How TA can solve the problem: 'I'm not getting what I want. I have no idea what to do'

'I'm not getting what I want. I have no idea what to do.'

In NLP there's this theory called 'transactional analysis'*, or TA, which is in essence about good communication and how to be flexible with communication. At first it sounded like hot air to me, but it's not.

You have three states: child, adult, and parent. For simplicity, I'll focus on the first two for now.

CHILD

'Children' don't care about the rules. In a social situation they're free to be creative. They'll make jokes. They won't worry about what they should do or how they're perceived. But they also can get stuck without guidelines, or can sometimes be hurtful, or neglectful of consequences.

'I'm not getting what I want. I have no idea what to do,' is a child's problem. A lot of sadness is about being in a child state. Say Joe wants somebody romantically, but the feelings aren't reciprocated. In a child state Joe will mentally stomp his feet and sulk. 'It's not fair! I don't know what to do.'

Being in a child state is about acting on impluses, which is great for the fast thinking needed to be funny or creative, or even just having good ideas on what we want to do, but when those impluses aren't sated, the child doesn't know what to do.

ADULTS

'Adults' ask themselves who, what, when, where and how. If Joe was in an adult state about his unrequited love, he might ask himself, 'what can I do about this problem?' 'How can I move past this?' Or a really adult question, 'Am I interested in her enough to change who I am to be more in line with what she's looking for? Or would I rather stay as I am and find somebody else?'

An adult state is great for keeping level. It's the exact oppose of the child state in many ways. An adult looks for good guidelines. However, as a consequence, being an adult doesn't lend itself to being entertaining or spontaneous. This is its weakness.

HOW TO USE THE THEORY

When thinking about psychology profiling people want to know which thing on the list they are. TA isn't like that. We all shift between the three states all the time. The skill is in knowing when to shift and problems arise for us when we don't shift optimally.

Child and adult compliment each others strengths. If we go into a situation in a child state, we can perform highly. When something goes wrong and we don't get what we want, however, rather than get stuck we can shift to an adult state.

IMPLIMENTING THE THEORY

Knowing about the states explicitly is enough to start making progress.

We can know when we go into the situation, we shouldn't, as many of us do, be looking for the guidelines, or the rules of the social situation.

Have you ever done that thing we all do at times where you're with people and you're just not as funny as you know you can be and its because you're trying to work out, sometimes not explicitly, 'would this be funny to them?' Or 'oh, they keep joking about X, is that what I have to make jokes about?'

This is the time to be in a child state. Abandon the rules and go with your impulses on what's funny. You can help yourself get into this state by noticing when you're caring about finding 'the rules' when you shouldn't be and asking yourself 'who's making this important to me?' The answer will always be you, it can't be another answer.

If you just used the child state, however, of course if something goes wrong -- maybe you offend somebody or you're not getting any laughs -- in a child state you will panic and go back to 'I'm not getting what I want, what should I do?' Instead, shift to being an adult. Again, adults ask questions. 'How can I help them not be offended?' 'What do they need?' and so on.

It'll take practice.

*TA comes from psychology, but I think NLP deserves all the credit for seeing the utility of the theory.