TA Today: The philosophy of TA
TA's philosophical assumptions:
- People are OK.
- Everyone has the capacity to think.
- People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.
Our essences as human is different from our behaviors. That is, although at times I hardly accept what you do, your essence as human is OK. From the viewpoint of our human essence, someone is not one-up to the others. All of us have equal worth, value and dignity as people, even though we may be of different race, age, sex or religion.
And all of us have the capacity to think, except for the severely brain damage. So, we have responsibility to decide how we live. Our lives are consequences of what we decide.
When we engage in not-OK behavior, we follow the strategy which we decided in childhood, that is, "life-scripts". Although we cannot help feeling or behaving in our life-scripts by various pressures, we are responsible for our own feelings or behaviors because it is just us to decide whether to confirm to these pressures. However, we can always change our decisions that produce comfortable relations.
Based on these assumptions, TA practice adopts the two principles as below:
- Contractual method.
- Open communication.
Contractual method means that both of a practitioner and a client take part in the process of each change on equal footing. Thus each of them should share full information about what was going on in their change, because people are OK and everyone can think and decide. This is open communication.
