Dealing with the emotional side of the therapeutic process was not a major emphasis in Eric Berne's thinking as he developed transactional analysis. Nevertheless, by inventing the concept of strokes and designing techniques for the analysis of transactions—the exchange of strokes—he laid the foundation for a pragmatic method of studying the emotional aspect of human interactions. Emotional literacy training is the application of transactional analysis to the study and effective use of our and others' emotional selves. In this article, emotional literacy is defined, training methods are outlined, and different contexts for training are explored.
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