What do we know about ourselves?
Before I started my psychotherapy training I had thought I was quite self-aware. I have discovered that the trouble with self-awareness is that it is entirely one sided. We can only know what comes into our awareness and follow this lead.
One of the roles of the therapist is to be a mirror to our experience, to reflect back in the kindest most compassionate way the things we cannot know about ourselves.
Integrative psychotherapists bring so many theories to their work, co-creating with the client the needed conditions for healing within the relationship. There are so many theories which touch in how we know ourselves that it becomes necessary to have some front and centre to be used as an kind of organising principle, a way of giving therapist and client a shared language which will then lead to a shared understanding of experience.
There have been several theories which have been particularly influential for me. TA, attachment and development, Gestalt, polyvagal theory are usually my starting point and there are many many more to draw upon.
TA 101 is a course that anyone can do. It offers a framework for understanding ourselves. Indeed a quick google search reveals that the subtitle is often just that – understanding myself and others.
Eric Berne, who devised the theory, wanted to find a way that we could take ownership of our own healing by describing experience in ways that were easily accessible to everyone. He noticed that language was often a barrier to understanding and therefore to healing and so he used terms everyone could relate to and found a way to describe the experience of being human alongside other humans in a way that holds up a mirror to our experience and says ‘this is what I see – now what do you want’.
It is a powerful model which many theorists have gone on to develop. It is used widely in many settings from business and education, to therapy and social development. For me it’s power is in its simplicity, like all good theories it’s simple principles can be taken and applied in so many ways. Other theories can be layered on to it.
It has its critics and like all theories there is much room for development, the language could be softer, the perspective is very western cultural, some of the ideas are rooted in the time they were developed and require an update – however as a way of knowing ourselves, it is incredibly useful.
What we know about ourselves includes our experiences and how we understand them and memory plays a key role in knowing. Some of our experience though we do not remember so what happens then?We are a meaning making species, we need to tell the story of our experience in order to make sense of it. But what if we can’t remember or we simply never knew?
Most people remember very little of what happened to them before the age of five, yet we know from developmental theory that this is a crucial age where so much of our personality is formed.
A thousand things a day can happen that influence the things that will happen next and over time this becomes who we are. A baby cries and is responded to with love -over and over and over again. This baby becomes the adult who knows they are lovable, knows help will come when they need it, knows they have needs and that action can be taken to meet them.
Trauma also separates us from memory. Our clever nervous system respond to protect us from the pain but leaves us with a fundamental problem of not being able to form a narrative of what happened, this in turn prevents us from putting it in the past.
TA can be applied to all these scenarios and more as a way of understanding what has happened, of understanding why we do the thing we do or cannot make the changes we want to make. Layered together with attachment and developmental theories, TA is a powerful framework for psychotherapy.