Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Thomas Harris
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Foreword by Thomas A. Harris, M.D.
1 If I’m OK and You’re OK, How Come I Don’t Feel OK?
2 You Can Be OK If
3 The Internal Dialogue
4 Handle Feelings Through Trackdown
5 Defuse Your Confusion
6 Adult vs. Parent Protection
7 Parent Stoppers
8 Stroking
9 What Do You Want?
10 Requirements for Change
11 Keeping People
12 Parent Shrinkers
13 Take Charge of Your Time
14 Building Children
15 Knowing and Daring
Index
Copyright
AFTER THE DOOR alarms, the glass breaks, the siren growls, the interview chills, after someone else gets the promotion, after a stabbing thought about what we forgot to do, after talking too much, after a look in the mirror, after a lot of things, we beat ourselves nearly to death. Why did I have to say that? Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut? Why wasn’t I a better parent? Why didn’t I speak up? Why don’t I just drop dead?
Alone with our feelings, in the dark of the night or the surreal light of day, the punishing voice of regret often plays like a broken record, if only, if only, if only. If only I could take back my words, erase it all, and start over.
When our daughter Gretchen was six years old, her persistent begging for something she couldn’t have finally provoked me to angry words. She stopped begging and went to sit on the floor, tears brimming in her big blue eyes. In a few moments she was back.
“You were mad at me. You shouted at me,” she said.
“That’s right, I did,” I replied. “But do you know what you were doing that finally made me shout at you?”
Weary of reasons, she turned her wet, wistful face square at mine and said, “Oh, Mama, sometimes we have to start all over.”
And we did, and my face got wet, too. How often had I not felt just that way, a little girl again, wanting to be close once more, with another chance? I was proud of her persistence and awed by her words. Had she not stated something universal and ultimate? Do we not all, from time to time, wish we could start over?
The wonderful thing about being young is that if we had it to do all over again we could. Many of us aren’t young anymore, and our history follows us around like a patent dog, nudging us for attention, and dropping long white hairs on the carpet of life. If we tell it to go lie down, it is soon back. The past is forever with us, the bad with the good, and all the feelings that accompanied both. Good feelings from the past are the golden, nostalgic moments that every so often fill our chests to bursting. The more common intrusions from the past, however, are bad feelings, sad feelings, little-girl or little-boy feelings of wanting and wishing and not getting.
Painful feelings erode self-esteem. We may wake up feeling like a million dollars, but sometimes it takes only a second for a frown, a slight, a remembered failure, to reduce us to zero, and the zero may last all day. We may have read rows of books on behavior, motivation and spiritual uplift. We may have insight, foresight, and hindsight. All this can go out the window in an instant when someone pushes a “hot” button, or when tragedy strikes, and feelings surge along every nerve fiber, preempting all the voices of reason that could give us hope and reassure us that life can be good again. Most of us are acquainted with the symptoms—weariness, depression, apathy, sleeplessness, sighs, too much to do, no taste for doing it, disorganization, sadness, loss of enthusiasm, loneliness. Emptiness.
The good news is that though we cannot stop the bad feelings from coming, we can keep them from staying. This is a book not only about how to get rid of bad feelings, once they have arrived, but also how to get good ones. It is a book about loving, talking, listening, wanting, getting, giving, deciding where we’re going, and enjoying the trip. It is the only trip we will take, and we can make it a good one despite our own imperfections and the imperfect world in which we live.
Although the millions of people who have read I’m OK—You’re OK know what we mean by the title, we have come to realize there are a great many others who are familiar with the title only. Popularity has pitfalls. In time the title became a slogan with all the twists and twits that slogans attract. Seen only as a slogan, stenciled on sweatshirts and bumper stickers, the notion that “everybody is OK” doesn’t quite seem to fit the truth. What we know is that sometimes we feel not OK, sometimes we act not OK, and certainly there are plenty of other people who act or feel worse than we.
Recently we received a letter from a woman who had been encouraged by a friend to read the book in 1969, the year of publication. She wrote:
What she was telling me about the ideas it contained was drowned out by my interpretation of the title, from which I gathered presumptuously that the ideas expressed a somewhat laid-back philosophy suggesting that if people would just “cool it” and accept one another, the world would be a better place. Since I didn’t quarrel with such an attitude, and because it didn’t seem very helpful to me, I “shelved” your book. Until recently. I was in 1969 very ready to consider the idea actually contained in I’m OK—You’re OK; but presumption and what I think is a misleading title (however appropriate when one knows the meaning) have delayed for 16 years my use of some exceedingly significant ideas . . . All the same I wonder whether you’ve encountered this response over the years from other tardy readers. Implicit in all this is my sense of gratitude to someone for having produced such a simple, beautifully coherent and useful exposition of a subject horrendously complex.
Others who at the outset felt the title was “flip” or “pop” also changed their minds. Among them was the late eminent neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield, whose pioneering work on memory mechanisms will be referred to in this chapter. In a letter written to us in December 1973, he stated:
I have been reading your book, I’m OK—You’re OK. It was given to me by another surgeon who is also a member with me of the American Philosophical Society . . . Let me congratulate you. The title seemed to me first to suggest that your approach was a superficial one. I apologize now for that misconception.
Because we want to be responsive to our readers, and because the present book gains much of its recognition by virtue of the fact that it is written by the authors of I’m OK—You’re OK, we feel it important to clarify misconceptions. We feel it a necessary siding on the tract before taking you to the destination of this book, how to handle bad feelings, produce good ones, and live life to the fullest.
“I’m OK—You’re OK” can best be understood when it is compared with the position of early childhood, “I’m Not OK—You’re OK.” We believe all children make this preverbal conclusion during the first or second year of life in the setting of a world of giants, the most significant being their parents, upon whom they depend for everything, food, care, nurture, life itself. This decision, permanently recorded, is a product of the situation of childhood, in which the critical reality is dependency.fn1 In early childhood, a period we designate as the first five years of life, thousands of events and perceptions, among them intense feelings, were recorded in the little person’s brain and are available for replay throughout his life. If in the present we find ourselves in a situation of dependency, we become a “child” again, feeling the very same feelings we did when we were little. We not only remember that child, we are that child. We may again feel “I’m Not OK and You’re OK.” Much of our life consists of attempts to rise above, circumvent, prove, or disprove this early decision. To help get the feel of the predicament, we will refresh your memory.
Objectively, a grownup looking at a baby sees an awesome, infinitely precious miracle of creation. Unless genetically impaired, the baby is indeed perfect. Perfectly OK. What is relevant to understand feelings, however, is the subjective view of the child, his interpretation of experiences in which he participates in childhood. However perfect he is, he is little and his parents are big, he is helpless, they are not. Most significant, he is totally dependent on them. It is hard to be objective even as grownups, when we need somebody that much.
Can we be objective about what the child feels? We cannot interview an infant or recall our own view of life in the first two years, the critical time during which the “I’m Not OK—You’re OK” position was decided. However, we can observe the little person and the situation in which he lives. He is small, clumsy, uncoordinated, without words to express his feelings, and totally dependent on big people to set up the situations that produce good feelings for him.
Consciously, we recall the good, most of the time. Yet the “happy childhood” is a myth, not because there was a total absence of happiness in childhood but because there was no way the child could control the environment to make the good feelings last. Play was interrupted by bedtime, mud had to be washed off, spilling the milk brought irritable disapproval, running free as the wind down the hill ended in skinned knees, mother’s rocking was terminated by the ring of the telephone, squeezing the cat produced claws, mispronunciation brought correction, intriguing explorations of the body sometimes brought abrupt interruption, and running into the street ended with a rough retrieval.
In the best of situations, with the best-intentioned parents, the child had no way to assure that good feelings would continue. Powerlessness, the total dependence on others, left the child with the on-again-off-again experience of great glee and the sudden cessation of what felt so good. One way to figure this out was to make a decision about it: ‘You are in charge; I am not.” “You are OK—I am not.”
The helplessness of the little person is compounded by his lack of knowledge about a vast, strange, new, sometimes terrifying world. As grownups we forget what our point of view was as small people, how things looked and seemed. Years ago we spent a week vacationing at the White Sun Guest Ranch in Palm Desert, California. Our lodging was a snug, rough-hewn cottage, decorated with a Southwest Indian motif. After bedtime, the first night, Gretchen, then age nine months, awoke screaming. I turned on the light in the girls’ bedroom, picked her up from her crib, and held her. Her uncharacteristic screaming continued as hard as ever. I thought she had been bitten by something, and searched both her body and her bed for evidence. I found nothing. I finally was able to calm her, and I rocked her and soothed her until she dozed. I turned the light off and laid her back in the crib. In the process she awoke and again began screaming. For more than an hour the holding, calming, dozing, continued. Yet every time I laid her down her terror returned.
Once more I laid her down, this time putting my head near hers in the crib, humming, as if to go to sleep with her. Then I saw what she saw. On the wall was a handcrafted tin mask with grotesque features and with eyes made of faceted red glass. Outside the window was a neon sign that flashed on and off, lighting up the mask with regularity, and causing the red eyes to glow horribly on, off, on, off. When the lights of the room had been on, the mask had not seemed so scary. But from her crib, in the dark, from her point of view, the scene was terrifying.
I picked her up again and turned on the light, and we went to examine the mask. “We will put it away in the drawer,” I said, and did. “The mask is gone, Gretchen,” I assured her. “It will not hurt you. It is only a decoration, a silly-looking face. It looked scary in the dark, but it won’t be scary anymore. I won’t let it scare you anymore.” After more rocking and reassuring I again laid her down. She stared steadily at the blank wall for a long while, the pink and dark gray still alternating from the neon light, and finally she fell asleep. There was no way to understand her terror until I saw what she saw. The mask did not frighten me. I knew what it was. She did not.
When we are grown we forget what we once saw, how scary life could be, how helpless we were. We even forget we made a decision, “I’m Not OK—You’re OK.” Yet once the decision is made, it is recorded forever. Because the assumption is a true impression of what life is like for the child, he attempts to maintain the integrity of his conclusion. Even though his assumption about himself and others seems unfavourable it has great staying power, because it is a decision based on sound early mental processes seeking practical and successful adaptation. Inadequate data, but good data processing. Though the “assumptive reality” that the child constructs may contain some wrong assumptions, it is nonetheless reality to him.
We believe there is ample evidence to conclude this is the preverbal assumption of all small children.fn2 Why, then, do some children appear more self-assured, more OK, then others? Why do some seem to be little princesses and princes almost from the start? Why are some outgoing, bright, curious, pleasant, self-assertive, and happy most of the time, while others are sulky, whiny, or terrified most of the time? Why are some childhoods more happy than others? Is it because the happy children never concluded “I’m Not OK—You’re OK”? We do not believe so. We believe the behavior of happy children is a result of unconditional love and straight, consistent, caring parental instructions and demonstrations of how to think and solve problems. Thinking and doing produce knowledge and mastery, despite the original decision! Mastery, too, is recorded and is replayed with accompanying feelings of self-confidence. Yet even confident children have their Not OK moments, as do grownups.
There is another way to be objective about how the little child felt about himself. This is the replay of our own recorded feelings when we find ourselves in a situation of dependency and helplessness—when a superior has us in a corner, when we run out of ideas to solve a problem, when we are tired, when we’re broke, sick, or old, when we are misunderstood, when we do our best and it still isn’t good enough, when we are judged unfairly, when our best-laid plans turn sour because of the whim of someone more powerful than we. Most people experience a feeling markedly different from “I’m OK—You’re OK” in such circumstances. The existence of a feeling of “I’m Not OK” is an indication that the original position of helplessness and dependency was recorded early in childhood and is available for replay in the present.
There is ample evidence from the existence of the first half of the equation, “‘I’m Not OK.” We can feel it just as plain! Also we can observe its expression in little children—tears, rage, shyness, fear, frustration. Why did we conclude, then, that these others, “they,” our parents, were OK if they were centrally involved in that which produced our frustration? Where does the “You’re OK” come from? They were OK because they were the child’s primary source of life-giving physical and emotional contact, which we call stroking.
What was once decided can be redecided. Our childhood position was arrived at preverbally and was based on feelings about how life seemed to us then. The “I’m OK—You’re OK” position is based less on feelings than on conscious thought, faith, and the wager of action. It is a decision to reject our childhood assumption and to assert that we are no longer helpless, dependent children. It is a statement not of evaluation but of acceptance. It is a statement of belief in the worth of persons, ourselves included. It does not mean that everybody is perfect or that all actions are good. It does not mean that all actions have the same merit, or that all persons are the same. It does mean that we treat people as persons and not things, willing to regard them in the best possible light, open to what can be regardless of what has been. It means we view ourselves in the same way. Goethe stated the possibility of the “I’m OK—You’re OK” position: “When we treat a man as he is, we make him worse than he is. When we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.”
“I’m OK—You’re OK” is an amendment of our constitution. Many good and novel actions may ensue. It does not mean the earlier decision is erased, for it was recorded and every so often it replays. But our later decision is recorded, too. The more conscious we become of this new way to look at ourselves and others, the more readily we are able to change the nature of our daily transactions, our greetings, our attitudes, our reaction to stress, and the way we handle feelings. Our guiding star is the faith that something better can exist between persons in this world than the combative and manipulative exchanges that threaten to destroy us today.
Having attended to the clarification of the meaning of “I’m OK—You’re OK,” we now wish to be responsive to persons who do not know what Transactional Analysis is. We trust that those of you who are already familiar with the basics of TA will be patient with a brief review. We simply do not know a better or more precise way to understand or discuss behavior than TA. Nor do we know how to say anything novel about handling feelings without using TA tools. The next few pages of this chapter and a brief section in Chapter 3, describing transactions, are the only places in this book where basics will be reviewed. For those not acquainted with TA, an understanding of these basics is essential to a correct understanding of all that follows. For instance, when we write of Parent Stoppers and Parent Shrinkers, we do not mean we are against parents, yours or ours. Quite the opposite! Even TA old-timers may derive new insights. Emerson said, “We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use.” TA’s symbols are three circles, representing the three parts of the personality of every person, Parent, Adult, and Child, words which we will define forthwith.
A transaction is the basic unit of behavior: you say or do something to me, and I say or do something back. Transactional Analysis is determining what part of the three-part you initiated the transaction and what part of the three-part me responded.
Thus far we have written mostly about the part of the personality which in TA we call the Child, the recorded experience of that little person we once were. It is a state of being, a state in which we may appear in the present, felt by ourselves and observed by others.
In the 1950s TA’s founder Dr. Eric Berne was treating a patient who was a lawyer. At one point the lawyer said, “Right now I feel like a little boy.” And he looked like a little boy, the way he was sitting, his vocabulary, his facial expression. Soon the treatment began to center on the question “Who’s talking now, the lawyer or the little boy?” They were two different people. About six months later Berne introduced his observation that still another person made his appearance in the present. That was a person who was very much like the man’s father, a parental person who appeared in a nurturing, sometimes critical way.
TA is based on the observation that all of us are three persons in one. Sometimes we act as the little child we once were, sometimes in a parental way copied from what we observed our parents do, and sometimes as an objective data processor, thinking, analyzing, predicting, estimating probabilities, making decisions, and solving problems. We are in one or another of these states at any given time. We can change from one person to another in a moment. Everything about us changes—our physiology, voice tone, respiration, perspiration, vocabulary, and gestures. These states are not roles, but realities. The state is produced by the playback of recorded events in the past involving real people, real times, real places, real decisions, and real feelings.
We represent these states by three circles, signifying Parent, Adult, and Child (Figure 1). These three words, defined, form the basic language tools of TA. Thoreau once said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” In a similar vein, many people are wary of a system that requires new worlds. Yet in order to communicate meaning it is essential to agree upon definitions. The thousand of letters we received from readers of I’m OK—You’re OK confirmed that meaning had been communicated, and we shall use these words in exactly the same way we did in that book. An impressive slogan used in a TRW advertisement is “Getting an idea from one place to another is as important as getting an idea.” Ideas travel on words. We therefore review the following definitions of Parent, Adult, and Child, always capitalized.
Figure 1
Three-Part Structure of the Personality
The Parent is made up of recordings of what the little person saw mother and father (or parent substitutes) do during a period we have designated as the first five years of life. It also includes what they said. It was recorded unedited, for the child was in no position to question the powerful people upon whom he depended for everything. Because of his dependency, he made assumptions and attributed to his parents magic qualities. They were OK, no matter what. In the Parent is recorded a taught and demonstrated concept of life. Traditions and values reside in the Parent, although values, as well as other information, may need updating later in life. The Parent is dated. What your parents think today may not be the same as the Parent in your head. They may have changed. The Parent may not even be what they actually said and did when you were little, but what you assumed about what they said and did.
The Parent is unerasable. The Parent is both nurturing and critical, if your parents, in fact, were both. The Parent is the history of your early environment, events that really happened, not an abstraction like “super-ego.” The Parent is unique. Yours is different from mine. The Parent is both a state and an influence. From this vast source of data comes information into our thought processes to influence decisions. Or we can “come on” Parent, and act just as mother or father did, even to the finer points of the same gestures and voice tone. The Parent is a recording. We do not think with it, we merely play it back.
One of the most powerful ways in which the Parent enters our lives in the present is the “internal dialogue” in which we hear the same applause, warnings, accusations, and punishments we heard when we were toddlers. The person in us who is at the other end of the dialogue is the Child, the preschooler in our heads. We can feel as bad today as we did then, when negative recordings in either Parent or Child are activated, and we hear the internal, unceasing voices of regret or accusation, if only, if only, if only, why did you, why did you, why didn’t you? It is probable people cannot hurt our feelings unless they arouse our Parent, which then accuses us internally. An oppressive Parent does not mean we had cruel parents. They could have been angels, but to the little person, when the Parent was recorded, they were giant angels, and may not always have seemed to be angels, either.
Parent is, in some respects, a problematic word, for, even though it has a unique meaning in TA, it nonetheless has intrinsic semantic power. We have tried to think of a less inflammatory word, but have not been successful. Neither are we eager to alter a now well-known structure, Parent-Adult-Child.
Perhaps inflammation has a benefit. It takes a certain amount of psychic upset to power a fresh examination of our hallowed dogmas and crippling misconceptions. Parent, despite the above-mentioned semantic shading, is an apt name for the authority in our heads, for it was derived essentially from what mother and father or their substitutes said and did. The significant distortion, however, is that it was we ourselves who internalized them, and we were unable to do the job objectively—unable to comprehend that they were only human and not God—because of our dependency, and inescapable situation of childhood.
As we begin to recognize the distortion, and as we begin to feel compassion for ourselves instead of continual self-castigation, we also begin to feel capable of compassion for our parents, who are, or were, in the same boat as we. They had a Child, too.
A great deal has been written already in this chapter about what it is to be a child. The child’s experience was recorded in the same way the Parent was recorded. It consists of the child’s responses to what the parents said and did. The Child is a permanent recording of internal events in response to the external events of the first five years of life. The most potent internal events were feelings. These feelings frequently replay in the present when we are put in a situation similar to that of the little person, when we are cornered, dependent, unfairly accused, clumsy, uninformed. If we are confronted today by parental-type accusers, we may be transported back there once again. Old tapes are always ready to roll, be they Parent or Child.
The Child includes our instincts and biological urges, genetic recordings, our physical selves, curiosity, and intuition. It contains joy as well as sadness. Whereas the Parent is filled with demands, directions and dogma, the Child is filled with desire. The Child is where the “want to,” the motivation, is. Much of what we have to do is an adaptive response to the Parent. What we want to do originates in the Child. The Child, like the Parent, is both an influence and a state. When we are in the Child state we act and look like the little person we once were. The Child is the most delightful part of our personality, or can be, if it is free to be inventive, creative, and spontaneous. The Child can also be a problem part of our personality if it is fearful, intimidated, or selfish. The referee between the demands of the Parent and the desires of the Child is the third part of the personality, the Adult, which thinks, solves problems, and mediates.
At about ten months of age, perhaps earlier, the little person has developed motor control and strength sufficient to enable him to begin to explore things on his own. Soon he crawls, he climbs, he walks, he runs! He has entered the glorious age of major motion. He also is thinking, adding a novel thought concept of life to the Parent-taught concept of life and Child-felt concept of life. He begins to construct his own understandings. He begins to separate himself from mother and learns how to say no. He has his own intentions and his own reasons. As his vocabulary grows, he begins to ask why. All of these individuating activities are products of that growing part of his personality we call the Adult. The Adult reasons, thinks, predicts, and figures out how to do things. In time the Adult begins to consider consequences. Whereas the Child provides the “want to,” the Adult provides the “how to,” borrowing heavily from what he learned from his parents. Good parents encourage the building of the child’s Adult capabilities, praise him for his observations about life, and applaud his questions as to why the rain falls, the smoke rises, and his shadow leans over.
The Adult is not only a functional part of the personality, but also a state, observable by others in the present. A person in the Adult state appears thoughtful, rational, and in the here and now. We can usually tell which state a person is in by looking. Body language, vocabulary, and gestures are clues to each state. The Adult grows from the child’s innate curiosity. Both Adult and Child are internally derived, whereas the Parent is externally derived. One of the important functions of the Adult is to update the Parent. A secure youngster is one who finds that most Parent data is reliable: “They told me the truth!”
The functions of all three states will appear in the following chapters. For a more detailed explanation of Parent, Adult, and Child, we encourage you to review Chapter 2 of I’m OK—You’re OK.
Startling realism is conferred on the foregoing descriptions by the findings of the late Dr. Wilder Penfield of McGill University. His hundreds of experiments in evoking artificial recall by applying a galvanic probe to the exposed brains of persons undergoing surgery for focal epilepsy provide convincing evidence that the past is recorded in time sequence and in detail.fn3 He discovered that the electrode probe evoked one single recollection from another, not a mixture of memories or a generalization. He discovered the memory record continued intact even after the subject’s ability to recall it had disappeared. His experiments led to four conclusions of great significance to the understanding of feelings.fn4
1. The brain functions as a high-fidelity recorder of the events of our lives, the most deterministic of which occurred in early childhood. These recordings are in sequence and continuous. “Whenever a normal person is paying conscious attention to something,” said Penfield, “he simultaneously is recording it in the temporal cortex of each hemisphere.”
2. The feelings which were associated with past experiences also are recorded and are inextricably locked to those experiences.
3. Persons can exist in two “places” at the same time. You can be physically present with someone in the here and now, but your mind can be miles and years removed. One of our problems in relationships is that “something” removes us from the present and we are not whom we’re with.
4. These recorded experiences and feelings associated with them are available for replay today in as vivid a form as when they happened, and they provide much of the data that determines the nature of today’s transactions. Events in the present can replicate an old experience and we not only remember how we felt, but we feel the same way. We not only remember the past, we relive it. We are there! Much of what we relive we don’t remember.
Did you ever wonder what became of that little boy, that little girl, you once were, the little person with the missing tooth and tousled hair that you look at in the family photo album? One look in the mirror tells you that you have changed. The cells of your skin and body tissue have died and been replaced millions of times. Not so with brain cells. Neuroscientist Dr. Gary Lynch, of the University of California at Irvine, states that “somehow the cells and the proteins that constitute cell membranes in your brain are being broken down and replaced, and yet the traces [memories] you stored as a child are still there.fn5 It seems a reasonable assumption, therefore, the brain cells, though “refurbished,” are permanent. If brain cells are destroyed by injury or advancing age, they are not replaced, although their function in some cases may be taken over by other cells. Most of us have most of the brain cells we had when our brains had developed their full complement. These include the cells that existed when we opened our eyes in the delivery room, took our first steps, learned our first words, first felt curiosity, glee, shame, fear, belonging, rejection and the all-consuming feeling of panic when we felt ourselves to be lost and out of control. Childhood events and the feelings that were produced by them were recorded in electrochemical neural pathways. They are still there. Though the encoding does not stop at the end of childhood, the circuitry so elaborately built in those early years is the basic wiring to which everything else is connected. We still are that little person, the Child, even though we have become much more.
Why do things that bother us not seem to bother others at all? Why are some people “up” all the time and others “down”? How can one person drop the aquarium on the parquet floor of the boss’s office and live to laugh about it when someone else would simple die along with the fish? Four facts help us find answers.
1. Every person is unique. We come into life with our own particular genetic coding, containing instructions for our one-of-a-kind fingerprints, how we’re to look, function physically, and, to a degree, function mentally. Also our histories are unique. They, too, are recorded permanently and in great detail in the brain. Everyone is born into a different situation. Even the situations of brothers and sisters are unique. A mother had four children in rapid succession. As we watched her dealing with the ever-increasing demands of the tots, we asked, “Jean, how do you do it?” She replied, amused, “With each one I just lower my standards.” In that home, as in all families, each sibling has a unique history, a singular place in the birth order, differing standards, and differing external realities. This unique history of early experience is permanently recorded.
Because of our uniqueness, we handle the problems and pleasures of life differently. For example, if a man’s mother died when he was four years old, it is probable that all experience of loss throughout life will be more painful for him than for others. Losing a mate, losing a job, misplacing a credit card, any kind of loss would probably produce more desperation for him than for someone who had not so suffered as a child. There are mitigating circumstances, of course: how the reality of her death was reported and understood, who became his new “mother,” what his father was like, generally the feeling of security that he did or did not have.
Sights, sounds, and smells affect us differently because of our uniqueness. For example, if you see a red car today, your “red-car circuits” hum with all the previous impressions you have had of red cars. If your first teenage romance was with someone who drove a red convertible, the sight of a red car today might flood you with happy feelings. If, however, you had a head-on collision in a red car and ended up in a body cast for eight months, the sight of a red car today would probably produce markedly different feelings from those of the person with the romance. The earliest memories are the most powerful. Little red wagons produce richer memories than big red cars, and jelly beans than caviar.
As our history is unique, so are our perceptions and feelings. A car backfires. Five people react five different ways on the basis of their past experience. It was a gun! A balloon popping. A bomb. A firecracker. A car backfiring. Penfield in the course of his experiments discovered “the subject feels again the emotion which the situation originally produced in him, and is aware of the same interpretation, true or false, which he himself gave to the experience in the first place. Thus, evoked recollection is not the exact photographic or phonographic reproduction of past scenes or events. It is reproduction of what the patient saw and heard and felt and understood” [italics added].fn6
Because our feelings are unique, our best attempt to describe feelings with words is never quite adequate, although it is one way we can attempt to share ourselves with others. If you tell a friend you’re sad, he can know approximately what you mean by sad. He knows what sad means to him, but he can’t know exactly how you feel, because he can’t get into your memory banks. Putting words to feelings is perhaps like trying to sing a picture or paint a song. Nonetheless, expressing ourselves with words, despite their limitations, is one of the ways we help each other. If we didn’t have words, our mutual assistance would be limited indeed.
2. Feelings are real. Feelings are direct, indisputable knowledge. We gain most of our knowledge about the world second-hand through reports of others. Through the abstraction of words we can have proximate knowledge about history, mathematics, geography, or current news bounced off orbiting satellites. We can infer, guess, dispute, and wonder whether or not this information is true. But feelings are primary, personal knowledge. When we are in the grip of feelings, we know it! That is, most people know it. Some people were told, in effect, not to feel their feelings. If children report how they feel and are told it is “wicked” to feel that way, or if a parent says, “what’s a kid like you got to be sad about?” they may decide to keep their feelings to themselves, to “hold it all in.” If expressions of feelings are always negated or twisted, children may become afraid to trust their own perceptions, and begin not to feel feelings at all. Later in life they may be “unfeeling” people. One woman, who described herself as unfeeling, said, “When I think of my childhood, I can’t remember a thing.” Childhood was loaded with feelings. If she was not supposed to have feelings, her childhood was buried along with the feelings she was not supposed to have. She did, however, acknowledge she had a feeling of emptiness.
Feelings are neither good nor bad, in an ethical sense. They are events, facts of our existence. What we do about them may be good or bad. But the feelings themselves cannot be judged by ethical standards. They occur to us unbidden. We may decide on a given day that we are not going to feel anger anymore. We may decide to love everybody, and not have any hateful feelings ever again. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, we are furious. Something has occurred to us. We may not have the slightest notion what produced the fury. But the feeling is real. It is an event. Subjectively, feelings feel good or bad. Feelings are particularly bad when they decommission the Adult and we compound our misery by doing one dumb thing after another.
3. We can change our feelings. We can’t do this directly by a resolution or meditate our way into a state of lasting bliss. The only way we can change feelings is through knowledge of their origin followed by a change in behaviour. Much of this book will be devoted to explaining how this is done.
4. Everyone was once a child. Our experience today is filtered through the events and feelings of childhood, recorded in detail. We cannot have a feeling today that is “disconnected” from similar feelings recorded in the past, the most intense of which occurred to us in the first five years of life. This does not mean that today’s feelings are not real, or that we are to discount them by claiming “they’re just an old recording.” We are today who we once were. The Not OK feelings that resulted from the dependency and helplessness of our early years are recorded and ready to roll when we face situations of dependency and helplessness in the present. If we feel ashamed, for instance, the “ashamed circuits” fire, and we not only remember we were once ashamed, we relive, we are the same ashamed small person we once were. We feel the same feeling we once had; thus the powerful, cumulative effect feelings have on us in the present.
We reveal ourselves today. We do this in transactions. We learn what our parents were like in our early years as our Parent is observed. The same is true for the Child and Adult. TA is a superb sorting device, whereby we learn to identify our own Parent, Adult, and Child and discover how each is revealed in today’s transactions. Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier likened the mind to a messy drawer, which every so often has to be dumped on the bed and sorted out. This total emptying can be likened to classical psychoanalysis. It takes a long time to examine every item and put it back where it belongs, and during the analysis the use of the drawer is significantly interrupted. In TA we force down a couple of dividers and start putting things in their place, into three sections, Parent, Adult, and Child. The advantage is we have the use of the drawer. This process is similar to rebuilding a railroad bridge one tie at a time. The trains can keep running, and finally there is an entirely new bridge.
This is the work of Transactional Analysis. The goal of TA is the strengthening and emancipation of the Adult through a clear identification of “what part of me is coming on” and an assessment as to whether or not this information is true, reasonable, and appropriate to today’s reality. The purpose is not to do away with the Parent or the Child, but to be free to examine these bodies of data. The Adult, to paraphrase Emerson, “must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.” Or badness, for that matter, as in the early decision “I’m not OK.” The ultimate goal of TA is to enable a person to have freedom of choice. “To say that we are free,” said Will Durant, “is merely to mean that we know what we are doing.” This freedom makes possible the creation of new options beyond the limited influences of the past.
The goal of this book is to use the tools of TA to handle bad feelings and to produce good ones. Good feelings produce energy to fuel our trip through life. Many people, beset by bad feelings, are running on empty. Frustration, dependency, and confusion can indeed overwhelm us, undermine our plans, fracture the relationships we long for, and send us into the deep despair of feeling totally insignificant. When we were three we were at the mercy of others. That was a past reality. The present reality is that we are not totally helpless even though we may feel we are.
The most common cause of negative feelings is the failure to live up to the conditions we originally assumed had to be met to be OK, those important ifs that constitute what Kant called the “handful of maxims which govern our lives.”
fn1 The other two positions, “I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK” and “I’m OK—You’re Not OK,” will not be discussed in this book but were explained at length in I’m OK—You’re OK, pp. 37–53. Both are variations of the first position. “I’m Not OK—You’re OK.’”
fn2 See I’m OK—You’re OK, pp. 37–43.
fn3 Wilder Penfield, “Memory Mechanisms,” AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1952, Vol. 67, PP. 178–198, with discussion by L.S. Kubie et al.
fn4 I’m OK—You’re OK, pp. 4–12.
fn5 Richard Restak, M.D., The Brain, Bantam, New York, 1984, pp. 189–190.
fn6 Penfield, op. cit.
Most of us were raised, I love you if . . . I love you if, if, if . . . I love you if you bring good grades home. I would love you if you make it through high school. Boy, would I love you if you go through college. Oh, would I love you if I could say, my son, the doctor. And we . . . literally end up believing that we can buy love with good behavior, or rewards or whatever . . . and then they marry somebody who says, I love you if you buy me a mink coat. If we would raise the next generation of children with unconditional love and firm consistent discipline, not punishment, those children would never be afraid of life, nor of death, and we would never have to make films and write books about “death and dying.”fn1
THIS STATEMENT BY Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross both confirms and confounds. Many people, particularly certain types of achievers, will hear the ring of truth in the conditions she enumerates. Social approval most certainly is conditional, and which “society” we seek approval from is determined largely by what our parents approved of. Whether we seek acceptance in the church, in business and professions, in the “jungle out there,” or the underworld, depends largely on which society our parents valued. We join an organization and, at the outset, learn the by-laws, both written and unwritten: “If you’re going to make it here, this is what you must do.”
“Making it” is the goal. Measurement is the gauge. Many of our “best people” go through life measuring up, desperate for approval, and, like the Good Guys and Sweethearts in the next chapter, are forever preoccupied with the anxious question “How’m I doing?” The paradox is that it generally takes achievers to make such observations about achievement. Would Dr. Kübler-Ross have derived such an insight had she not herself been an achiever, for whatever reason she became one?
The question follows: Is it wrong for parents to expect things of their children? We believe not, but before we explain why, it is necessary to make a distinction between explained expectations and assumed expectations.
The critical fact of early childhood is dependency. Unable to make fine distinctions or to understand reasons for their parents’ sometimes shifting expectations, small children construct an “assumptive reality” about themselves and their surroundings.fn2 Everything from genealogy, to birth order, to illness, to the world situation feeds into these assumptions. What the child assumes may be incorrect, but for him it is reality. His most deterministic assumption was “I’m Not OK—You’re OK.”
Having perceived his predicament, the little person looks to his parents for clues as to what he can do to please them, whom he regards as OK. To the child they are magic people, big, powerful, comforting, frightening sometimes, and, of primary significance, needed. However they treat him, he needs them.
Some years ago we read an account of a murder trial of a father who had beaten his four-year-old daughter to death over a twenty-four-hour period because she had “not minded him.” The mother had participated in the relentless, horrible punishment administered with belts and whips. One of the most pathetic accounts in the entire proceeding was of the little girl, after about the twentieth hour, weak and dying, approaching her father for help to undo the clasps of her overalls so she could go to the bathroom. She came to her tormentor because she needed him, and he was her father.
In the best and worst of circumstances the need of childhood prevails. Because the child has nowhere else to go, he forces his perceptions into the molds of his need, and distortion in thinking, or incorrect assumptions are not only possible, but probable.
In the beginning the infant gets what he wants by crying, yet it may not be long before he receives the message, in words or actions, that a crying baby is a bad baby. So he figures out new ways to get his needs met, to make mother smile. Whatever he does, if it works, he continues doing it.
As his sensory equipment matures he fine-tunes his perception to pick up clues as to how he can please his parents, or at least get their attention. His eyes search their faces for needed approval or dreaded disapproval. Not all at once, but little by little, the child pieces together a comprehension of his reality, and decides what he must do to be OK. As the puzzle takes shape he makes a series of decisions, and these decisions become the basis for his life script.
Kübler-Ross suggests it is possible to raise children with unconditional love. From a parent’s point of view, this ideal may seem within reach. From a child’s point of view, it is not, for even survival depends on conditions: keeping mother around, being picked up, fed, and cared for. When the infant becomes a toddler the parent’s life-saving don’tslife-threateninghehashe is not OK