Pamela Levin: “I received permission from Eric Berne to be independent, think for myself, and speak my truth”

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This interview was conducted as a reflective conversation focused on the history, development, and future directions of transactional analysis. The interview was conducted by Liliia Lukianova, a psychologist in the modality of transactional analysis and a contributor to the journal ”Transactional Analysis in Russia”.

Reference from the magazine «TA in Russia»

— You have come such a long way. And before we go into specific topics, I would love to ask: when you look back now, what feels most important to you about your journey in transactional analysis?

— Well, there are so many things! I became an adult (Author’s note: Pamela was 24 years old when she first read Games People Play) and discovered transactional analysis at the same time. So my whole journey as an adult and my whole journey in TA were one and the same. I couldn’t separate out anything. You know, TA is so much part of my life that I don’t even realize I’m using it.

— You graduated from the University of Illinois in 1964 with a degree in the nursing program. And in your article, “The Role of Personal Evolution as a Therapist”¹, you mention that when a colleague and a friend once asked you “What would you do if you could do anything”. You replied that you would work with Eric Berne. Do you remember the moment when you first heard about Berne, and about transactional analysis in particular?

— Well, before my friend asked me that question, another friend and colleague had handed me “Games People Play” (Berne, 1964) and said, “Here, you have to read this.” And she had never said, “Here, you have to read anything,” before. So I took it very seriously and got a copy of the book.

And then, because I was moving to San Francisco and realized that Eric was there, once I read “Games People Play,” I was like, “Wow, I’d love to meet him.” But that was just a pipe dream.

I was being completely flippant when my friend said, “What would you do if you could do anything?” and I replied, “Oh, I’d work with Eric Berne.” I mean, it just felt totally impossible. And she said, “Oh, I’ll get you introduced to him.” And she did.

She knew a friend who was a social worker who attended the seminars. And Eric insisted that you had to have a contract of confidentiality in order to attend the seminars, because he was presenting case studies. And because I was a licensed RN (Author’s note: a registered nurse (RN) is a healthcare professional in USA who has been licensed by a state board of nursing to provide patient care) and working in a hospital, I had that contract. So he allowed me to come one time.

He was careful. It was conditional. But, man, once I got there, it was like, “Hey, I’m staying here, if I can.”

— Am I right, that this book in the USA was very popular. I mean “Games People Play”?

— Yes, that time when I met Eric, it was the number three all-time bestseller of books in the history of books. The first one being the Bible and the second one being the “Boy Scout Handbook”. So, I mean, it was hugely popular. This was an international all-time best seller, not just in the US. Every week at the seminar Eric would hold up another translation.

— And what personal or professional questions were you hoping to explore through transactional analysis at that time?

— Well, it wasn’t as much professional, at least consciously. I wanted to be first in line when they figured out how to fix it. You know, I had a lot of conflict and so forth from my childhood and emotions that were swirling around and I didn’t know what to do with them. And, you know, I was looking around, I was uncomfortable with myself. And that’s why TA spoke to me so profoundly.

— So you just tried to find answers on your questions?

— Yeah, personal. Yes.

— And also, in the same article, you describe the difficulties you faced when taking your clinical exam that the Board of Examiners initially rejected you because you knew it too well. They offered you Limited Clinical Membership, which meant that you could practice only in certain medical centers or hospitals and under supervision. But you declined this offer and submitted the first formal appeal. You were the first person to do so, had your exam fee refunded, and then successfully passed the exam. That sounds like a strong expression of your personal and professional identity. Could you share what was happening inside you during that period, and what helped you stay determined?

— Well, there were a number of things. One of them was the milieu of the 1960s. You know, the 1950s in the United States and maybe worldwide, I don’t know, were very repressive. In the States, it was the Eisenhower years. It was post–World War II, and the men who came home from the war just wanted peace and quiet. They didn’t want challenges. They didn’t want anything disruptive.

Those were my teenage years, and I felt very stifled. And I’m sure many people felt that way. Then, in the 1960s, the lid came off. It was the Summer of Love, hippies, people smoking grass and taking LSD, it was as if freedom suddenly became available.

Because my mother was very controlling and demanding, and my older sister was very compliant with her and didn’t want any company in that role, the position of being rebellious was open to me as the younger child. And I took it. I very much wanted my voice to be heard, which was not the case in my family.

So when the lid came off in the 1960s, it felt like I finally had permission to start saying what I felt, what I wanted, and what I thought. At first, I did that only in a very contained way, within a small group of friends.

But when I met Eric, he gave people permission to be smart. He didn’t care who you were, what degree you had, or how old you were. I was only 24 at the time, still wet behind the ears. I don’t know if you know that expression, but I was very young, almost newborn as an adult.

And all of those things came together.

— And do you remember that moment, when, having come to TA initially out of personal interest, you decided that it should become your profession?

— When I realized it was possible. You know, like, oh, I have a license, I’m an RN, I could make this happen. And so I said to them, “I want training.”

It turns out and I didn’t find this out until later — that at that time, in 1966, they had just created what they called the “International Transactional Analysis Association” (ITAA). And it was kind of a joke among them that it was “international”, because it certainly wasn’t at that time. But it was the International Transactional Analysis Association, and they would laugh and say, “One day it’ll be international.”

They had also just created the levels of membership. Special Membership meant that you were interested in TA, that category doesn’t exist anymore. Then there was Clinical Member, meaning, okay, you want to do this as your work. And then Teaching Member meant not only do you want to do this as your work, but you also want to teach TA. All of these were brand new, they were just newly minted.

I didn’t know any of that at the time, but I said, “I want to go into private practice. I want to be a Clinical Member.”

At that time, there were 450 unemployed social workers in the Bay Area alone. And they didn’t want the competition. They didn’t want to open things up so that nurses could also be competing for clients and so forth. So underneath it all, they were trying to defeat me, even while on the surface saying, “Oh yes, you can be a Clinical Member.” The Board of Examiners at the exam consisted of six people, all men. Then, there was no appeal process, so when I said, “I appeal” they had to invent an appeal process! Then they did things to trip me up. But that just made me more stubborn. I had been well trained in childhood to become even more stubborn when that kind of thing happened.

— And I read in your article that Eric Berne once said to you that “if you really want to know what’s going on with patient, ask a nurse”.

— Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Eric had, he taught at, I think, UC Medical Center in San Francisco and also had groups at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. And when he wanted to know what was going on, they were inpatients, you know, in a hospital. And if he wanted to know what was going on with a client, he’d learn to ask a nurse. So, I felt very validated by his saying that. So I took him seriously and he was serious about it.

— It sounds like a permission.

— Exactly.

— And whom do you consider your most significant teachers in transactional analysis and why?

— Well, of course, Eric would be top of the list. I was able to be at the seminars with him from 1966 until he died in 1970, and that was every week, so I got a lot of good exposure to him.

At one point he asked me, he was so popular, everybody wanted to hear him speak, and he had been invited to Oakland Naval Hospital to give a presentation, and they wanted to know about nurses.

I mean, I was 24, what did I know? But he asked me to give him some examples of games nurses play. And I remember taking more than a whole weekend, just sweating at home, trying to think of how, and finally I was able to give him, I don’t know, three or four examples. And he used them, and later we co-wrote an article called Games Nurses Play (1972). So that was my first official publication.

At the seminar there was an inner circle. It was unspoken, but it was Eric, of course, and then Claude Steiner. He sat, I always used to say, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, because he had a lot of power. And then Stephen Karpman and Jack Dusay. And the one woman in that inner circle was Pat Crossman, who invented permission, talked about permission.

I watched them like a hawk: what are they doing? How are they acting? How do they think? And I learned a tremendous amount from them.

Then I finally got a sponsor, and his name was Joe Concannon. He was a very kind social worker who had been with Eric from the beginning, maybe a year or two earlier than I had. And I had been a Navy wife. At that time, women had to be connected to a man, basically patriarchy. I’m sure you’re familiar with it: what man gives you permission to do this?

So anyway, it wasn’t really because of who I was. It wasn’t on my own behalf. It was that I had been a Navy wife. My husband had been in Vietnam and then he came home, and that got me in. So Joe got me two groups for a year at Oakland Naval Hospital, which is what I had to do in order to qualify for clinical membership at the time.

So those are the main people. And then in the audience was Muriel James, who wrote Born to Win. That was an international bestseller too. She was looking at all the games being played in the seminar, sitting in the back quietly taking notes, and using all the game examples to put into her book Born to Win (James, Jongeward, 1971). So she was modeling how to use anger in a constructive way.

— And there are so many names — it feels as if I’m travelling through time, sensing the atmosphere of something very special, of the period when the history of transactional analysis was being created.

— At the time, between 1966 and 1970, Eric was very focused on how people develop scripts. He was doing a lot of script study, developing his whole script theory, and writing another book. The seminar was always a working seminar. Eric asked a question, or any presenter who was presenting had to start the presentation with their question. Then they would make their presentation, and the last part of the time would be devoted to answering the question.

The answers came from the audience, of course, from that inner circle. That’s who people wanted to hear from first of all. But Eric would not let anyone be passive. He would say something like, “Hey, you, second row from the back in the green shirt, what’s your answer to this question?” So you couldn’t hide out.

But I was very shy and thought, “What do I know?”. So I tried not to get called upon. And one night, I was quietly sneaking my way out the door after the seminar was over. Eric came to the door as I was leaving, caught me, and had a grin on his face, as if he knew perfectly well that he was catching me.

He said, “Pamela,” – pointing at me like this, – “what do you think about how people develop scripts?” And I said, “Well, I think first we need to know how people develop, and then how people develop scripts.” He pointed at me and said, “Yes.”

And I took that as my assignment. I don’t know why, but I did. It was like, okay, now I’m not going to get away with being passive. I’m expected to contribute, and I’m going to study this and find it out.

— I read in Fanita English’s book (Rohl, 2024) that he was quite provocative. And when I hear your story, I can really feel how that worked.

— Yes, Eric was so empowering. He didn’t care, as I said, how old or young you were, or what your degree was, or anything like that. And people would come from, well, there were a few international people at the time, but mostly from all over the United States, because they wanted to see the great… we called him the Great Pyramid. People wanted to see the Great Pyramid.

So it was very lively, but not necessarily entirely friendly, because people were jockeying for position. Everything was brand new, and people wanted to be close to him, and they weren’t necessarily kind. If you wanted to be close to him, you might get an elbow psychologically speaking you might be defeated.

And I was being defeated, kind of without my knowing it, because they didn’t want nurses to be competing for private practice clients in the Bay Area. And I only found that out later.

— And you also served the seminars as a President. What does it mean to be a President of the seminars of Eric Berne?

— That you showed up on time and that you said, okay, it’s time to start now. And you made sure that the presenter asked a question and saw to it that people were respected and were able to keep it organized.

— You helped people to be in present and to ask questions?

— Well, that was long after Eric was gone. He died in 1970. And it was after that. The structure for the seminars was already well set. I helped people present their material, i.e., give their presentation.

— Did you feel exhausted? I mean was it a big loss for the community when Eric Berne died?

— It was huge. It was such a shock. It happened so quickly. One day he was with us. He was fine. He was doing the seminars. Then he was in the hospital, supposedly for a procedure. We talked to him over the phone on Tuesday night, when we had the seminar, and the next few days he was gone.

I still feel the shock. We were bereft. Pam Blum was the person Eric had open his house for the seminar on Tuesday night. Not sure what all her duties were, but she would open his front door at precisely 8:20 pm and the seminar would start promptly at 8:30 pm when Eric would emerge from the upstairs of his house. So, Pam Blum opened Eric’s house for us the next Tuesday night after his death. His chair, the one he always sat in at the beginning of the seminar, was empty. It was so profoundly sad. Nobody knew what to do, and everyone was grief-stricken.

At the same time, everybody was clear that the show must go on. That was a very strong part of Eric’s legacy. There began some discussion about how that would happen, and then people started jockeying for position, wondering who would fill Eric’s shoes. Some candidates felt it was their right, and some of them were part of the inner circle at the seminar. Eric had also been active in Monterey, about two and a half hours south of San Francisco, and there was a strong TA community there as well.

So the next couple of years were mainly about people jockeying for position.

One of the significant things that happened for me before he died was that Eric had been writing Sex in Human Loving (Berne, 1964). I had begun to be more vocal about women, women’s rights, and women’s perspectives, and he asked me to review the manuscript. Once again, I thought, “Whoa, me?” But I agreed. He handed me the manuscript one night, and I took it home. I felt safe there. I sat by the fireplace with a pencil and filled the margins. I was deeply disturbed by the sexism and the blaming of women.

I handed it back to him at a seminar, and he said, “Thank you,” and went on running the seminar. I thought that was the end of my TA career. I expected him to be offended. I waited and waited for the other shoe to drop, but nothing happened.

Finally, I went up to him and asked if he had read the manuscript and what he thought. He said, “Oh yes, thank you, Pamela. You saved me.” I thought, “Me? Save Eric Berne?” He said, “What if Betty Friedan had gotten hold of me in the press?”. That would have been terrible. (*Author’s note: Betty Friedan was one of the most influential feminists of the XX century in the USA. Her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) sparked the second wave of feminism in America.)

He then asked other women to review the manuscript as well. Since it had already been submitted to the publisher, he responded by creating a dialogue in the footnotes between E.W., Emancipated Woman, and E.B., Eric Berne. He completely rewrote the section on female power. Women were no longer blamed in games like Frigid Woman. That was gone.

Before he died, the annual summer conference in Monterey was approaching. All the TA people attended. Eric asked me to present a paper on women’s oppression, and he was going to discuss it afterward. That meant a full hour of my presentation followed by discussion, and because Eric was involved, everyone wanted to be there. It was scheduled for late Saturday afternoon, the last presentation before the evening party, and the room was packed.

Between the time he asked me and the conference itself, he died: the conference took place in early August and he died in July. Without my knowledge or consent, the men in power removed him from the program and replaced him with five men to discuss my paper. I refused to accept that.

Luckily, Claude Steiner was in touch with a lot of women who were in the women’s movement in Berkeley, which is a couple hours away. I was expressing my upset to Claude. And so anyway, he called the women that he knew in Berkeley that were very well aware of how to do political action. And they came down to the seminar or to the Monterey conference with buttons and slogans like “Sisterhood Is Powerful.”

We demanded that the men step down and be replaced by women, so women could speak about women’s experience. Some women whose husbands were on the panel said they would ask them to step down. Well, boy, did they wake up because none of the men did step down. That clearly exposed the power dynamics in that relationship.

By Saturday afternoon, the room was packed. Half the audience was saying, “Don’t speak,” and the other half was saying, “Speak, don’t let them silence you.” We had prepared a list of ten women willing to replace the five men. I sat in the speaker’s chair, unsure what to do, and finally decided not to speak.

The audience was shouting, “Speak,” “Don’t speak,” “Let the women speak,” “Step down,” “Don’t step down.” Finally, Valerie Langford stood up, took the microphone, and said, “Let the women speak.” The audience applauded, the men stepped down, and the women came forward. That was the beginning of women’s empowerment in ITAA.

After the conference, we were asked what women wanted. We wanted equal status in ITAA, which we did not have at that time. The men were standing shoulder to shoulder, psychologically speaking, preventing women from advancing to clinical membership and positions of power. We demanded that every examining board include at least one woman in order to be legally constituted. So if there was no woman on the board, it was because they just weren’t passing women: “Oh, you didn’t do it well enough” or “You didn’t do this” or whatever. And it was really hard for women to be who they were at that time. We’ve been very carefully conditioned to be dancing girls or serve the coffee. (Author’s Note: Sexism in the United States during the 1960s was a deeply entrenched norm that confined women to domestic roles and reinforced inequality in the workplace, giving rise to the second wave of feminism. Women faced discrimination in hiring, lower wages, and restricted access to contraception, although the decade also marked the beginning of a broader struggle for emancipation and the sexual revolution.)

— Listening to your story, I experience you as someone who clearly stood up for her voice and her position, and I want to thank you for sharing this important part of your history. This brings me to a question that often arises in professional discussions. My colleagues and I sometimes reflect on Eric Berne as a person, psychologically speaking. Some TAJ articles mention the idea of a narcissistic injury in Berne’s history. Do you agree with this assumption, and how did you personally perceive him?

— Well, I kind of have to laugh when I hear the label narcissistic injury, because I think, who doesn’t? None of us came into this world free of trauma. So, of course, he probably did, just like we all do.

He was very intelligent and very committed. He had a great sense of humor and could have a lot of fun. Sometimes it was under the surface that he was laughing at what was going on. But I also think he was socially uncomfortable. When he was in charge, when he was running the seminar, when he was doing TA work, when he was talking about TA, he was very comfortable in his skin. But I think, in part, he felt that pastiming was a waste of time, although he did say it was a good way to get acquainted.

He did understand the role of play. He did invent, or discover, the Child ego state. So after the seminar, he would say, “Now we’re going to have fun.” We would go to a nearby restaurant called the Old Spaghetti Factory. We would go there afterwards, but it really wasn’t fun. The people who were at the seminar didn’t have the social glue or interest in each other to carry that off.

When Eric was there, he would go sometimes, not always, but you could tell he was studying. He was learning about people, about what this person did and what that person did. So I suspect he was working on his book even while we were supposedly having fun.

— And what do you value most from interaction with Eric Berne? I mean, the idea, a phrase or an observation that stayed with you throughout your life?

— Well, I’d have to say, first of all, he was so empowering. I’ve given you some examples of that. Nobody could hide out in the seminar. He wanted to hear from people, whoever they were. And who was I? I was a major nobody. So you were expected to think. You were expected to have an opinion.

I’m thinking there was another thing: permission to be independent, I guess I would say, and to think for yourself. Whatever your thoughts were, they were your thoughts, and they were valuable in and of themselves. They didn’t have to be justified.

And that, in combination with the Bay Area in the 1960s, was a potent combination. So it was fabulous to become an Adult and be in my twenties during that time.

— It sounds fascinating!

— Yeah. You know, you were expected to contribute.

— And do you remember, sorry?

— Just to underscore, I got permission to speak my truth with him. And not just with him, but in my life, that it was okay to say what my truth was and that maybe that wasn’t going to be okay with other people, but it was okay that I had my truth and that I could speak it whether other people liked it or not. Wow!

— And also you were a Member of the International Transactional Analysis Association from the time of its foundation?

— Not quite. It was started just before I came. So it was probably started in 1965, maybe, and I came in 1966. So it was just invented.

— Okay, thank you for the clarification. And how do you see the development of transactional analysis today globally and in Russia in particular?

— I’m not really familiar with it. I don’t have exposure to it. I know what I read in The Script. One of the things I would love for somebody to do, probably the President of ITAA, you know, in the United States, the president of the United States every year does a State of the Union message. And I would like in TA for us to have a State of the Union message so that information is gathered. I would like TA to have a kind of State of the Union message, so that information is gathered.

How many TA organizations are there in the world? In how many countries is TA practiced? I have no idea. When I won the Eric Berne Award, TA was being practiced in 76 countries around the world. I don’t know what that number is now, but I’m sure it’s much higher.

I also don’t really know what the current state of the practice is. From what I read, it seems that in Europe it has become, or perhaps always was, closer to a Freudian approach. That surprises me. I think, wait a minute, you’re a TA therapist, but what are you doing talking about all this? It’s valid, certainly it’s valid, but that is an intrapsychic phenomenon, not an extrapsychic one. That’s not the social world. So I can’t really say. I don’t know, but I would like to know.

— And am I right that you have no idea how we practice transactional analysis here in Russia?

— Yes, I have no idea. I know that I was contacted happily to have “Сycles of Power” translated, and that was a number of years ago, and that’s all I know.

— I am surprised that transactional analysis is far less visible than approaches such as CBT. In Russia TA is more popular than in the USA. It feels paradoxical that in the country where TA originated, it is less widespread than in Europe. Do you think Eric Berne’s script may have influenced this, or do you see it differently?

— Well, I think Eric’s script does manifest in the TA world. The main way that I feel it manifests is a certain competitiveness. And he fostered that. He felt that that would promote good ideas. And I suppose in his family of origin it was competitive in that way. Like, who can be the smartest, who can come up with the brightest ideas and so forth. And I feel like that has very clearly manifested in TA. I, and of course, I think it’s really healthy to be rebellious to not all the time, of course, but to have that energy, that is, the very creative energy of the Natural Child, so I hope that I would like to see more of that rebelliousness now, because it seems like at least in terms of the TAJ in English has become very Freudian and it’s also become very top-heavy. By top-heavy, I mean rather than in the beginning of TA, there was a lot of Child Ego state, a lot of Adult, a lot of good thinking, a lot of creativity, and so forth. And now I feel it’s become very top-heavy, meaning parental. We have to have all these articles have to be written in this exact way. And they have to have all these references. And you have to, it’s like the Bible and the Old Testament beget this, beget this, and that, beget that. And I’m sure it’s the stage of... development in TA, but I look forward to the time when the cycle comes back around to the creativity and openness that was there at the beginning. And I know it will, because it is cyclical. It’s not linear.

— In Russia, your book The Cycles of Power is very popular, and many psychologists base their work on it and train through seminars and practical workshops inspired by the book. Did you know about this, and how do you feel about it?

— No, I didn’t know about it at all until you told me, and I’m delighted. It took me twenty years to write that book, because I had to figure out what was going on with development. I kept asking myself, what am I seeing? I was noticing repeating patterns. I saw that people who were twenty-six had common themes and shared challenges in their lives, and that twenty-eight-year-olds had very different challenges. I kept asking myself, what am I seeing?

It took so much time and energy over all those years, so I’m really glad to know that this work has taken on a life of its own. That makes me very happy.

I also feel that the world, at least up until now, has been very patriarchal and very masculine in its way of thinking, linear and reductionistic. I am very happy that a more feminine way of thinking, a cyclical way of thinking, is coming forward. I don’t think men have an exclusive claim on reductionistic thinking, nor do I think only women can think cyclically. We all have access to both.

If you look at the brain, we have two hemispheres. One tends to think reductionistically and logically, and the other thinks more holistically and cyclically. So it helps me feel that a balance is emerging, that what has been long repressed is coming forward. And I think the world needs that.

— And some authors argue that cycles of power is not exactly transactional analysis. What would you say in response to that?

— Well, first, I have to laugh. As I said, Eric specifically pointed at me when I said that we need to understand development, and that what The Cycles of Power shows is the development of ego states. We are not born with fully developed ego states and that is what an infant does not have a Parental ego state that can make definitions and set structures. We have to grow that.

So, my question has always been, how do we grow it? How does it develop in healthy ways, and what gets in the way of that? Development is relational. There are stories of babies and children who were raised without parents, or in extremely deprived conditions, babies who were left in cribs without being held or touched, without relationships, and how profoundly that affects their development.

Transactional analysis is a perfect tool for exploring how we develop in healthy ways and what kinds of relationships we need in order to develop well.

Another important part is that this work was nominated for the Eric Berne Award in 1984. At that time, there were seventy-six countries around the world with voting members of TA, and every voting member had a vote. The award was not given by a committee as it is now. All seventy-six countries voted, and I was told that The Cycles of Power received the highest number of votes ever given to a winner.

So I don’t think most TA people believe it is not TA. To me, comments like that sometimes feel like a power play, as if to say, get out of the way, you are too powerful, or you might become powerful. It can be very competitive. I simply think there are better ways to live than through competition, and I hope people find them.

— Yes, thank you for this theory. I really use it in my practice. Even today, I was reading a book by my teacher, Alla Dalit, about empathy, and I noticed that she also refers to and uses your theory, your Cycles of Power, in her book. This model often helps us clarify many things that are happening with clients. I am truly grateful to you for this theory.

— Thank you so much. And I’m very grateful for knowing that it’s serving its purpose. That all that energy that it took to produce it is not wasted.

— And which developmental cycle do you feel you are in personally at this moment?

— I would say early adolescence. There’s a way in which I had been very much into my own world, my own life, being more private. And now I’m coming out into the world again. And so I feel like I’m doing a lot of the developmental tasks that are common to early adolescence.

— Have you experienced periods of burnout? And if so, how did you restore your energy and resources?

— Oh, well, I mean, there’s nothing like rest. You know, sleep, good food, good company. I think that’s common for everybody.

— So you just use your Nurturing Parent?

Well, as I said about development, it’s not something you do only within yourself. Nurturing happens through relationships. What restores your batteries?

From the early days, and even now, I’m sure many TA people restore their energy by going to conferences and being with other TA practitioners. There is really nothing like it. I remember going to a hotel where a TA conference was taking place, and you could actually see the hotel staff change their facial expressions. They would start to relax and smile more because the TA people were happy and relating with one another, maybe not always in completely healthy ways, but certainly in much healthier ways than the general culture at the time, especially from the perspective of hotel employees. By the end of the conference, people were hugging, smiling, and laughing. That is a wonderful way to restore your batteries.

For me, though, the opposite is also true. Going out into nature and tuning in with nature restores me deeply. That is how I became aware of what was happening with the cycles, why twenty-six-year-olds tend to have certain concerns and twenty-eight-year-olds have very different ones. We have natural cycles that are part of our nature because we are part of nature. Being in nature restores us and helps us attune to those cycles, to the rhythms of nature.

— And is there a question you are rarely asked, but that you wish someone would ask you?

— I don’t think so. I’m thinking about a time some years ago when I lost my health and then regained it. I became much healthier psychologically and emotionally through TA, but TA could not give me what I needed to restore my physical health.

In my searching, I discovered, not invented but truly found, clinical nutrition and medicinal herbology. I trained in both, and discovering them was as profound for me as discovering TA had been in the beginning. I trained in clinical nutrition and clinical herbology and began to combine them in my practice. For a period of time, my work shifted almost entirely to physical work with people.

Later, I came back to realizing how much emotional issues were affecting physical health. I might set a protocol involving specific nutrition and herbs, but the body would resist it. So I ended up working with people to uncover inner child issues where it felt dangerous for them to thrive.

I feel that this combination is profound, and I love working in both areas.

— And before we close, I would like to ask one final question. What feels most important for you to pass on the next generation of transactional analysts?

— Well, I hope that people become more cognizant of the development of doing Inner Child work and how important it is. And I know that a lot of people are doing Inner Child work. I think to the extent that they are effective therapists, they are doing Inner Child work by whatever label you might call them. But I think that what’s missing, at least as far as I am acquainted with it, is that people are not going deep enough. They’re doing post-verbal Inner Child work. And I think pre-verbal Inner Child work is huge in terms of its effect on people. So I would like that to become part of TA. I think we need to develop a language about it because, like I said, it is pre-verbal, but we are needing to use language to talk about it.

— Pamela, thank you so much for this conversation, and I’m deeply grateful for your time, your openness, and your clarity in sharing your experience and your reflections with us. And for me personally, it was really an honor to speak with you on behalf of the transactional analysts in Russia.

— Well, thank you. I’m delighted. And it’s been delightful to meet you personally. So I appreciate you acquainting me with TA in Russia and also with you.

— Thank you very much!

¹ Levin P. The Role of Personal Evolution in the Therapist // Transactional Analysis Journal. – 1995, 25:1, p. 72-74.

About the authors

Liliia G. Lukianova

Author for correspondence.
Email: lilia0606@mail.ru
ORCID iD: 0009-0002-8526-957X

Psychologist, practicing in Transactional Analysis modality, art therapist, private practice

References

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2. Reference from the magazine «TA in Russia»

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