​

A little history

TA was developed by psychiatrist Dr Eric Berne in the late 1950s and 1960s, alongside a group of colleagues in San Francisco. Berne wanted therapy to be something clients could understand and take part in, rather than something done to them. His book Games People Play became a bestseller, and today TA is practised and taught all over the world, including here in Scotland.

TA is used by psychotherapists and counsellors, and also in schools and workplaces, which shows how widely its ideas apply to everyday life.

​

What this means for you

It's easy to understand. TA uses plain, down-to-earth language, so you can recognise the ideas in your own life and keep using them outside our sessions.

It's built on respect. TA starts from the belief that everyone is fundamentally OK, everyone can think for themselves, and the decisions we made about life, often very early on, can be revisited and changed.

It's collaborative. We'll agree together what you want from therapy, so you have a say in the direction of our work and a sense of where we're heading.

It looks at relationships. TA pays attention to how we connect with others, and to the patterns that can leave us feeling stuck, repeating the same situations or not quite ourselves.

​

It's thorough. TA has a deep and evolving body of theory, which means it can support anything from a specific life change to longer-term work with past experiences.