Merhaba (Hello) from Turkey!

We are ATAD, which is the Turkish acronym of The Eurasian Association of Transactional Analysis. Being just 14 years of age (founded 2009), we are the adolescents of the community and as you would expect we are full of youth, energy and enthusiasm.  

The initial aim was to bring together a community of practitioners who had an interest and or had received some training in TA and wanted to gain more knowledge and benefit from mutual support. Today we have a total of 29 members: including just one PTSTA and one CTA. Our great target and challenge is to increase the number of certified TA practitioners and members in Turkey while increasing the overall awareness of TA in the country.      

Over the years growth has been slow but we are a tightly-knit group who identify with the tortoise rather than the hare: we might seem to be small and slow but we are making progress and we will cross the finishing line earlier than anyone expects.  The mutual support which is a distinguishing characteristic of our group was at least partly facilitated by the difficult days which our country has gone through in the last decade. 

As well as the ongoing global cost of living crisis, we have also suffered from political upheaval, an attempted military coup in 2016 and this year’s devastating earthquakes. All of these challenges have brought us closer as a TA community with more frequent contact and mutual support. This in turn has also led us to focus on training programmes and workshops using TA for practitioners.  We also provide help to frontline workers (from teachers to healthcare workers and therapists) who suffer from and or have to work around the fall-out from these traumatic events. We are currently working on a project to provide training support to primary school teachers in the earthquake zone to help them deal with the psychological aftermath of the disaster both in themselves and in their pupils. 

As ATAD we are excited about our work and our future in Turkey to raise awareness of TA and to rapidly increase the number of our members. 

We are passing the baton to the Czech Republic!