Staying OK

By AMY and THOMAS HARRIS

Children depend on their parents for everything, food, care, nurture, life itself. The decision “I’m not OK – you’re OK”, permanently recorded is a product of childhood, in which the critical reality is dependency. In early childhood, a period we designate as 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.

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.

What was once decided can be redecided. At childhood the position was arrived on the basis of feelings. The “I’m OK- you’re OK" is based 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.

A transaction is the basic unit of behavior: you say or do something to me, and I say or do something back. Transactional analysis (TA) is determining what part of the three part - Parent, Adult, and Child – you initiated the transaction and what part of the three part me responded. TA is based on the observation that all of us are three persons in one.

The Parent is a recording of what the little person saw mother and father or parent substitutes do during a period, the first five years of life. The Parent may not be the same today. 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. Most decisions follow an accumulation of signals or experiences. The child’s early assumptions are tentative and do not become firm without repeated reinforcement.

Parent, Adult, Child

We receive signals from mother’s and father’s three primary sources – Parent, Adult and Child (P, A, C). We internalize messages from these sources by recording them in our own Parent, where they remain for the rest of our lives. The most potent messages are the parent’s feelings, those things they said and did when their Child was hooked.

The parents’ conflict becomes the child’s conflict and confusion. By examining the P-A-C of our parents we can return the conflict to the place it belongs, then choose which Parent messages to live by. As grownups we no longer need our parents for survival. When the messages were recorded, we did.

Accepting responsibility for at least a part of the past made it possible to have power over the future. At each juncture of life we have had choices to make, regardless of what our parents told us or showed us. We have said both yes and no. if we are a part of the problem we can be part of the answer. This is the creative challenge of being, feeling and staying OK.

Three messages parents should give children- 1. You can solve problems. 2. You can think. 3. You can do things. Give frequent “what to do” messages. This will build their confidence in their own OK –ness and capacity to solve problems and will teach thinking. Achievement that brings joy to the child grows from unconditional acceptance before the act and not the other way around. On the other hand, the promised stroking must be delivered, else he does not learn to accept in life, nor does he learn to say “thank you” graciously.

By moving to the Adult, the old Child tapes stop rolling. We cannot erase the old tapes but we can avoid situations in which they can overwhelm us in the present. This essentially involves decision, an act. It is action that is the ultimate antidote to painful feelings. Tracking memory lanes helps in gaining understanding and in taking action- a movement for controlling our environment.

Most of us update our earliest forms of protection. Under stress, our tendency is to regress to early forms of learned protection like withdrawal, intimidation; intellectualization or ritual. A totally withdrawn person may be protected from most forms of external threat but may also be languishing from stroke starvation.

Children learn from what they see. Parents who solve problems with heavy hands teach violent solutions. Some people so characterized are truly lonely, for they have told everyone to stay away. Discounting what other’s say and engaging in a nonresponsive, brainy-sounding filibuster, keeps people from getting close. Many people live a lifetime hiding the dwindling treasures of their lives behind ferocious exteriors, all the while cursing a world so lacking in love.

Life's Meaning

We feel the presence of others only when we allow them to have a piece of us, a piece of our time. Once we have accepted responsibilities, we cannot in good conscience, walk away. Ideally, want lists should be made early in life. If we value ourselves and respect the limitations of time and personal energy, we must not take on more than we can handle. If we know what we want, we probably can get a lot more out of life than we think. Quantities of energy are released when we finalise some objectives and cease our endless indecision.

Writing a list of our wants helps us in getting touch with reality, which is our most important therapeutic tool. Will these things make me happy? Because it is the child who wants, it is useful to ask,” what did the child want originally?” The original wants were three: security, novelty and meaning. Children need to be informed, which makes them secure in novel situations. Life has to have meaning without which, security and novelty does not give happiness.

Having made a want list, what do we do next? Wanting is half of getting there. The other half is change. Until we want to change, nothing different is likely to happen. Our knowledge does not engage the gears of motivation unless we decide we want life to be different. Three things make people want to change: pain, boredom and enlightenment. Change will work when it involves both the adult as well as the child. Ask- is this the change that will make an improvement in my life?

Much of our life is dominated by habit; unthinkingly we walk the same paths, day after day, year after year. Rewards, experienced and repeated, provide a reason to change even the most ingrained habits.

Habits are used by the body to save energy and are therefore valuable. Unless energy is deliberately and repeatedly applied to new courses of action, we will continue to do the same thing the same old way.

Relying on one person to fill all of one’s emotional needs is a setup for failure. Healthy relationships require community: friendships, acquaintances, co-workers, members in social groups in which the entire family participates. If your life is built on our “one and only”, be prepared for none and lonely.

Are you fun to be with? Are you fun to come home to? People are drawn to laughter. You can make fun happen if you let out your own playful Child and look for the playful Child in others. Having fun everyday is a good prescription for keeping people and for good health. Problems need attention, but solutions come easier if people take time out first to relax.

Keeping some people is difficult if their primary source of communication is the Parent. Physical threat is not the way to build thinking, creative human beings. A Critical Parent is oppressive and Nurturing Parent is depressive. It is not possible to shrink the Parent in everyone. When things get tough, the only assumed option is to retreat to the old safety, the Parent. Whatever you do, be gentle, courteous and open, ever ready to greet the Child when it finally breaks out of the prison of constraints in which a Parent-dominated person lives.

Staying OKStaying OK means taking charge of your life, which means taking charge of your time. Use time deliberately, planning our lives. Were we to follow our hearts we would divide our twenty-four hours into three segments, working eight hours, sleeping eight hours and using the remaining eight hours for life renewing activities.

Who is in charge of your time? Who is in charge of your sleep, your work your free time? Often it is not free because we have left a vacuum into which swoops someone else’s agenda; or we blindly follow what is expected of us, whether it is rewarding or not. Taking charge of our time involves decisions, even with impossible pressures based on past decisions, not well thought out, we still have options. If we think we don’t we must make them, for the alternative may kill us. Open up your thinking, to breathe a little easier. Eliminate time wasters, those things that produce only worry, to gain time and life.

Everything we own takes our time, even if we don’t enjoy it or use it, it has to be maintained and they accumulate as dust on a log.

Type A

Type A behavior is described as a “particular complex of personality traits, including excessive competitive drive, aggressiveness, impatience and a harrying sense of time urgency. Individuals displaying this pattern seem to be engaged in a chronic, ceaseless, and often fruitless struggle- with themselves and others, with circumstances, with time, sometimes with life itself. Like serum cholesterol, it contributes just as much by what a person feels as by what he feeds himself.

The most significant trait of people with Type A Behavior is time urgency, or “hurry sickness”. Another is a quest for numbers. They lack a sense of their own value. They have no yardstick to gauge their own worth to his own satisfaction and measure his value in terms of numbers of his achievements. Thus, pace becomes a primary measure of success.

The cost is too high if you constantly exhibit the following behaviors:

• Vocal explosiveness, accentuating various key words, hurrying of the end of sentences, indicating impatience even the time required for your own speech.

• You always move, walk and eat rapidly.

• You feel impatience with the rate at which most events take place, hurrying the speech of others, head nodding yes, yes, …..and finishing other people’s sentences for them.

• You do two or more things at once. Like reading and eating and not experiencing either.

• You speak about topics that interest you.

• You feel guilty when you relax.

• You don’t observe well and lose sight of beauty.

• You do not have any time to spare to become a person worth being because you are so preoccupied with the things worth having.

• You schedule more and more in less and less time.

• Your body language includes a clenched jaw, grinding teeth and tight muscles.

• Your free choice has been supplemented by a sad enslavement to the acquisition of numbers.

You can decide not to live that way. Count the cost. Whom are you trying to please?

So much of our life is spent preparing for the next day, the next year, the next promotion, the next generation that we forget that this moment, which will not come again, is when we live. We experience eternal life precisely when we do not think about it, when it is enough to say, “thank you for today,” and live in celebration of the moment.

To build a child, parental teachings, demonstrations, standards, admonitions, permissions, applause and how-to information that a little person records in a Parent turns out to be the early building blocks. What can you do to make it life enhancing for the little one?

Be aware of your child- seeing them for who they are individual human beings of infinite worth- that is awareness of children. Unconditional acceptance comes next. Everyone needs to know there is someone on his side, no matter what. That is what parents are for. Children can survive dreadful events if they are sure of their parents’ presence, love and protection.

Good parents do not lie

Good parents do not lie to their children. Very young children need to be reassured, from mid-elementary, do not misinform them and as adolescents, the most reassuring is that parents also feel afraid but not helpless. Think before you speak to children. Good parenting requires simple, unqualified statements that do not confuse the child.

People change and forget to tell each other. Children can accept the mistakes of their parents. What they cannot abide is a cover-up. Consistency in the behavior of the parents is a must. Good parents solve problems and if they can’t, they have faith that a solution is possible if they keep searching for it. We will find a way! Instill hope in the child.

Little children love repetition, the same rules, rituals – reinforcement of learning is enhanced by repetition. He experiences a sense of mastery, when he can match what goes on outside with what he knows inside.

It isn’t what we have that makes life good, but what we enjoy. Tradition gives the feeling of being rich. Create little traditions on occasions. Eat food together at a certain place. It’s your life. It’s your family. Have you ever really believed you can have what you want? Go for it. Looking forward for a good time is half the fun and tradition makes this possible. What can little children look forward to? Do they have special days?

Cheerfulness and humor also express values. To ask a toddler to help you is to tell him he can do things lifelong neatness comes from expectations that “you will take care of your things”. Parents need to be there to listen. Now is quality time for the child. Time is an essential requirement to raise a child. Parents want to pass on their genes to children, but what about personalities? This takes time and being with. Children need care and someone must provide it.

Gratitude is a sure cure of envy. Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Forgiving is for getting, getting back what has been lost, getting rid of guilt, getting another chance, changing behavior and conserving past gains. Forgiveness is not righting a wrong, but righting a relationship. Sometimes we must right wrongs other ways, by confrontation, correction, even conflict. Some things ought not to be tolerated- life threatening behavior, cruelty, social oppression and using persons as things. We need wisdom to know the difference.

Reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this a better world if you can. Love is real and hope is real.

Amy and Thomas Harris are authors of I'm OK, You're OK

STAYING OK / AMY and THOMAS HARRIS

Abridged by Harina, State Bank Learning Centre, Indore