Before the Script Sets: Transactional Analysis and Therapeutic Work with Children
This session is fully booked. Drop your interest below to be the first to know when the next one opens up.
In the meantime, explore our other offerings.
Each of us was once a child. We carried a world inside us: feelings we couldn’t name, rules we didn’t choose, and a deep, wordless need to be seen. Many of us still carry that child—in the way we love, the way we work, and in the moments when we sit across from a small person who is struggling and wonder: what do they really need from me?
This workshop begins there.
Working with children demands more than an individual lens. Children don’t come alone. They carry their families, schools, cultures, and the systems that have shaped them. What presents as a child’s “problem” is often a pattern held in place by relationships, roles, and repeated transactions. And because a child’s life script is still in formation, this is a crucial window: work at this stage can prevent harmful scripts from taking hold and support healthier patterns over a lifetime.
Transactional Analysis offers a framework to work with this complexity—holding together development, family systems, and the child’s emerging sense of self. Drawing on a rich body of TA literature and the work of thinkers including Eric Berne, Virginia Axline, Salvador Minuchin, Leonard Campos, and Munari Poda, this two-day workshop introduces an approach that is both theoretically grounded and clinically practical.
This is not only about understanding children—it is about intervening at a stage where change has a lifelong impact.
Programme Structure
Day 1: Systemic Assessment — Locating the Child in the System
Day 1 focuses on understanding the child in context. Participants learn to see the presenting issue as part of interconnected family, cultural, and institutional systems. The day introduces developmental frameworks and builds skill in identifying patterns, roles, and the primary subsystem where intervention is most needed.
Day 2: Therapeutic Work with the Child
Day 2 shifts to practice. Participants work with TA-informed treatment planning, intervention strategies, and ways of engaging the child through play and imagination. Case material follows the therapeutic process from first contact to termination, including working with parents and navigating systemic complexities.
Participants will be able to:
See the child in context: Understand how a child’s difficulties are shaped by family, school, and cultural systems
Apply TA relationally: Work with ego states, scripts, and strokes as they operate within relationships
Use structured frameworks: Assess where intervention is most needed and design integrated treatment plans
Work with the Child ego state: Support emotional expression, agency, and boundaries, with attention to permission and protection
Use play clinically: Engage play, metaphor, and imagination as central tools for communication and change
Navigate the wider system: Work effectively with parents, caregivers, and professionals, and track the arc of therapy
Learning Methodology
This workshop is grounded in the belief that adults, like children, learn best through experience, relationship, and play. It combines reflection, small- and large-group discussions, and case-based work to connect theory with practice.
This program is suitable for
- Counsellors and therapists wanting to extend their practice to include children
- School counsellors
- Special educators
- Paediatric and allied health professionals
- Parent coaches
- Social workers in child education or protection
- Child and developmental psychologists.
This offers 12 CPD hours that can be counted towards SAATA or ITAA credentials.
Prior knowledge of Transactional Analysis is not required, though it will be helpful.
Investment : Rs. 14655/-(all inclusive)