 Hello and welcome to MIPS TV and with me is Bob Cook from the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy. He's a psychoanalyst and he... I'm a transactionalist, Roy. I'm a transactionalist. I should have trained in psychoanalysis, that'd be much better. Alright, we'll go again. I'm not a psychoanalyst, I'm a transactionalist. I'll call you a psychiatrist. In five, four, three... Hello and welcome to MIPS TV. And today I'm with Bob Cook from the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy, who is a transactional analysis. And he'll be talking about a piece of theory in this section. If he's TA made simple, he'll be talking about a theory in transactional analysis. And we're going to be talking about four passive behaviours. Bob, what is four passive? What are these passive behaviours? What's going on? They come from a... really make a passivity model. That's the best way to look at this. Which comes from what is called the Cthexus model of transactional analysis, which is... You know, we're not a particular school which is advocated much. But this particular theory, which is used a lot by modern-day transactionalists, comes from Jackie Schiff and Mo Schiff. It's a passivity model and talks specifically about four specific passive behaviours which are linked to discounting and symbiosis, which is where I'm going to start. Okay, so let's just get the language clear here, Bob. So discounting and symbiosis. What's the shorthand there, Bob? Okay, symbiosis is where two people act as one. Right, okay. And discounting? When you're discounting yourself, others' existence and significance of solving problems. Okay, so I'm going to guess that symbiosis you may see in couples therapy where there's two people in a relationship, but one cannot separate themselves from a rather like the IV attached to the poultry. Each of them need each of them to survive, yes. Yeah, so you've got healthy symbiosis where the mother, you know, an infant. And the healthy symbiosis, when the infant is born, of course, the infant is dependent on, in transactionalist terms, the parent and adult or ego state to take care of the child's emotional and cognitive needs. Now, the unhealthy symbiosis is where the, very simply, the child doesn't grow up, the parent can keep them as an infant, or the child looks after the parent whose child is impaired as well. So either way, the two act as one, just as you said. And it's replays, just as you said, in couples therapy, particularly, where the two people find it difficult to separate out. Its genesis, though, comes from the early relationship with the mother and the child. Oh, how interesting. So effectively, these kind of behaviors can be kind of stored up from early childhood and replay in later behaviors. Yeah, and so basically, let's just talk about these four passive behaviors, and then I'm going to talk about how the unconscious motivation is to enact the symbiosis. Just hold on for the moment. I'm going to give them first of all. The first one, passive behavior, doing nothing. So the client that comes into your room, and instead of coming from an adult place in the here and now, and demonstrating their thinking or behaving in a here and now position, they do nothing. In other words, they're thinking, they block their thinking, there's no problem solving, there's no move to proactivity, and really the actual, how can I explain this to you? The real seduction is for you to do the thinking and feeling for them, that the client passively just sits there and waits for you as the metaphoric parent to complete the transaction and take care of them and do the thinking and feeling for them. Yes. So that may look in the therapy room where the client looks for lonely at you in the hope that your words of wisdom will spur them into a happier existence. Correct. So you're doing the thinking and feeling for them, just as they wanted their original mother to do that. Next one, and no particular linear order here, I'm just going through, is over-adaptation. So that'd be over-adaptation to what they think the other either therapist wants or needs. Okay, so they will start to over-adapt, please you, try hard, being strong, hoeing up, making cups of tea or whatever it is they think that you need. Rather than meeting their own goals. Yes. Yes, so that could be atlantic maybe in gifts or anything. Or come in and say, oh, you know, last week you told me to do this and I've done that. Yeah, that's right, you know. So in real life it might be the client does, you know, they want to go out shopping, but the wife says to them, oh, look, I really think it's important to mow the lawn today. So the partner gets up and mows the lawn rather than following their own goal. They over-adapt without thinking or feeling, they just over-adapt.