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Wednesday, 02 July 2008
What’s your racket?
There is a concept in Transactional Analysis called a racket feeling. If you are having a racket feeling or you are ‘in your racket’ as it is said and that is a bad thing. You are seen as a game player and displaying pathological behaviour and emotions.
There has been much discussion about rackets over the years and this has included many varying definitions of what a racket is. The term racket originally came from the concept of ‘protection racket’. The gangster would approach you and say, “If you pay me $500 I will make sure that no one burns your house down” and thus the person was protected. Obviously what he was really saying was, “Pay me $500 for me not to burn your house down”. So the person is given false protection and thus a racket feeling is one that gives the person false protection.
What feeling is she hiding from?
But there have been other ways that racket has been defined. Some of these are:
1. Your most common feeling. What is the feeling that you have most often. Once defined then you have isolated your racket feeling. A racket feeling is one that you are most comfortable feeling and showing and thus it will tend to be the one you have most often.
2. A racket feeling can be a layered feeling. If a young girl was trained not to be angry because nice pretty little girls don’t do such things then she can layer another feeling over her anger. A common one is a sad feeling. So in adulthood when she feels anger all of a sudden she cries and is sad. The sadness is layered over the anger. Thus the sadness ‘protects’ her from the prohibited feeling of anger and she is said to have a sad racket.
Young girls and women often layer sad feelings over anger. So they have a sad racket.
3. Sometimes a racket is a feeling that is used to manipulate others. Girls and women learn that if they get sad and turn on the waterworks then sometimes (often) men will give them what they want. So unconsciously they develop a sad racket because they learn that by being sad they can get men to behave in a way that they want. On the other hand men can learn that when they get angry then some (many) women will back down and give them what they want. This leads the man to develop an anger racket as it can manipulate the woman into behaving how he wants.
4. A racket occurs at the end of a game. The hubby and missus find them selves in yet another game of “Uproar”. They are yet again arguing about something trivial which they seem to do over and over. At the end of the game what does he feel? Perhaps righteous anger or triumph at ‘winning’ the argument. What does she feel at the end of the game? Sadness or despair at yet again getting it wrong? Each of these feelings can be seen as the persons racket feeling.
Anger racket?
5. Related to the above, a racket feeling can be that feeling which is associated with a faulty belief. After every game has been played both parties will have a faulty belief that is reinforced. It can be discovered by finishing the sentence,
“It just goes to show you that....”. The hubby after the game of uproar has been played may think, “It just goes to show you that all women are irrational and illogical.” In turn the wife may think, “It just goes to show you that mother was right and all men are bastards”. The feelings that go along with these thoughts are racket feelings.
6. Sometimes rackets are seen as non-real or fake feelings. This can be similar to the layering of feelings or the feeling that is used to manipulate. When in prison I got to know a prisoner well because he would often be in the medical centre where I was stationed. He was a hysteric personality and hysterics commonly somatisize their emotions and feelings. That means if they feel sad then it will develop in a somatic way, or it will show up in the body. They may get eczema or some form of dermatitis. Or if he is feeling angry he may suddenly develop migraine headaches. If he is feeling scared he may have a bout of asthma. So the body is used by the hysteric to display their emotions.
This prisoner presented with numerous somatic complaints and the nursing staff would ask me about him. I would tell them that he is not lying to them or faking it. He actually would feel the pain. They nurses had a hard time believing this as there was no physical cause to the pain that he was complaining about.
So if a girl cries in order to get looked after then the sadness can be seen as fake because it is just a feeling that is being used to manipulate others. Or it may be a feeling layered on top of the real feeling and thus it is seen as fake.
7. A racket feeling can be that feeling which is not related to the here and now. If someone thinks about the past or the future and then has a corresponding feeling, then that feeling is seen as a racket. Typically those feelings will last longer periods of time whereas a feeling related to the here and now usually lasts no longer than ten minutes.
So we all have real feelings and those come from the Free Child and we all have racket feelings and those come from the Adapted Child ego state. So one way to get out of your racket feelings is to switch ego states from Adapted Child into Free Child
Graffiti
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