September 26, 2019,
Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script 
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Berne, like many others studying human behaviour at the time, suggests that a childlike stance is more likely to occur in a person’s third or fourth decade of life, after the skills to ensure survival have been fully developed.
By then, you have learned from experience that your subconscious mind will take care of many operations: practicing social niceties are now a matter of habit and you know you’re socially safe. You can now enjoy special moments in life without inhibition or fear.
To maintain the autonomous state, however, requires constant vigilance as you move away from the programmed script that influenced your past behaviour patterns.
If we lived in Utopia, we wouldn’t have to learn social survival skills, but we don’t. We will always have to struggle for absolute autonomy until we achieve enough maturity to realize that we have choices about how we live, and to understand that we are always presented with new options.
In my role as a counsellor, I believe that I have a lot of power to influence my clients, both positively and negatively. I take this responsibility very seriously and know that if I do my job well, I can truly make a difference to someone else’s life. I am also very aware that I must “practice what I preach” (“walk the talk”). If I don’t, my clients will know, and they’ll see me as a fraud.
I must practice the types of behaviours, thoughts, and feelings that go with being an autonomous person. This is not just in how I work as a practitioner with my clients. It is even more important for me to apply these practices in all my relationships as well as with my family. I try to model all the behaviours, thoughts, and feelings I admire, in my professional rooms and in my everyday life, just as I encourage my clients to do in their own lives.
As a Transactional Analysis Practitioner, my ultimate aim is to live by the standards and ethics outlined by my professional organization. This requires me to take charge of my life and to accept full responsibility for all my actions, wherever I am and whomever I am with.
I feel that the final words from Berne’s Games People Play are appropriate to conclude with. After briefly stating that life is little more than a waiting game for most people, he says that:
For certain fortunate people there is something that transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity: and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy.
If I can become autonomous and help others to find autonomy for themselves, I will feel that I have done an adequate job as a person and as a therapist.
To the wonder of you,
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