"I define creativity as ‘having an insight which enlarges understanding" By this I mean we are able to see something that we could not envisage before.  There is also a link with problem solving, as this is often the stimulus to creative thinking.  The problem itself may be a direct one, as when a process fails to produce the required outputs.  It may also be indirect, such as the ‘problem’ a customer has when no suitable product or service exists yet to satisfy their particular need.” (Hay, 1992, p. 184). 

In that book, I went on to describe how ego states can be a useful framework for understanding the psychological aspects of creativity and the behavioural elements of brainstorming.  I used a simplification of Parent, Adult and Child, implying a mix of internal and behavioural:
​

• A Child ego state system that contains our creativity, along with our other natural responses to the world and to other people.
• An Adult ego state system that contains our ability to process information, think logically and solve problems, and therefore enables us to be competent.
• A Parent ego state system that contains the ‘messages’ and opinions which are significant in our lives, and which seeks to ensure that we adopt solutions that conform.

Among other things, our Child ego state is curious and creative.  Unfortunately, many of us experience curbs on our creativity and curiosity, perhaps to keep us safe but maybe also to keep things safe from us! Or perhaps our caregivers are busy or neglectful.  We may come to associate creativity with danger, pain, chastisement – and because we have a deep need for love and approval we may stop doing things that displease the grown-ups. Instead, we ‘learn’ the ‘right’ way to do things.  At school, more of this teaching takes place, as we discover what low marks we get if we make up our own answers to the teacher’s questions instead of quoting from the textbook.  By the time we are adults, we may have pushed much of our original creativity underground.  We display to the world our Adapted Child more often than we show our Natural Child and may have forgotten that we ever had much creative ability.

Reinforcing the learning and adaptation process of our Child ego state is our Parent ego state.   If we were encouraged to be creative, we will also be comfortable about our own creativity. However, if we were laughed at when we wore a pan as a hat, we are likely to laugh in the same way when we see a child doing as we used to.  If we were told our ideas were impractical, we will tell others why their ideas are impractical.  Thus, the implicit messages about creativity being stupid or a waste of time are passed on through generations.  Internally, we may react negatively to ourselves at the first sign of any creativity. When we replay Parent in this way, we may also stimulate a corresponding replay of a recording in Child so that we feel discomfort that is related to the past.  This feeling can be re-experienced powerfully enough in the present to stop us being creative even though other people are encouraging us to put forward ideas.

Our mediator between our own Parent and Child ego states is our Adult ego state.  With luck, this ego state also filters the effects of other people so that we have some protection from their conditioning.  When in Adult ego state, we think.  We identify problems, recognise the need to find a solution, consider the advantages and disadvantages of various options, review the implications, weigh the probabilities of success, and make decisions.  We may do this in fractions of a second or it may be a process that extends over days as we keep coming back to the problem. Our input includes data from our Parent, which has stored away our experiences of how such matters were tackled in the past.  This ego state will provide us with options that we recall being used successfully on previous occasions.  It will be up to our Adult to analyse whether the current situation is similar enough to the past to make an option relevant.

Our Adult may also have to deal with feelings of discomfort if being creative led to unpleasant experiences in the past.  It will also have to sift through any ideas we do have to check which ones could be implemented without too many problems.  It is as if Adult takes the raw material from Child ego state, imagines what would happen if the various ideas were pursued, and then develops practicable options.
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In practice, Adult is likely to arrive at solutions that are a mix of Child creativity and Parent experience.  Provided we are not too cluttered with negative messages, our Child can see totally new ways of doing things.  Provided we are not too set in our ways, our Parent sees the implications of the new idea based on what happened in similar situations in the past.  Adult synthesises the two sets of inputs and adds any relevant external data, such as information and opinions from other people, before making the final selection of a course of action.
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In my next blog I will write some more about how this approach to creativity also help us with brainstorming.
​

References

Hay, Julie (1992) Transactional Analysis for Trainers Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill (currently published as 2nd edition, 2009, Hertford: Sherwood Publishing)​

​© 2018 Julie Hay​
 
​Julie is a fan of open access publishing so feel free to reproduce any of these blogs as long as you still attribute it to her.

Based on an adaptation of the practical problem-solving technique from Synectics (see Nolan, 1981) I developed the concept of solution stroking.

The problem solving technique involves:

1. listening to the problem owner headline their problem, the background to it, solutions already thought of and/or tried, their ability to take action, and their ideal, even fantasy, solution;
2. brainstorming (in TA terms, Natural Child behaviour with Parent and Adult ego states banned by a Controlling Parent facilitator);
3. one person at a time offers a practical suggestion related to the problem-owner’s chosen direction;
4. the problem-owner responds to each suggestion by paraphrasing, stating at least three reasons why they like the idea (even if this is hard for them to do), and indicating any problem with the idea, worded as a direction, to which others must then address any further ideas;
5. a final step in which the problem-owner confirms they have a workable solution that they will implement – and the process really does lead to such an outcome.

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The process works because:
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• there are several brains working on the problem;
• the ego states are balanced (Child being creative, Adult focused on the here-and-now, Parent opinions being limited by the process);
• the process severely limits discounting;
• there are enhanced levels of stroking through:
  • listening and interacting with the problem-owner;
  • the 3+ points given for each suggestion;
  • hearing the action statement and seeing the genuine appreciation of the problem-owner.

I took the stroking aspects, which I named solution stroking, to create a way to respond whenever offered an idea, particularly an unsolicited one – listen, paraphrase, identify one benefit or positive aspect of the idea, and promise to think about it.

Such a positive response will encourage the idea-giver to continue to be creative and offer you suggestions. Sometimes we might want to add a comment about why the idea will not work, but if we do this as a direction for another idea, we may well find the idea-giver has a solution for that too.

Example

[Paraphrase] So you are suggesting that I present my ideas at the next conference. [Plus Point] I like that idea because it would get my ideas across to a lot of people at once. [Optional – Direction] How can I be sure that the conference organisers will allow me to speak? [I will think about your idea] I will see what can be arranged.

With the optional direction included, the idea-giver might add:

I can recommend you to the organisers. OR  I happen to know they need more speakers.  OR . . . .
​

In Hay (1992) I introduced the notion of internal ego states and used this idea to explain NOICISED, under a heading of Ego States and Decision Making.  I explained that NOICISED was a word I had invented on the basis that it is DECISION spelled backwards. I wrote that I linked together thinking, problem solving and decision making because these separate elements are so often generated as part of the process containing all three. Decision making involves selecting the course of action from alternatives (including doing nothing is a course of action). The stimulus for making the decision is generally the fact that we have a problem to solve. Making our selection requires us to think, so the better we understand our thinking processes the more scope we have to improve our decision-making. This is more likely to happen if we use a structured approach that involves all of our internal ego states.

​That simple approach that I recommended was:

In 1999 (Hay, 1999) I linked NOICISED to the ego states in terms of the 3 Es - Experience, Emotion and Evaluation. I explained that these were simplifications of the three principal parts of personality as defined within transactional analysis. Experience related to Parent, originally copied as we grew up from the parental figures around us; Emotion related to Child, which is our store of our own responses to the world; and Evaluation related to Adult, which is the part of us that processes what is going on in the present moment.

References

Hay, Julie (1992) Transactional Analysis for Trainers Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill (currently published as second edition, 2009, Hertford: Sherwood Publishing)

Hay, Julie (1999) NOICISED and Decision Making INTAND Newsletter 7:4 7-9

​© 2018 Julie Hay​
 
​Julie is a fan of open access publishing so feel free to reproduce any of these blogs as long as you still attribute it to her.

Rather than write a normal review, below are various comments and quotes from this very interesting book.

I have looked up and added references because these were not given by the author, who mentioned author names only. (Page numbers below refer to paperback published in Great Britain 2010)

Ratey, John J & Hagerman, Eric (2008) Spark London: Quercus

The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolve in concert with motor functions allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we are not moving, there’s no real need to learn anything.” (p.53)

“the brain activity caused by exercise generates molecular by-products that can damage cells, but under normal circumstances, repair mechanisms leave cells hardier for future challenges. Neurons get broken down and built up just like muscles – stressing them makes them more resilient.” (p.60)

“… stress seems to have an effect on the brain similar to that of vaccines on the immune system. In limited doses, it causes brain cells to overcompensate and thus gird themselves against future demands. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon stress inoculation… Assuming that the stress is not too severe and that the neurons are given time to recover, the connections become stronger and our mental machinery works better. Stress is not a matter of good and bad – it’s a matter of necessity.” (p.61) (italics in original)

“humans are unique among animals in that the danger doesn’t have to be clear and present to elicit a response – we can anticipate it; we can remember it; we can conceptualize it.… There is an important flipside… we can literally run ourselves out of [stress]… we can alter our mental state by physically  moving…” (p.63)

People with ADHD “have to get stressed to focus… it’s only when stress unleashes norepinephrine and dopamine, that they can sit down and do the work. The need for stress also explains why ADHD patients sometimes seem to shoot themselves in the foot. When everything is going well, they need to stir up the situation, and they subconsciously find a way to create a crisis.” (p.65)

“… Cortisol isn’t simply good or bad. Little helps wire in memories; too much suppresses them; and an overload can actually erode the connections between neurons and destroy memories.” (p 67)

“Palaeolithic men had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.” (p.69)

Helen Mayberg “inserted an electrode into the subgenual cortex in half a dozen severely depressed patients, for whom every other form of medical treatment had failed.… All six patients spontaneously described sensations such as a “disappearance of the void” right there on the operating table, the second the electrodes were switched on. Four of them eventually achieved full remission.” (p133)

“anti-depressants seem to work through a bottom-up chain of events… [They] relieve the physical effects first – we feel more energetic before we feel less sad.… With cognitive behavioral therapy and psychotherapy, we feel better about ourselves before we feel better physically.… The beauty of exercise is that it attacks the problem from both directions at the same time.” (p.134-135)

“… the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for inhibiting impulses, doesn’t develop fully until we are in our early twenties.” (p.158)

“… effects of exercise in ADHD kids… in boys, rigorous exercise improved their ability to stare straight ahead and stick out their tongue, for example, indicating better motor reflex inhibition… Girls didn’t show this improvement… [for] another measure related to the sensitivity of dopamine synapses… Boys fared better after maximal exercise and girls after submaximal exercise…” (p.159)

[Addiction] “Exercise builds synaptic detours around the well-worn connections automatically looking for the next fix.” (p.169)

Olds & Milner found that a rat would return to a corner to be stimulated with an electric shock even when food was placed in a different corner. The rat also learned to push the lever to give itself electric shocks, which it did until the power was switched off, after which it fell asleep. (p.170)

“for the developing substance abuser, the overload of dopamine has tricked the brain into thinking that paying attention to the drug as a matter of life or death.” (P.171)

Once a reward has the brain’s attention the scenario and sensation are remembered and the synaptic connections get triggered – in addiction, the brain has learned something too well – we have a habit. (p. 172)

Gene-Jack Wang quoted “In the Chinese language, a subject is an animal, and an object is a vegetable… You cannot ask a vegetable to jump from here to there. If you don’t move, you are not an animal any more – you become a vegetable!” (p.175 in Ratey & Hagerman)

“A groundbreaking study in 1990 revealed, for instance, that a lot of alcoholics have a gene variation (the D2R2 allele) that robs the reward centre of dopamine receptors, lowering levels of the neurotransmitter. Presence of the D2R2 allele doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up as an addict, but it’s more likely.… Results tell of similar story with gamblers and the morbidly obese… If the reward centre isn’t receiving enough input, your genetically predisposed to be constantly craving, relentlessly searching for a way to compensate for the deficit.… The amygdala gets involved because it thinks survival is at risk… (p. 176)

“… Fits in high-risk sports like skydiving, display less inhibition and more thrill-seeking behaviour than, say, rowers… Many skydivers don’t experience pleasure from typical daily life. Both skydivers and addicts have a higher-than-normal threshold for excitement… Other research shows that drugs… Damage D2 receptors… The more drugs you take the more drugs you’ll need to feel the same rush.” (p.177)

“… neurotransmitters anandamide and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) … Marijuana, exercise, and chocolate all activate the same receptors in the brain.” (p.183)

“… Both exercise and abstinence from alcohol not only stop the damage but also reverse it – increasing neurogenesis and thus regrowing the hippocampus of adult rats.… A group of Australian researchers… measured the effect of a two-month exercise program… [found that] behaviour related to self-regulation took a turn for the better.… [the students] increased “their visits to the gym… smoked less, drank less caffeine and alcohol, ate more healthy food and less junk food, curbed impulse spending and overspending, and lost their tempers less often. They procrastinated less and kept more appointments. And, they didn’t leave the dishes in the sink – at least not as often.” (p.188)

PMS – in another study it was found that women with PMS had an impaired ability to ‘trap’ tryptophan in the prefrontal cortex so that less serotonin was produced, and those with this depletion had an increased tendency towards aggressiveness. (p.194-195)

Catherine Monk “… found that when pregnant mothers with clinical anxiety are asked to participate in a stressful event, such as making a short speech in front of the group, their fetuses’ heart rates are overactive and don’t calm down as quickly as fetuses of mothers without clinical anxiety.” (p.199)

James Clapp found that babies from a group of mothers who exercise during pregnancy were more responsive to stimuli and better able to call themselves following a disturbance. He theorised that physical activity jostles the baby in the womb, and he found statistically significant differences in IQ and oral language skills at five years of age. (p.201)

Similar results are found in rat pups, who had fewer neurons in the hippocampus at birth but had 40% more after six weeks than those born of rat mothers who did not exercise. (p.202)

However, Brian Christie found that brain damage in rats born to mothers who had consumed ethanol could be reversed after birth through exercise. (p.203)

“in the brain, when neurons get worn down from cellular stress, synapses erode, which eventually severs the connections.… the brain is designed to compensate by rerouting information around dead patches in the network and recruiting other areas to help with trafficking.… we’re talking about one hundred billion neurons, each of which might have up to one hundred thousand inputs. It’s a very social network that thrives on making new connections and, as I’ve mentioned, is constantly rewiring itself and adapting – provided there is enough stimulation to spur the growth of new connections.” (p.222)

“The intensity level of strength training seems to affect results, in that moderate weights have been shown to have a more positive impact than heavy weights, at least in a small group of older women. Other research has shown that high-intensity strength training actually increases anxiety levels in both men and women.” (p.259)

Ekkekakis has researched the relationship between exercise intensity and discomfort. “… He has found that once they cross the line [from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism] almost everyone reports negative feelings on psychological tests and high ratings on scales of perceived exertion. It’s your brain putting you on alert that there is an emergency. The point is, if you feel lousy even at lower intensity level, don’t take on interval training in the early stages of your new routine.” (p.260)

References

Acevedo, Edmund, Ekkekakis, Panteleimon, (2006) Psychobiology of Physical Activity Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers

Christie, Brian R., Redila, Van, Swann, Sarah E., Olson, Andrea K., Mohades, Gisou, Webber, Alina J., Weinberg, Joanne (2006), Hippocampal cell proliferation is reduced following prenatal ethanol exposure but can be rescued with voluntary exercise Hypocampus 16:3 305-311 https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.20164

Clapp, James (2002) Exercising Through Your Pregnancy Omaha, NE: Addicus Books Inc

Mayberg, Helen S. Lozano, Andres M., Voon, Valerie, McNeely, Heather E., Seminowicz, David, Hamani, Clement, Schwalb, Jason M., Kennedy, Sidney H. (2005) Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment-Resistant Depression, Neuron 45: 5 651-660 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2005.02.014

Monk, Catherine, Myers, MM, Sloan, RP, Ellman, LM, Fifer, WP (2003) Effects of women's stress-elicited physiological activity and chronic anxiety on fetal heart rate. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics. 24: 1 32-8.

Olds, James & Milner, Peter (1954) Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 47: 6 419-427

Wang, Gene-Jack – unable to trace a publication in which the comment about Chinese language appeared

Download a PDF copy of this blog:

In Hay (2012) I proposed 4 elements to autonomy:

“awareness - being in the here-and-now, knowing who we and others really are

alternatives - having several options for how we might behave, being able to choose what to do

authenticity - knowing that we can be our real selves and still be OK, not having to wear a mask

attachment - being able to connect and bond with other people” (p. 16)

Prompted by students at a workshop in Hertford, I have picked up on material by Drego (2006) and Moodie (2005) and added a fifth that reflects ‘responsibility’ to the original Berne (1964) version of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy:

accountability – accepting responsibility for our own behaviour, recognising that we act based on our own decisions (and that we can change previous decisions)

Drego (2006) had commented on a workshop that had been run by Moodie (2005) about the way that early social responsibility had developed in Scotland, and wrote that Berne's (1972) three-handed position of "I'm, OK, You're OK, They're OK" envelops both individual and social freedoms. It spans both individual wholeness and mutual responsibility [italics added] between individuals and between groups. (p. 90).

Recently, a colleague mentioned how Richo (2002) and Yacovelli (2008) present the components for mindful loving and emotional fulfilment (respectively), and that prompted me to think that we need to add more about ‘the other side’ of autonomy. In his original description of autonomy, Berne mentioned spontaneity, awareness and intimacy - only intimacy has a focus on ‘the other’.

I can see that a more cocreative view of autonomy might include:

• for attachment (Berne’s intimacy) we need affection and appreciation (Richo and Yacovelli) and acceptance (Richo);
• for awareness, we need attention (both authors) from others, meaning they are aware of us;
• for authenticity, Richo has allowing and Yacovelli has acceptance and approval (although her descriptions of these sound very similar to each other).

​I prefer not to use appreciation or approval, as both of these imply that our sense of OKness is dependent on the opinion of someone else. However, affection, attention, and acceptance seem to me to be useful additions to how we think about autonomy.

These ideas stimulated me to look at the five elements I had already to think about how each of these might be presented in a cocreative manner – below is the result:
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• awareness/attention - to indicate that others are aware of who we really are in the same way that we need to be aware of who they really are;

• alternatives/accountability – to recognise that we are responsible for how the options we choose have an impact on others;
• authenticity/acceptance – to emphasise that we can be our real selves, faults and all, and still be accepted by others;
• attachment/affection - to reinforce the two-way dynamic of how attachment operates.

References

Berne, E (1964) Games People Play, New York: Grove Press 

Drego, P (2006) Freedom and Responsibility: Social Empowerment and the Altruistic Model of Ego States Transactional Analysis Journal 36: 2 90-104 

Hay, J (2012) Donkey Bridges for Developmental TA Hertford: Sherwood 

Hay, J (2014) Extending the Donkey Bridge for Autonomy IDTA Newsletter 9:1 8

Moodie, A. (2005, 8 July). Robert Burns, the Scottish enlightenment & TA. Workshop presented at the World TA Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland

Richo, David (2002) How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Relationships Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications 
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Yacovelli, Dyan (2008) The 5 “As”: Acceptance, Affection, Appreciation, Approval, and Attention: The Journey to Emotional Fulfillment. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Inc

​© 2018 Julie Hay​

Julie is a fan of open access publishing, so feel free to reproduce any of these blogs, as long as you still attribute it to her. 

​At the same time (Hay, 1992) that I was writing about Personal Styles, or behavioral ego states, I also introduced the notion of Internal Ego States. I pointed out that Eric Berne had, rather confusingly, used the same diagram of three stacked circles to show what he referred to as structural and functional analysis. To provide a distinction between diagrams, I opted to show the internal ego states as drawn with dotted lines, following on from Berne’s way of using dotted lines for ulterior, and therefore unobservable, transactions.

Using a heading of ‘What happens inside us’, I pointed out that often it will be enough for us to analyse the observable behaviour and choose a corresponding ego state. However, there will be times when this is not so - it will sometimes seem as if the person is in two ego states at once, or the behavioural aspects will feel somehow out of line with our intuitive sense of what is happening. At times like this, we will need to speculate about what is happening on the inside.

We arrive in the world with the beginnings of the Internal Child already in place. It is our experience of ourselves. We have needs, wants and feelings. These include hunger and thirst, fear, curiosity, anger, wanting to be loved, and a whole range of other feelings that occur as we grow.

All of these seem to be recorded. It is as if our Internal Child is a computer disc on which we file everything away. We are continually adding new data. We also refer back from time to time to the old files. We may do this consciously, as when we are aware that we are remembering. We may feel as if we have lost the file, as when we try unsuccessfully to recall something we used to know. We may go back without realising, as when an incident in the present triggers an emotional response from the past.

A common example of reverting without intending to is when we meet someone who treats us as a teacher used to. Perhaps they say our name in a way we no longer expect – and then we feel like we are a small child again back at school. Even more problematic, if we meet one of our teachers when we are grown-up, we may find it very hard to continue to behave like a grown-up ourself because we feel as if we are still the little person that we were.

Internal Parent might be thought of the storage system where we put the copies of the big people that we have known. These copies will include the opinions, beliefs and value systems that went with the behaviours that we were observing other people displaying. As with Internal Child, at any moment we may pull out an old recording and replay it or we may lay down a new recording.

Old recordings emerge when we catch ourselves repeating what our parents or caregivers told us years ago. This may be a problem if things have changed since then. Beliefs about nutrition, for example, are very different nowadays. Politics, economic policies, racial and other prejudices, all tend to be things that change significantly as time goes by so it is problematic if we are still running with the same beliefs that previous generations had.

We need to pull out the contents of the file for scrutiny. Then we can archive those aspects that are no longer relevant. As we meet more people, we can observe and copy the things they do that are effective. We can then add these new options to our filing system so that they will be readily accessible.

Our Internal Adult is like a computer program that we use to access our disks and to process and store new data. Internal Adult takes in information from the outside world, such as who is talking to us and how. It monitors our reactions in Internal Child and checks whether they seem relevant to the situation. It scans through our Internal Parent for any recorded ways of responding that would be appropriate now.

When our Internal Adult is functioning well, we are continuously making choices about what to do. These selections may take only fractions of a second, yet we manage to weigh up probabilities and make balanced decisions. During this does not prevent us from behaving instinctively; rather it paves the way for more spontaneity by ensuring that we have considered the consequences first.

You will see from the above that in 1992 I was using the metaphor of a computer and talking about how we had disks. The previous metaphor used within the TA literature had been of likening these ego states to a tape recorder, and pointing out that often the Parent tapes and the Child tapes were linked in some way. This gave an explanation for how people would sometimes feel bad when someone acted towards them in a parental style – they would regress and feel as if their original caregiver was now telling them off and so they would re-experience the same bad feelings that they had felt as a small child.

Nowadays, with the benefits of neuroscience, we probably need to update the metaphor of the computer as well, or at least use it more accurately. The neuroscientists tell us that we do not have memories as such; instead, we re-construct our recollections and believe that we have remembered them. The computer analogy can still work provided we realise that the documents we look at are actually contained within the computer in a form of coding so that when we call them up, the computer automatically collects together what we need and presents it in a form that we can comprehend.
​
Over the years, I have also developed more metaphorical ways of thinking about internal ego states, such as the rings of a tree, a filing system, and a computer program – more about these in my next blog.

References
​
Hay, Julie (1992) Transactional Analysis for Trainers Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill (currently published as 2nd edition, 2009, Hertford: Sherwood Publishing)

​© 2018 Julie Hay​
 
​Julie is a fan of open access publishing so feel free to reproduce any of these blogs as long as you still attribute it to her.