Friday 6 April 2018

Transactional Analysis Theory - Psychological Trading Stamps

This blog comes from Ajit Karve, a Transformational TA Coach
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Psychological Trading Stamps

Psychological trading stamps are the currency of transactional 'rackets'. Escalated feelings of anger, hurt, guilty, scared, inadequacy constitute 'stamps'; so do feeling stupid, baffled, surprised, righteous or triumphant. Psychological trading stamps are generated by sexualising a racket feeling. Given here is Berne's list of observations concerning Psychological Trading Stamps in the Hello Book:
1. They are obtained as a by-product of legitimate transactions;
2. Each person has his favourite feeling. If another feeling is offered the person may reject it.
3. Some people go through their hurts and angers every night before going to sleep. Others do it less frequently. Still others do it when they are bored or have nothing better to do.
4. People like to show their collections to others. They talk about them to others.
5. The stores for redeeming stamps are addiction; quit a job; end a relationship or marriage or therapy; bouts of depression, being hurt or pained; landing in a mental hospital, or in a jail; and in the extreme death as punishment or by suicide.
6. Some people learn that psychological trading stamps do not come for free. One has to pay for them in terms of loneliness, insomnia, raised blood pressure, stomach ailments, and a host of other somatic ailments.
7. Persons use their favoured occupation to obtain a harvest of their favourite stamps. Some are in haste and some others are patient. They wait till they get the right person, situation or setting to obtain a yield of their favoured racket feelings to pile up their trading stamps.
8. Paranoids collect counterfeit stamps. They imagine provocations. The impatient among them collect free homicide or free suicide stamps. People with voice hallucinations manufacture trading stamps right out of their heads.
9. The best way to dispose off the collection and live a life in peace is to put them away in a drawer, like by practising forgiveness. Thereafter by being committed to living life in new ways.
10. Righteousness, triumph and joy stamps are trade-able nowhere except in fool's paradise.
In conclusion Berne speaks about the commonality between psychological trading stamps and the commercial ones. They are of no value once they are used. The people who trade them speak nostalgically about the ones they turned in. Psychological trading stamps exist as emotional memories. They remain in a continued state of agitation, or electrical potentials which go round and round in a circle of Jordan curve; they are exhausted only when they are piled up enough for discharge.
Berne suggests it is best to make psychological trading stamps shop worn.
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Jordan curve is a curve on a plane surface the ends of which join. A circle or a contorted circle, the only condition being that it has to be a plane figure.
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