In the therapy room, shame – which we often hide, almost at any cost – frequently hinders progress. Clients sometimes conceal aspects of their behaviour they fear are shameful, such as viewing pornography, taking class A drugs, or losing their temper. This is because it is perhaps one of the most intense and complex feelings…
After many years of hard work, when life was finally falling into place, does it feel like everything is suddenly changing? That you’re blinking into a life transition you neither asked for nor saw coming? In this article we’ll be discussing life transitions: how they can challenge us at a deep and even existential level,…
Having a growth mindset is a term from the business world, referring to an individual who believes that their success in a particular field is contingent on working hard, forward planning and being able to receive and implement constructive feedback from others. While it is a term that is regularly used in business, and undoubtedly…
Transactional Analysis (TA) is a widely recognised form of modern counselling and psychotherapy, originally conceived by Eric Berne in the 1950’s and which is now used not only in therapy but also in education and organisational training and consultancy. It is a theory of personality, behaviour and communication, and draws on tools and methodology from…
We all use the word ‘personality’ in everyday language. We might use it to describe how we experience another person (“She has a nice personality.”) We use it to describe elements of how a person may behave, in the case of personality traits. And sometimes we use it interchangeably with the word ‘character’ to describe…
An introduction Hello. I’m Alice Ayres. Up until now on this blog, it’s always been the therapists speaking. This is the first of a series of blog posts in which I will be presenting a view from the other chair, the view of the client. I hope it will be useful to those considering or…
Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis (TA) described it as ‘a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth and change’. In Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy, we adopt the philosophical principles that: – People are fundamentally OK, even if they sometimes behave in not-OK ways; – Everyone (with rare exceptions) has the capacity to…