The clinical moment in this piece is a composite, drawn from patterns seen across practice and supervision. It does not describe any one person.
The men who arrive still functioning
Most of the men I work with are still functioning when they first sit down with me. They hold demanding jobs, train hard, carry other people, and look entirely capable from the outside. Many of them have been the reliable one for so long that nobody, including them, has thought to ask what it costs.
What usually brings them is that the way they cope has started to cost more than it gives. Sleep goes, or a relationship goes quiet, or an injury takes away the one place where everything made sense. Something that used to work is no longer working, and they cannot see what else there is.
This piece sets out how I think about that moment and how I work with it. It is written for men who are wondering whether therapy is for them, and for colleagues who are curious about how relational Transactional Analysis meets men whose lives are organised around performance.
Coping as a solution
I start from a simple position: the way a man has learned to cope was once a solution. Berne (1972) described script as a life plan decided in childhood, and I find it most useful to think of that plan as a set of conclusions a child reached about what it took to stay safe, loved, or simply unnoticed enough to get by.
For many men those conclusions sound something like this. Feelings slow you down. Needing people is a risk. If you can handle it yourself, handle it yourself. Kahler (1975) described Be Strong as one of the drivers, the moment to moment pressure that keeps a script running. Not every man's version runs on Be Strong; for some it is Please Others, Be Perfect or Try Hard, and the work looks different with each. The Gouldings described injunctions such as Don't Feel and Don't Be Close (Goulding and Goulding 1979). In the room I also hear something I have come to call Don't Need, which is not one of their original injunctions but is often how the restriction sounds: a man who can tell me in detail what everyone else needed and has no words at all for himself.
Structurally, I think of these rules as living in P₁, the early Parent within the Child, while A₁, the young and intuitive part of the Child, keeps quietly reading every room for whether it is safe to let anything show. Under that sits C₁, the earliest needs, often well hidden (Fowlie 2005). None of this is foolish; it is intelligent survival. The difficulty is that it keeps running long after the circumstances that required it have gone.
Where performance comes in
Sport and other high performance environments can make this harder to see, because they reward it. A man who does not need anyone, who trains through pain and treats feeling as a distraction, is often exactly what a coach, a team or an employer wants. The script and the culture agree with each other, and so nothing pushes back.
Brewer, Van Raalte and Linder (1993) described athletic identity as the degree to which a person identifies with the athlete role, and noted that a strong and exclusive athletic identity can leave someone vulnerable when that role is threatened. I know this from the inside. My own rugby career ended with a shoulder injury at twenty one, and I remember how little of me seemed to be left once the training stopped.
When the role is disrupted, by injury, deselection, retirement, burnout or simply age, the questions that surface are rarely practical. Who am I if I am not doing this. What am I worth if I cannot perform. What was all of it for. Motivation and mindset rarely touch these questions, because underneath them sits a self that was organised around being useful and being good at something.
What relational TA adds
Classical TA gives me a clear map of script, drivers and injunctions. Relational TA asks me to take seriously that the script will not only be described in the room, it will be lived in it, between us (Cornell and Hargaden 2005).
Hargaden and Sills (2002) describe three domains of transference. In the introjective domain the client seeks from me something that was missing, often attunement, often simply someone who notices. In the projective domain he may experience me as the critical coach, the absent father, the selector who decides whether he is good enough. In the transformational domain he may communicate, without words, something of what it was like to be him, often by evoking it in me. With high performing men all three are common, and the projective domain in particular tends to arrive early and quietly. I may be experienced as someone to impress.
This is where my own countertransference matters. I notice when I start to feel that I need to be a good therapist for him, when I feel pulled to produce insight, set homework, show progress. Sometimes that pull is mine. Often it is information. A man who has always had to perform may recruit me into performing too, and two people performing for each other can spend a long time doing very good work that changes nothing.
How I work
Contracting. I contract clearly from the start, about practicalities and about what we are working towards. Where someone else is involved in the referral, a club, an employer, a family member, I keep in mind English's (1975) three cornered contract and make sure we both understand whose agenda is in the room. Many men have spent their lives working to someone else's agenda. The therapy should not become another one.
Attunement before interpretation. Erskine's emphasis on inquiry, attunement and involvement shapes the pace (Erskine, Moursund and Trautmann 1999). I am less interested in explaining a pattern to a man than in staying close enough that he begins to notice it himself. Insight that arrives too early tends to be filed away as one more thing to manage.
Working with what happens between us. I pay attention to how a man responds when I get something wrong, when a session ends, when I notice something he would rather I had not. These moments are often where the old conclusions show themselves most clearly, and where something different can happen.
Pace and protection. I treat the protection with respect. When a man comes close to feeling and then steps back, with a joke, a change of subject, or a sudden interest in logistics, I tend to name the movement gently rather than chase what lies behind it. If the relationship can hold it, the feeling usually returns.
The body and the context. Where it helps, sport, training and work come into the room directly. A conversation about a missed penalty or a failed promotion can carry more of a man's history than a conversation about his childhood, and I would rather follow the route he can actually use.
A composite moment
Ben came to see me about sleep. He was a semi professional footballer with a full time job, a young family and an ankle that would not heal. In the first weeks he was an ideal client. He arrived early, brought notes and asked what he should be working on.
I noticed that I looked forward to his sessions and that I felt slightly anxious before them, as if I needed to be worth his effort. When I took this to supervision, I realised I had been answering his question about what to work on every single week. In the next session I said that I had noticed I kept giving him tasks, and wondered what it would be like to come without one. He was quiet for a long time, then said that he had never once played a game his dad came to watch without being told afterwards what he should have done better. The work changed from that point. It became harder, and it became his.
What changes
The aim is to make the old way of coping one option rather than the only one. Over time I tend to see a few things shift. A man begins to notice the old conclusions as they happen rather than afterwards. He finds he has more than one way of responding under pressure. He can let someone matter to him without it feeling like a weakness. And he can tolerate being ordinary, which for many high performers is the hardest thing of all.
Performance often improves too, but I hold that lightly. When performance becomes the measure of the therapy, the therapy has usually been recruited into the script.
The limits
This does not describe every man, and not every difficulty is script. Some men are depressed or anxious in ways that need more than weekly therapy, and I work with GPs and other services when that is the case. Concussion and brain injury in sport can change mood and behaviour in ways that are neurological as well as psychological, and need medical assessment. And some men want help to get through a hard season and nothing more. That is a legitimate contract, and the door can stay closed until they choose otherwise.
I also try to hold my own frame lightly. TA gives me a useful map, but a map drawn too quickly can become a story I tell about a man rather than a way of staying curious about him.
Who this work is for
I work with men who are under pressure and keep it contained, who notice the same patterns repeating in relationships or at work, who find it hard to say what is going on inside, or who are living through a change in identity after sport, injury, a career or a family transition. I see clients weekly in Falmouth and online across the UK.
References
Berne, E. (1972). What do you say after you say hello? Grove Press.
Brewer, B. W., Van Raalte, J. L., & Linder, D. E. (1993). Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel? International Journal of Sport Psychology, 24(2), 237 to 254.
Cornell, W. F., & Hargaden, H. (Eds.). (2005). From transactions to relations: The emergence of a relational tradition in transactional analysis. Haddon Press.
English, F. (1975). The three cornered contract. Transactional Analysis Journal, 5(4), 383 to 384.
Erskine, R. G., Moursund, J. P., & Trautmann, R. L. (1999). Beyond empathy: A therapy of contact in relationship. Brunner/Mazel.
Fowlie, H. (2005). Confusion and introjection: A model for understanding the defensive structures of the Parent and Child ego states. Transactional Analysis Journal, 35(2), 192 to 204.
Goulding, M. M., & Goulding, R. L. (1979). Changing lives through redecision therapy. Brunner/Mazel.
Hargaden, H., & Sills, C. (2002). Transactional analysis: A relational perspective. Brunner-Routledge.
Kahler, T. (1975). Drivers: The key to the process of scripts. Transactional Analysis Journal, 5(3), 280 to 284.
If you would like to talk about working together, you are welcome to send an enquiry.By Carl Stephens, TA Psychotherapist, Falmouth, Cornwall
