 Hello and welcome to Book Review 19 on MIP TV, where Bob Cook from Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy reviews his favourite books and have a look at the playlist, because we've got just loads and loads of interviews where Bob talks about his book. But this one is quite an interesting book, changing lives to Redecision Therapy. So I'm guessing Bob, and cut me if I'm wrong, this may be the Redecision School in CAA. Absolutely, congratulations. You passed the TA test, that's correct. Great. So what? Yeah, so a specific school in the arc of the development of transactional analysis. So tell us a little bit about this book and share a little bit about the insights it gives into this School of Therapy. Okay, I was coming back, I can't remember from San Francisco about five or six years ago, and the person said to me, what do you do for a life? I said I was a psychotherapist and a transactionalist. He said, oh yes, transaction analysis, I know, that's about Eric Byrne. I said yes, and you know, we're now in 2006 or whatever it was, it's evolved a lot, and I was talking about the different approaches. And then I was talking about the Redecision approach by Bob and Mary Goulding, which really started to take its own wonderful format after Eric Byrne died in 1971 to 2000, 2002, 2003, and really became a real central school, if you like. And the person next to say, that's really interesting. So as you charted all these different approaches, what makes up a TA therapist then? So I said, look, a person who thinks of transactional analysis proper, that's, you know, a theory of communication, eager states, games and scripts, then you can call yourself a TA therapist and all the other approaches are simply styles. So this is a style or an approach which has evolved from 1971 to about 2002, 2003. And it was called the Redecision approach. It still is, of course, even though the founders are dead, of Robert and Mary Goulding. It was a very popular approach, if you want to put it that way. Basically, it's about the idea that, you know, people really make changes in their lives from the child eager state, and that you need to work with the child eager state because that's where the original decision, which are so often, was the aspect of the personality, which sabotage their own process, where they got stuck in, where they couldn't solve their problems from because they were actually living and coming from this young, more regressed place. So Mary and their ideas was that you need to go back in time, find out the decision which is so limiting to your script and your changes today, and then make a new redecision so that you can take ownership of your own life and change in the adult or present time. So it's working specifically with the unconscious and child eager state. Yeah, and it also sounds like it's working very much with scripts and the scripts that people make in childhood. I know we've just discussed another book where the theorist said that, you know, the script is developed through an arc of time, not just in childhood. And that's the kind of hallmark of this particular school, isn't it? What they're saying is that the initial decision is made in childhood subconsciously, and then it's developed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a real hallmark. And with this book, what happens is you're completely correct, you really are, is the, Bob and Mary Goulding would say that you need to look at injunctions, counter injunctions, and the early decisions, and then make new redecisions. And the method for doing that was through going back into time to an earlier time you made those decisions, and through two-chair technique or simply playing or well-playing with different parts of yourself, you make new decisions, which you can integrate into your more mature part. And then hunky-dory. There we go. We take destiny of your own script. Well, there we go. You take your life in your old hands and write your own part in the world's play, as Shakespeare might say. I just want to pick up on something you said about two-chair work. A lot of people listening to this may very well say, isn't that a gishtel? Isn't that a gishtel idea, two-chair, empty-chair work? How does that play out in TA in this particular modality, if you like, or thinking? Okay. Fritz Perls stole the idea of two-chair technique from Merino. Merino was the psychoanalyst that started up the whole idea of psychodrama. And he used the idea of playing out or, yeah, playing out the different conflicts of the different side of yourself in actual drama, which sometimes is called psychodrama, sometimes sculpturing. And he used the method of two-chairs to actually play those two conflicts out. Now, you know, Fritz, when he came along, that's the originator of gishtel psychotherapy, he used those ideas from Merino and used the same ideas to enable people to actually play out the different conflicts of the self. And he called the two positions top dog or lower dog, and they became synonymous with gishtel psychotherapy. But like everything else, there's no original thought. Well, perhaps there's a bit, but the ideas were taken from Merino in terms of the methodology of those two chairs. Yeah. And what would happen is the client would be encouraged to speak to maybe an earlier self or... Yeah, a different part of the self. Yeah, yeah. So the hopeless self or the, you know, the compliant self or the rebellious self versus the more powerful self, which might represent different conflicts of the self, or even may represent the internalized parent talking to the compliant child in TA terms. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting, and this is what I love about these book reviews, Bob, is that you really kind of expand on the theory. You know, we've heard about scripts. We've already know that there's one school that thinks that this particular school thinks scripts developed strongly in childhood, got another school that thinks it developed over, but also about that re-decision about getting clients to read, rewrite their scripts. In other words, their character's in a play, but they are the directors and the scriptwriters of that play. That's right. Yeah. What a wonderful way to put it, Rory. I really like that. Yes. It's the only way I can understand it, Bob. Yeah, they are responsible for their own direction of their film, and therefore they can change that, and they're the people that really alter their destiny. So this book really outlines this particular idea within TA this style, as you discussed earlier, and useful for who. Who'd benefit from reading this, Bob? Students again, of course, in Transaction Analysis are great for people who want to know the early development again of Transaction Analysis. People want to know the development away from Eric Burns Classical School. People are interested in how people make changes in their own conscious, and it's a wonderful historical document of the early parts of Transaction Analysis in terms of evolution, of course. But the ideas making change from the unconscious is such a novel idea in terms of that you can be like a director in your own film, and you can make new decisions, and you can put them into practice. So for the student in particular, for the historians of Transaction Analysis, and people who want to think about how change really happens? Well, as always, just really rich information here, and for anybody watching, I just think it's brilliant to have so much in this short interaction we've had. As always, this isn't a paid book review. Bob's not getting paid for this, and neither am I as a book review. Bob just does this for the fun of it. We have to say that on YouTube now because of the way YouTube works. My free child has really, really gone wild. Yes, indeed. Yes, the free child of YouTube. Yes. So we're going to put a link in the description below. So if you want to inspect this book, click on it, and also in the outro, we'll put a graphic up so you can see what the book looks like, and also a description just to remind you. But as always, Bob Cook, thank you so much for giving the time and sharing this wonderful book. Thank you very much, Roy.