William F. Cornell
Abstract
This article weaves together a description of the process of transactional analysis psychotherapy with an account of one client’s therapy-a client who asked, “What am I getting myself into?” as she started her work. This essay seeks to convey both the mechanisms and the experience of psychotherapy. It emphasizes work with psychological scripts and transference, the exploration of new possibilities for thinking and living, skill development, and the promotion of new neural pathways as the primary means of change in psychotherapy.
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“So, what am I getting myself into here?”
Suzanne asked me this question toward the end of our initial session. She had led quite a life up to the point she decided to enter therapy. As she approached retirement from her post as a university professor and campus minister, her life, at least from the outside, seemed full of accomplishment and-one would imagine-personal satisfaction. Suzanne was one of a handful of women to gain admission to a certain theological seminary and eventually to become ordained, although only after a valiant struggle. Ultimately, she rose to a position of leadership within her denomination.
Suzanne was the only one of her siblings to leave the area where she grew up, the only one to go to college, the only one to win any visible acclaim. And yet she was the black sheep of the family. Now, as she approached retirement, she was alienated from her family and did not experience much pride or satisfaction in her professional accomplishments. Throughout a lifetime of professional struggle and gain, she lived alone, could not sustain close personal relationships, and suffered recurrent bouts of depression. She was terrified of a retirement marked by loneliness and depression. Suzanne decided to enter psychotherapy to see if she could understand and change her depressive and isolating tendencies and thus anticipate a different sort of retirement. Suzanne, like many people who enter psychotherapy, was extremely successful in some realms of her life and lost and ineffective in others. Psychotherapy works to deepen self-understanding so as to increase the range of personal autonomy and effectiveness in a person’s life.
Suzanne consciously chose transactional analysis psychotherapy because she had read a number of transactional analysis books and found them sensible and somewhat helpful. She had done enough reading and talking with colleagues to know that many of transactional analysis authors and organizational leaders were women. Some had even made contributions to the feminist literature. She said she understood herself better from the reading but still could not significantly change her way of living. She chose me as her therapist because she knew I practiced transactional analysis and because she knew a couple of colleagues who had seen me for treatment. They considered their work with me successful and had recommended me to her.
After Suzanne asked what she was getting into, I responded that I did not really understand the intent of her question. She explained that she wanted to know what she could expect to accomplish and how psychotherapy might help. She wanted to be reasonably sure that she was spending her limited time and money well. She said she knew people who had really changed in psychotherapy, “but I don’t understand what psychotherapy is or how it works.” The answer did not roll out of my brain and off my tongue. I took up her question seriously and answered it as best I could. At that point in my practice, I routinely asked my clients what they needed to know about me, but it had never occurred to me that clients might have the same question about psychotherapy itself. How does it work? What am I getting myself into? I have since learned that many clients enter therapy with this question in mind but do not feel free to ask it.
This essay is my answer to the questions of how transactional analysis therapy works and what you, as a client, might be getting yourself into. Your therapist-even if she or he has a transactional analysis frame of reference-may have a different perspective. Ask. Push past the standard theoretical explanations to talk more openly with your therapist about what you each know and expect of psychotherapy, what you each know and believe about how people change. That initial discussion can lay an important foundation for the work you will do together.
Psychotherapy is a hard and exciting endeavor. It is work, rewarding work. Transactional analysis psychotherapy is a collaborative effort (“collaborate” comes from the Latin word collaborare, which means “labor together”). You and your therapist will have a working relationship, one that may be gentle and supportive at times but challenging, conflictual, and even disorganizing at others. Your therapist’s primary job is to provide you with a respectful and reliable space within which the two of you (or perhaps a group of you) can reflect, explore, and experiment with feelings, beliefs, and interpersonal behavior. Things that you may have taken for granted about yourself, life, and others will be opened to question. You will have the opportunity to examine how you relate to yourself internally and with others interpersonally. You will work with your present-day relationships, on the one hand, and look at the lingering influences of childhood relationships on the formation of your beliefs, feelings, and behavior, on the other. Your willingness to question, be questioned, reflect, challenge your beliefs, and experiment with new possibilities is at the heart of your job as a client.
In the remainder of this essay I will consider how transactional analysis psychotherapy works by addressing four areas of the therapeutic process: script formation and insight, new possibilities for feeling and thinking, skill development, and changes in neural pathways. I will return to Suzanne’s life and the work she and I did together to offer some concrete examples of how the process works.
