Transactional Analysis Podcast

Transactional Analysis Podcast is an interview show about TA as something people use, argue with and keep revising. The conversations are between TA trainers, supervisors and practitioners, and the hosting is shared. Matt Taylor and Parul Arora co-host one conversation. James Longwell and Aaron Lam, who works in TA's education field and is based in Singapore, host another. A third pair is greeted simply as John and Josh. The show's credits list the United Kingdom Association for Transactional Analysis and the European Association for Transactional Analysis as partners, the International Transactional Analysis Association as a sponsor, and Patreon supporters. Being close to the field's own bodies has not stopped it from airing doubts about the model. The clearest example is Beatrijs Dijkman, who studied TA for ten years and now talks about hospicing it. In her view, some of what TA offered was right in the 1960s but does not answer the complicity she feels living in modernity. She describes workshops where people named concepts they would drop: cure, contracting, and perhaps ego states. Other guests extend the model instead of retiring it. Rosemary Napper treats an organisation's culture as its script, the mostly unconscious map of what actually gets followed. Her illustration is unsettling. Newcomers to one organisation begin to feel afraid after a few months, carrying the aftermath of valued colleagues being publicly removed, events nobody discusses. James Sedgwick explains contextual TA with a bag of Scrabble letters, in which inherited language quietly leaves out tiles that other people have. In that picture, some thoughts simply cannot be formed. He calls this style of therapy a kind of consciousness raising, and the talk turns to personal and socio-political influence. A panel with Beatrijs Dijkman, Layo Seriki, Liz Jackson and Valerie Cionca takes up functional fluency. It starts from a plain question, 'did I and others benefit?', and notes that the model's language has moved toward effective and less effective behaviour. The profiling that goes with it comes up as a way for an exhausted teacher, carer or parent to see where their energy is going. The episode with Linda Gillham, on technology and online counselling, is practical. It looks at how blurry counselling and psychotherapy roles become for trainees and who is responsible for keeping them clear. Across these conversations the tone is collegial and exploratory, and guests have room to think aloud and admit they do not have every answer. A listener comes away seeing TA as a live, contested practice, described by people working inside it.