What Is a Racket Feeling? The “Substitute Feeling” That Covers Your Real One

A racket feeling is what Transactional Analysis calls a “substitute feeling.” In a situation where you ought to feel your real feeling, it is automatically swapped for a familiar feeling that was permitted in your family when you were a child.

Why do substitute feelings arise?

Every family has “feelings that are all right” and “feelings that are not allowed.” In some homes it is all right to get angry, but not to show weakness (fear, sadness). A child from such a home gets angry even when frightened or sad, because getting angry was what won attention and recognition. A feeling learned in this way goes on covering the real feeling in adult life.

Signs of a racket feeling

• The situation is different every time, but the feeling left at the end is always the same (always a sense of being wronged, always guilt, always irritation).
• Even when you feel that feeling fully, there is no relief, and the problem is not solved.
• After feeling it, you go back to a familiar conclusion: “I knew it, I’m…” “I knew it, people are…”

Collecting stamps

Berne compared saving up racket feelings like these to “collecting emotional trading stamps.” You save up the sense of being wronged, or the anger, bit by bit in your mind, and then one day you “cash them in” all at once — exploding, or cutting off the relationship — on the grounds that “I have put up with this much.” These stamps are the fuel of relationships that always end the same way.

Getting out — reaching the real feeling

The key is to ask, “Underneath this familiar feeling, what am I really feeling right now?” Only when you reach the fear under the anger, or the sadness under the irritation, does the feeling do its job and flow on. The place to begin is finding out which racket feeling you use most often.