 Hello and welcome to TA MedSimple with psychotherapist Bob Cook and Bob Cook he's got talent for explaining the elements of transactional analysis in very straightforward terms it's great if you're a student of TA you can watch this and you can get some free learning free information maybe help you with assignments maybe help you with your practice and we're going to look at something that we're going to resurrect something today aren't we Bob it's not really talks about that much ego grams the work of Jack the say am I right it's just say and around 1972 and off camera you were telling me that you talked about ego grams and had to do ego grams or a new trade but now it's almost kind of non-existent non-existent why do you think that is Bob well I think primarily because of the rise of relational transaction analysis rise the rise of integrated transaction analysis move away from behavioral diagnosis which eager states really are they don't really figure in relational transaction analysis and bit like you know when you use some of the diagnostic models out of TA say like core 9 core 10 a lot of the computer behavioral stuff but I think it just got lost because of the rise of relational TA and different forms of TA that the behavioral diagnosis of eager states which is what it is which I want to talk about in a minute disappeared from the literature and I think quite quickly because I did for every client I did an eager ground which I'm going to explain in a minute but by that's 1985 I started by 1990 1991 I think they sort of disappeared 2019 now isn't it I don't I bet if you asked any of them to modern TA therapist younger TA they wouldn't even probably know talk about him because so useful yeah it's interesting as there's a couple of things that the first is is that of course TA and was almost a cognitive behavioral model the way that burn practiced it and have videos in this playlist watch this on the playlist to have a look all the videos and of course burn died I think in 1970 so been very very close to the original burning idea and then of course the arc of times common has been different schools and the relational relational TA isn't a particularly a school if I'm correct it's a more of a kind of yeah yeah so I know about you go go because I was taught it in my purse yeah it added my person said the course in 2000 and the first year I was introduced to the ego grams we have to do each other's ego grams great fun and he was very very quickly could find out about a your perception of yourself and other people's perception of you I do them in all my 101s which is the introduction we first introduction causing to TA ones that I've been doing this in 1986 and you're quite right yeah yeah think about Jack you say who I think is dead now he was a great friend of Eric Burns and he was an Eric Burns in a circle and he he every Tuesday night from 1961 to you know a burns death went to open seminars seven o'clock to nine o'clock calm else on Francisco and I'm sure the idea of eager go came out of the late 60s behavioral school just like you just said where where you know certainly adult was the key and contracts for the key and the behavioral part of transaction answers was very popular and this is a behavioral technique so you quite astute and picking that up definitely definitely there's there's no talk of the use of the relationship or no talk about past and present is very focused on the distribution of energy across the different functional eager states so let's just start off though so before I came to a therapist I wanted to be a narrative therapist and a native therapist is basically helping people tell their stories of their lives and rewrite a different story now through my life as a TA therapist I learned about scripts and the idea that we actually you know devise our own life plan which you could call life story if you can help a person develop their life plan or life story you can help them develop their own different stories so it's quite akin to what I passionately wanted to do and I used these eager grams to help clients in their first session tell their story and review them every six months and looked at how they the goals they wanted to change so very simply thank you say worked on the principle of what he called the constancy hypothesis as a word for you constancy hypothesis to juggle it isn't it Bob and it's basically the idea that in our psychological psychological energetic system basically our thoughts and our feelings come from energy so if we look at where our energy is distributed in the five eager states and this is a functional model the adaptive child free child and adult nurture child controlling panned and we ask the person right do a bar graph yeah of how much energy you have or you think that you store and use up from that part of yourself the idea was that we only have a fix say a fixed or finite part of energy within our psychological organs or systems and therefore if you take the energy out of one part of yourself you can distribute it into another part of yourself so what you often found were clients and you described this in a bar graph and you said right okay how how do you see yourself and distribution of energy across the different parts of yourself they would probably for a lot of energy into their critical parent yeah very little energy in a nurturing part of themselves very little energy in the spontaneous free parts themselves but a lot of energy in the adaptive side yourself and you could develop a story from that how their energy was distributed in the different parts of themselves and then you'd ask them to draw an ego gram of how they would like their energy distributed and invariably they they they would say well I'd like a lot less energy in my critical parents of myself much more energy in self care and nurturing myself more spontaneity and less adaptive yeah and then you say well what would need to happen to get to those achieve goals so I found that very useful in terms of a narrative of the story and for them to understand and it's a really fundamental light changing pivotal understanding if they can get to understand that they can actually choose to move their energy from one part of themselves to another yeah so they can choose to change stop their own critical thoughts against themselves and move it into energetic nurturing of the self yeah it's as you're telling me this Bob I'm taking back oh 12 no 20 years ago when I did my very first introduction to counselling and one of my teachers she put five chairs rather like the number the five dots on the dice one in the middle and through each corner yeah I volunteered to sit in the middle and having been told the functional model of the transactional analysis ego starts I was a thrust and to show where I was each part of the day and I'd say yeah it was really honestly it was really good exercise so I said well yeah I was I was you know I got someone called me up in the car so I sat in the critical parent and I wagging my finger and and then and then I went into the free child when I was by my luncheon and I went back and forth and back and forward and I moved across and at the end she said it's interesting isn't it did you notice that you didn't actually sit in the nurturing parent chair yeah yeah and I also remember me saying that I forgot my coat that day and it was raining and she says it's interesting when you said that you're in you're in the adapted child chair yeah you didn't think of sitting in the nurturing chair and saying I really must bring a coat when it rains and what an awareness and you do that through the eagrams and hopefully get to the point and just repeat again because it's so important the idea which I suspect you got to that actually you can change energy from one part of yourself to another part yes so you change the critical energy or decrease it and put into self-care and remember to bring the Mac next time you come that's it that's it you know it's a bit like having a kind of intelligent four-wheel drive system for your car isn't it where you can put the wheels in any energy configuration to help you where you need to be at that time yeah and one of my first clients in 1986 or did an ego growing he he and I always remember this because I don't know if I thought about it much myself so this is why I remember this he he was a revolution it was a revolutionary thought to him that you could organize your own psychological structure yeah in other words he believed that you just did things reactively and everything happened to him but to actually take on board that you could structure your organizational thoughts from different parts of yourself so that you could behave in different ways changed his life yes seriously changed because he started to do things from different parts of himself his self-esteem his self-care the decrease of his critical for introjects his more energy in his spontaneity less adaptation and being perfect or antisocial they all changed really yeah fundamentally yeah he gave him the gear about the more talk about I'm gonna start using again yeah fundamentally useful I'm just hearing you talk about it I'm surprised that they fallen out of favor because when you when you explained it didn't really feel like a behavioral intervention it felt like a it felt like a kind of relational intervention where you could kind of say hey you know you know you have got this psychological gear stick where you can literally put your your drive into different gears for different things right and people forget about the word relationship the word relationship or relational therapy have you want to describe it it's about the use of the relationships so all these techniques I've been talking about contracting or whatever it is we've been talking about in TA made simple videos if you use them within the relationship they cease to be techniques yes they become part of a relational dimension yes you're absolutely right you're right as you talk you're right you can you could you see if it differs as a technique is if you said go home then and come back and da da da if you the relational would be let's do it together yeah yeah yeah and you use ego games relationally yeah without this whole idea you know they go off and do themselves or and it does become a technique then but you could use it basically like of the way I'm talking to you yes but they are so pivotal because they write it down and they then see on the second ego grab oh I could change my energy from there to there and this will change my life yes that is pivotal absolutely well I mean there we go so I can feel that certainly in the Bob Cook therapeutic engagement there's gonna be a resurrection I mean the grams and I know you teach so maybe you could encourage your students to use them relationally they sound mighty powerful and really useful and one of the things that strikes me is that they really give control to the client they give yes the gear stick of their psyche into the hand of the client they could shift those gears around and you know where they need it absolutely Roy and a wonderful tool eager grams Jack just say in any of the TA books like TA made simple sorry TA today by in Stuart yeah books all the book reviews any of they will talk about eager grams and just just do what just for the readers get a dice just like Roy talked about and just say right okay let's put you in different chairs and do the same sort of exercise and actually you would be doing a great favor yeah you could do it you could even do it at home if you watch it you stand in the middle and then you don't think of you could put bits of paper on the floor and the parent free child adapted child and then just think of how you how where you were in your day walk to those and just see which one you walk to the most and crucially as in my case which one you didn't walk to at all that's the bit yeah that's the bit that's the denial out of your awareness what you didn't that's absolutely correct yeah yeah it'll change yeah yeah so there we go well that's that's really good I'm sure that in households throughout the country there's going to be a piece of paper on the floor and people people do not like some kind of free dance experiments but it's if you're a teacher you watching this great lesson I listen I used to teach and the awareness that learners used to come away with was just amazing as they went through maybe part of the day accessing the different ego states just walking from one piece of paper to the other so as always Bob cut we thank you for your wisdom and I'm sure there'll be a few teachers jotted a quick lesson plan down there watching this so you welcome yeah you are it's great great and we'll catch you in the next one what's the next one going to be Bob what's the next I don't know I was thinking about the other day I know that Stephanie you appeared on one last week yeah I think Cartman triangle yeah yeah by the way I was looking on the she's had a hundred and twenty views within one week of that of that yeah it's simple she said she'd like to talk about how she used TA techniques in the first session of a meeting yeah right incorporated to talk about when a person walks in the door of what what what a TA therapist would look for and I know with Steph she's got some very interesting ideas yeah yeah absolutely we'll look forward to that so it's bye for me and I guess goodbye for Bob