An Examination of Parental Alienation through Transactional Analysis

This post will probably only be interesting to alienated parents or people who enjoy psychology.

In 1964 Psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote “Games People Play” to introduce his theory of Transactional Analysis about the dynamics of human relationships.

I am not trained in psychology but I was fascinated by its potential to illustrate how the normal pathways of communication between a father/mother and son/daughter relationship can often be disrupted or reversed in cases of parental alienation, causing harm to both…

I couldn’t find a desription of PA with this so I wrote my own little “paper” to convey my attempt at describing PA pathways of communication through this established method. My apologies if its already been covered.

Until I work out how to insert diagrams in here, if you are interested just click on my PDF version here transactional-pa

….In cases of PA, the Alienating Parent (AP) allows the alienated child (AC) to ostensibly make their own decisions on such important parental matters as amount of contact with the other (target) parent (TP). By empowering the child in this way, the AP validates in the child’s mind that they have been granted an adult role which raises their main ego state of communication from child to adult and undermines the TP’s role as a Parent…..

If you have any thoughts on this attempt to illustrate please add a comment.