Category: TATuesdays

Fight – Flee – Freeze – or – FLOW? This is About Functional Fluency – Susannah Temple

Susannah Temple

In this conversation, Susannah will be sharing some of her ideas about her Functional Fluency model – what it is, key aspects of how she created it and ways in which it can be used. She says, “Functional Fluency is a way to put ‘I’m OK – You’re OK’ into action to create mutual benefit. I believe people can learn to choose their behaviour and that this makes a huge difference to how they relate to others (and themselves). The FF model offers a menu for choosing how to behave, moment by moment.

‘It ain’t what you do – it’s the way that you do it – the functionally fluent way’.”

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Normalising Shame – Alison Ayres

Alison Ayres

In this hour I will introduce the ‘Innate Affects’, (Tomkins 1962, Nathanson 1992) and offer a brief introduction to shame in this context, including the Compass of Shame (Ayres 2014), relating this material to Berne’s existential Life Positions.

We will discuss how we can use and perhaps share these ideas with our clients, in order to help them to normalise their experience and I will offer the Compass of Resilience, my development of Nathanson’s model, as a process through which we can learn to stay in contact with others and with ourselves.

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The Elephant in the Room – Marion Umney

Marion Umney

Our body sense and the cultural aspects of that are an important part of our sense of self. We who live in the West all come under the strong influence of an obsessive hatred and fear of fat. It is deep in our unconscious and is linked to our fear of the shadow side of ourselves.

Our challenge is to recognise and to accept that we do feel fear or disgust, but that this is a projection of our own fear or disgust at our disowned propensity for greed or lack of self control and not to apply it in our relationship with the client.

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Trauma and Blessing in the Family System – Enid Welford

Enid Welford

Berne referred to the ‘family scripting’ that can be seen as a pattern through several generations, and the important influence of the grandparents. Thus difficulties with our immediate parents may have begun several generations in the past, and often seem to be related to unresolved traumas. Fanita English (1979) described these traumas as a ‘hot potato’ passed on to subsequent generations. Knowledge of these traumatic experiences is held within the introjected Parent, and the theme of this TA Tuesday is the usefulness of working at the source of the difficulty, i.e with the ancestor who first had the traumatic experience.

Unfortunately the knowledge we hold of our family history is not always available to our conscious mind. There are signs in the therapeutic process that indicate the presence of an impasse that spans the generations, and hopefully there will be time to discuss these signs. I also hope to discuss aspects of Family Constellations that inform my approach to these difficulties, along with TA techniques that Transactional Analysts can use to address intergenerational trauma.

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Ideas About Change – Matthew Elton

Matthew Elton

As practitioners and clients we carry with us a many ideas about what it means to be ‘unwell’ / ‘stuck’ / ‘broken’, ‘sad’, etc. as well as ideas about what it means to be ‘well’ / ‘un-stuck’ / ‘fixed’ / ‘happy’.

There is a risk that some of these ideas bring with them a set of limiting assumptions about what kind of change is possible, how hard it might be, how long it might take, and what the end point will look like etc.

Matthew will discuss some of the ideas about change that he has learned about from his clients. And he’ll describe how playful and creative challenges to such ideas can help clients come closer to their preferred way of being.

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The Overweight Patient: A Psychological Approach to Understanding and Working with Obesity – Kathy Leach

Kathy Leach

There are 3 questions that I would like us to think about during this #TATuesdays event.

1. Do I understand the experience and life of an obese person in our culture? The overall picture, media, attitudes, prejudices, medical models and their implications?
2. What are the differences in Long and Short term issues of weight and the clinical implications of these differences?
3. What is the aim of psychotherapy with this client group?

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The Challenge of Leadership & Change in Organisations: A TA Perspective – Debbie Robinson

Debbie Robinson

Many organisations are struggling with economic, technology and cultural challenges – how can we influence organisations and develop leaders to create vision, cohesiveness and accountability rather than command and control, fragmentation, conflict and stress?

Debbie will discuss TA concepts that can support change in organisations and enable leaders to develop and grow teams that have the resilience to perform and thrive.

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Contact After Contact: TA and the Treatment of Combat-Related PTSD – David Harford

David Harford

David has worked in private practice in Edinburgh since 2008; his clinical work evenly divided between the provision of TA counselling and psychotherapy to Scottish armed forces veterans experiencing combat-related PTSD and a similar service for “civilian” individuals and couples from premises located in Leith.

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Education Matters: An Introduction to Educational Transactional Analysis – Giles Barrow

Giles Barrow

Giles Barrow (TSTA – Ed) offers a personal view about some of the distinctive features of educational transactional analysis (EdTA).

The seminar will include ideas about central theory and models in EdTA, and thoughts on underpinning philosophy. An important consideration will be exploring the distinction between educational TA and TA in education, arguably the central question for those practitioners interested in CTA in the field education.

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Being with Others: Musings on Autonomy and Attachment – Jim Davis

Jim Davis

Being with others – at work, in intimate relationships, in therapy – faces us with a fundamental, inevitable, and lifelong challenge of both being fully, spontaneously, me and fully, securely, attached to you.

Jim presented some ideas on the inherently and developmentally relational nature of self, with implications for some key concepts in Transactional Analysis theory and practice.

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Me, My Family, My People: Social Identity and Radical Psychiatry in Transactional Analysis – Karen Minikin

Karen Minikin

The radical psychiatry movement in the late 1960’s and 1970s proposed all mental difficulties are forms of alienation.

At the social level, this means feeling isolated from our work and relationships. Internally, we may feel psychologically alienated from different parts of our self.

This #TATuesday discussion explores the significance of social identity in TA and the ways in which radical psychiatry can inform our thinking and practice.

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Somatic Process in Therapy – John Heath

John Heath

I am still a talking therapist first and foremost, using TA as my main modality, but I have learned to integrate somatic data into my day to day work. Working with an awareness of body process has the power to deepen and accelerate the talking work. In this seminar I hope to share some of my enthusiasm for this way of working and perhaps to inspire others to extend their existing clinical skills.

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New Models of Grief: Implications for Assessment & Practice – Aideen O’Hagan

Aideen O’Hagan

Aideen talked about some of the new theoretical models for understanding grief and the process of bereavement.

Not everyone needs bereavement counselling and Aideen talked about the assessment process used within the Hospice to identify people who may benefit form bereavement counselling.

Aideen also talked about the new models and their implications for practice as well as the overlap with some familiar TA concepts.

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Mindfulness Skills for Therapists – Rita Harvey

Rita Harvey

In this workshop Rita will give you a “taster session” of her Mindfulness Skills training. We will practice together an exercise and talk about why mindfulness is so beneficial, for our clients, but also ourselves as therapists.

You don’t need any previous knowledge of mindfulness to participate and enjoy this time, and you can ask question and involve yourself “in the present moment”. All you need is an open mind and a gentle curiosity.

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TA: A Model for Understanding Mental Health and Relationship Based Treatment Planning – Kathie Hostick

Kathie Hostick

As an alternative to the medical model most often used in mental health I relate to specific TA concepts to make sense of many clinical presentations such as obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, post natal depression, self harm etc. Clients will often present with these symptoms and a further diagnosis of personality disorder due to their developmental and relationship issues.

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Trauma & Transactional Analysis – Michael Gavin

Michael Gavin

Michael Gavin is deeply passionate about the role Counselling & Psychotherapy can play in helping people who have experienced Trauma.

Michael has extensive experience in working with people who are experiencing Post Traumatic Stress. He has agreed to talk to us about how his work has been informed by the theory of Transactional Analysis and how he thinks about the clients embodied experience, engaging with the whole person of the client to facilitate recovery.

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#TATuesdays – Transactional Analysis in the Postmodern World with Helen Rowland PTSTA

The postmodern critique of truth and reality is starting to have a significant impact on the practice of psychotherapy, but its influence often remains unspoken. In this TA Tuesday I’d like to open up a conversation about truth, reality and psychotherapy and explore what transactional analysis can bring to the postmodern table.

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TA In All Its Shapes and Sizes! – Leilani Mitchell

Leilani Mitchell

TA is a great tool that can be used in a range of ways, my experience is that TA therapists in particular often limit themselves to using their skills and knowledge within the therapy room, but there are many other areas we could apply what we know.

I talked about TA as a psycho-educational tool and shared some ways that we at The Link Centre facilitate learning TA concepts while inviting growth and development in our students. We mostly use these ideas when training therapists but they can be applied in many different settings.

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TA Does The Business – Richard Maun

Richard Maun

In this interview Richard talks about how TA has helped him run his own business successfully and how he uses it when coaching and delivering organisational change.

Richard is a business coach, best-selling author, hosts a weekly business radio show and has been awarded Accredited Teacher status at Cranfield University. He has taught TA skills to executives and managers and used TA to benefit hospitals, SME’s, charities and single-handed businesses. His secret mission is to write a whole book about Physis, and he’s started with chapters about it in his books Bouncing Back and Riding the Rocket.

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TA with Kids in Care: Being Part of a Therapeutic Community – Clifton Supple

Clifton Supple

Clifton Supple is Clinical Director of Physis Quantum (www.physisgroup.co.uk) recently established in Shropshire to work with children and young people who present a complex range of emotional needs, inappropriate / harmful sexualised behaviours, attachment disorders, abuse reactive behaviours and trauma.

He is intending to discuss the culture that been developed upon an explicit commitment to a whole team approach focused upon the integration of therapeutic care, educational provision and clinical components to maximise the opportunities and outcomes for the young people they support.

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TA: An Evidence-Based Therapy by 2020? (Interview)

Mark Widdowson

In this interview, Mark will talk through some of the findings from his research on the outcome of TA Psychotherapy for depression, which demonstrate that TA can be an effective therapy for depression.

Mark’s vision is for TA to be recognised as an evidence-based therapy by 2020, he is also looking forward to talking about a systematic research strategy for the TA community and a series of small-project research ideas which can be taken forward to build the evidence base for TA therapy.

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