Then one day he doesn't amve. She is disappointed, but still believes in her daddy. The greeting ritual is restored the next day and continues as ever for many weeks. Then one day he arrives home angry, for reasons of his own, and he brushes past her, refusing to pick her up. She is disappointed again, but still believes in her daddy. The ritual is restored the following day and continues as before.
Then one day daddy amves home intoxicated. When she rushes to him, he tells her to go away, grow up1 and stop bothering him. Even this behavior may not produce a decision, but trust begins to erode and is edged with anxiety.
The bad scene is repeated on another day, and still another day. On x hour of J day of z year, the little girl's trust topples under the accumulated disappointments, and she decides: "I will never trust daddy again.
Therefore, a child can survive many "bad" incidents before he makes a "get away from" decision. We emphasize this to put parents' minds at ease. Though it takes one straw to break a camel's back, there must be a fairly large stack there already. In the best of conditions and with the best-meaning parents the child's first assumptions are conditional. Later in childhood the parents' actions and words may communicate unconditional love, but the recordings of early preverbal events are not thereby erased.
I f remains a fulcrum in a person's life, and even though it produces troublesome feelings, it also provides stability, predictability, and safety, providing it does not shift about, as in the case of conflicting double messages, which will be discussed later in this chapter.
We are indebted to the Gouldings for their clear summary of the kinds of don't messages a child internalizes as injunctions. They are the result either of wrong assump tions, as in the case of the boy whose brother died of pneumonia, or of correct interpretations of what mother and father actually said or did.
Implicit or explicit, the message is "I will love you if you don't. State the Gouldings, "Injunctions are messages from the Child ego state of the parents, given out of circumstances of the parents' own pains: unhappiness, anxiety, disappointment, anger, frustration, secret desires. Therefore, on the basis of repeated "charged" behavior, children make decisions of the don't variety:.
Don't, period. This message is given by fearful, overprotective parents, who are unable to give positive affirmation to any of the child's wants, dangerous or not. Both parents and children are care-ful, that is, full of care. Don't be. This is the most lethal message, according to the Gouldings, stating in one way or another, "I wish you had never been born.
What is the child to do with such a statement? Don't be close. This decision may grow from loss, the death of a parent or sibling, or cruelty at the hands of parents.
Don't be important. Belittling a child's accomplishments, shh-ing him every time he speaks before grownups, "who do you think you are? Don't be a child. Don't grow. Little-boy and little-girl names also are used to express endearment. In the South, where parents' names are often passed through several generations, diminutive names are used to make distinctions between generations.
Dallas has three John Ross Ewings. Father was Jock, son is J. Thinking of Dallas, perhaps the "don't grow" message does persist whenever a person is not called by his real name, for whatever reason the nickname is used. Don't mazed. Father plays chess with his son, and one day son beats him. Father doesn't play chess with him anymore. Perfectionism also frustrates success.
Don't be you. According to the Gouldings this "is most frequently given to the child who is the 'wrong' sex"-a boy when a girl was wanted, and vice versa. Don't be you; be my fantasy of you. Don't be sane and don't be d l. Children who get strokes for being sick, attention for being "emotionally upset," whose therapists are changed "just when they are getting well," decide the way to get love is to stay the way they are, sick or upset.
Don't belong. An immigrant family who talked disparagingly about "Amerikanare" as outlanders, forbade their children to join Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts or participate in school sports. The parents did not feel they belonged, and passed the message on to their children. Other don't messages are: Don't trust, don't think, don't show your feelings, don't have your feelings you're not hungry, you're sleepy , and don't enjoy. Also you don't deserve it, you'll never get it, you'll lose it if you do, you'll regret it, you'll pay for it, and you have more than you deserve.
Do Messages People are generally not aware of the foregoing negative "secret" injunctions. Do messages are in awareness. The child heard them "in so many words" or inferred them from what the parents said or did. Be perfect. Be best. Try hard. Please me. Hurry up. Be strong and don't show your feelings. When a person cannot succeed in these positive attempts, the earlier don't decisions are confirmed.
I can't be perfect; therefore, I won't make it. I can't be best; therefore, I won't be important. I can't try any harder, therefore, 1 won't be well. I can't please you; therefore, 1 won't be me, or I won't be, period.
I can't hurry any faster; therefore, I won't grow up. I can't be strong and not show my feelings; therefore, 1 won't have any feelings. Conflicting Double Messages Children thrive when "what to do" messages are consistent and harmonious. This is not always the case. However wellintentioned parents are, they frequently communicate mixed messages that confuse the child. Figure 2. The most potent messages are the parents' feelings, those things they said and did when their Child was hooked.
That all six sources are at all times is harmony is as unlikely as a unanimous vote in the UN. Parents are not so much misunderstood as understood all too well.
Henry Kiinger stated, "The diplomat believes that an international conflict derives from misunderstanding. Therefore he seeks a verbal formula to overcome it. The statesman believes that conflict derives from a difference of interest and confrontation positions. Therefore he tries to change the realities on the ground. Though we hold to the belief that "my parents meant well," which most parents do, it is essential we see the double messages for what they were and are: mjlict.
Children see and experience communications from all three parts of the personality in both parents: Parent nurturing and criticizing, Child feeling, and Adult problem solving. Father had his set of variables. Mother had hers. They had their own internal conflicts, and each may have disagreed with the other. All of this mixed externality was recorded in the little person's Parent, a cauldron of human need and hope. From all this he has to choose. Who was right?
What was right? The parents' conflict becomes the child's conflict, and confusion. Eager to please, the child attempts to follow both the instructions of the parents and the feelings they express, even if there is discord.
If, when he does his very best, he is still wrong, he despairs in the double bind, "Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
By examining the P-AX of Tnr. April 1. You Can Be OK If 39 our parents we can return the conflict to the place it belongs, then choose which Parent messages to live by and which set of values enhances our lives in the present.
As grownups we no longer need our parents for suroival. When the messages were recorded, we did. We Are Not Wholly Determined Our assumptionsabout the external world, most significantly, mother and father, became a part of us.
But only a part. We also have a Child and an Adult, and in these two parts of our personality lies our capacity for feeling, novelty, and creative thinking. The Child has its own desires and intentions, and the Adult has made choices based on signals not only from the Parent but also from the Child and from the Adult's appraisal of incoming data from the outside world.
Parent messages which may have evoked automatic child responses lose their "knee-jerk" quality once we have become aware of them, thereby increasing the number of neuronal connections or associations.
We are not wholly determined, and therein lies our hope for change. But I remember the no less lively feeling of liberation I had one day when I was talking with you, when I realized once more that 1 was personally responsible for an act for which the psychoanalyst had always said I was not responsible. You see, as long as I was not responsible for anything, there was nothing I could do to help myself get out of it.
His attempt to be both had driven him into a corner, and all exits seemed blocked. The competitive spirit that drove him was continually at war with the unacceptable aggressive spirit required to make it: Nice people are not aggressive. He was burdened with the painful certainty that, no matter what he did, it wouldn't be right.
Though an examination of the conflicting Parent messages helped him recognize the source of some of hi diiculty, the mast liberating d i s m q was that he, too, had participated in his c k s. He said, "I don't want to be treated like a bouncing ball. There is more to me than that. I enjoyed being best. They wanted things for me but I also wanted things for myself. I made decisions and I also made mistakes.
Accepting responsibility for at least a part of the past made it possible to have power over the future. Although the various do and don't messages we have described are useful clues to help us change, they are not conclusive. 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 ys and no. If we go only with determinism, we come to the awful conclusion there is nothing we can do. We need anticipate neither praise nor blame. It couldn't have happened otherwise.
Life, so understood, becomes mindless, terrifying, and without hope. If, on the other hand, we discount deterministic factors altogether, we are also deluded, and can only conclude that everything about us is our own fault. Then, instead of the helplessness of the determinist, we have overwhelming guilt, which, unrelieved, can cut the nerve of effort so cleanly that we give up our efforts to change and merely exist.
Therefore, when we examine the ifs we live by, we should do so with a generous spirit, toward both ourselves and our parents. They had their reasons, their ifs, their needs, fears, and complexities. If we adopt a wholly negative attitude toward the Parent we fail to recognize the positive life-preserving and life-enhancing gifts we received from our parents, if, in fact, we did. Also, bad luck must be factored into the equation.
When we were little were our parents the victims of catastrophe, poverty, disease? What did we make of it? What did they do about it? How is misfortune internalized in our Parent? The uncontrollable must be taken into account, not only in the past, but also in the present.
Did your home blow away in a tornado? Was your son killed in Vietnam? Are you depressed because you have lost your job in a plant layom Are you a victim of criminal assault? There are aspects of our lives over which we have little, if any, control. That was true also for our parents even though we, as little children, saw them as magic and all-powerful. As our problems are not all our own doing, neither is our good fortune.
A "self-made" man may look over his ledger sheets, his factories and fields and claim that it was because he got up at 6 A. He may further judge the poor because they are lazy or unimaginative. The truth is there are millions who get up at 6 A. Thq were born in Bangladesh, not in Boston. There are many other givens about which we have absolutely nothing to say. Does it make a difference that we are male or female? Black or white, or a mixture of both? That our parents were Jewish or Muslim or Christian or none of the above?
If we are legitimate or not? If we were born blind or deaf? Difficult givens weigh heavy on us. But there is more yet to get in the novel present and future. The good news is that we can think! Thinking itself produces novelty. We not only can consider the past but can look to the future.
We can put ourselves, our parents, and our children in historic perspective, seeing everyone as having had a part in creative causation. We cannot control everything but we can control some things. If we are a part of the problem, we can also be a part of the answer. This is the creative challenge of being, feeling, and staying OK.
I drew P-A-C diagrams of my parents, seeking information about what my mother and father would have done, and what contribution to the subject came from the Parent, Adult, and Child of each. There were positive instructions as well as cautions, those same kinds of "beware" messages parents give their children to protect them. Apart from discovering new information about the content of my Parent, the most significant insight I derived was that they said a id of things about a lot of subjects throughout my childhood and later in life.
They also did a lot of things. Could any one simple statement summarize all of that, what Willa Cather's character Jim Burden called "my own infinitesimal past"? Would you like a few-word summary to represent everything you have said to your children?
Would it be accurate? A variation of the P-A-C diagram is to draw the Parent, Adult, and Child as cylinders, adding a dimension of quantity. Parents who say little to their children, who do not participate in their lives, or are not around, do not 1eave.
The more information in the Parent the more we have to examine, not only for conflict, but also for useful information about how to live. Analyzing this information may help us in day-to-day decisions-taking a different job, buying a house, getting married, taking a stand on a moral issue.
What would dad's Parent say? What would his Child feel? What would his Adult decide to do? What about mom's Parent, Adult, Child?
Then, what about yours? I I Thus far we have been dealing with destructive, impossible, internalized arncmptionr of what the child must do or not do to be loved. The child himself has made these decisions, based on his own interpretation of reality in a state of dependency and need.
Parents may well wonder what they can say or expect or require that will build happy children, secure in selfesteem and rewarded by mastery. We do not believe it is wrong to have expectations of children, provided they are clear and based in reality, which includes the needs and abilities of the child. T o expect nothing is a form of discounting, a way of saying "no point in challenging you," leading the child to assume he doesn't have what it takes.
Mastery is rewarding in and of itself. T h e baby figures out how to retrieve a rolling ball. A child learns to open the door by himself or to print his name. His parents may have helped him by showing him how, but once the task is mastered, the child wants to do it himself.
A little boy, held up to the light switch and allowed to turn the lights on and off, was asked, "What makes the lights go on? Much of the child's assumption about what to d o and what to master is derived from observing his parents. Children want to do what their parents do. If a parent plays the piano, the child will want to, even if his first efforts are tuneless and banging.
Language is uniquely human and makes thinking possible. We cannot, for instance, show a child how to behave on the playground we will not always be there with him. But we can tell him. Jacqui Schiff, a pioneer in treating adolescent schizophrenia, stresses the importance of three messages parents should give children: I You can solve problems.
She states: A frequent mistake in parenting occurs when the children are not offered enough "what to do" messages. Almost inevitably children will incorporate "don't" messages. A good rule to practice is, whenever children are told what not to do, they 1 You Can Be OK If 45 should also be told what to do.
This will build their confidence in their own OK-ness and capacity to solve problems. Happy Achievers Achievement that brings joy to the child grows from unconditional acceptance before the act, and not the other way around.
Knowing he is loved, he will want to please his "lovers," to "show and tell," to bring home reports of his day in the world. He is especially happy if his behavior brings the reward of parental stroking.
Even if the child has assumed a conditional "I can be OK, if" I finish my assignment, do my chores, behave properly, he is happy if the "promised" stroking is delivered. The contract then is complete. Unhappy Achievers When children do what is expected of them, they feel betrayed if stroking is withheld. This is done in a variety of ways and for a number of reasons the parent may feel are "good": 1. Stroking is withheld so "you won't get a swelled head.
In his discomfort he says, in Berne's laconic expression, "Shucks, 'twarn't nothing," knowing full well it was. T h e child goes through life climbing topless mountains and feeling the despair of bottomless pits, because the anticipated reward never comes. He doesn't stop trying, but hi anger and frustration build until he is consumed by them, often to the point of hostility. Achievements are not understood, and thus discounted. John brings home a trophy for winning a highschool debate on the best way to ease the international trade imbalance.
He overhears his mother tell a friend, "John always was a good talker," with no understanding of his achievement at grasping this complex subject at such a young age. You didn't do it right my way. A man works yean to become a medical doctor, then specializes in psychiatry. It's great you became a doctor, but did you have to become a psychiatrist? The Parent message here is, "Don't be you; be my fantasy of you. It isn't perfect. Susan and Jennie work several days to redecorate their room, including a new paint job.
On being called in to examine their finished product, father looks it over as they await his praise. Strokes are stolen. A young man receives "the most outstanding student award" and great applause from the audience. After the ceremony his mother says, "You see, I have prayed for you all my life.
You must give God all the glory. T h e young man needs at least a little of it. What is communicated is that mother needs the glory. Gratitude is genuinely expressed only when it is not demanded. Children learn to say "thank you" by hearing parents say "thank you. Strokes are tarnished. Gold stamps from peer admirers or other strangers to the family turn to brass as a parent downplays, "What do they know about anything, those p e e ple. If only you had gone to Harvard like your cousin Fred.
Accomplishment is belittled. Joseph works his way through college, and despite a full-time job, manages to win a scholarship to Oxford, then proceeds to be named a teaching assistant in cultural anthropology at a small New England college. Says his father, "Imagine little Joey Muldoon, back there with all those high-fallutin' folks. My goodness. Did you hear about George Wilson, just been made assistant manager at Sears.
Now there's a job for you! You weren't best. Maybe next time. There is no pleasing some parents or the Parent in some people's heads. Life for eternal strivers is a fruitless struggle to get something that isn't there. The insight that can relieve the pressure is that some parents' needs were so great they were not able to reward their children. Parental strokes external and internal are sweet, probably the sweetest, but in their absence we can look elsewhere for rewards-in our daily relationships, from our friends, from our own realization that we did a good job.
We did our best, and our best is good. We started this chapter with a statement by Dr. We shall return to this subject in Chapter 14, "Building Children. In the next chapter we will show how the past "replays in the present," in fact, replaces the present by an ongoing "inward talk with ourselves," an old dialogue that robs us of the awareness of the persons around us, the persons we so desperately need to stay OK, and also the persons who need us, most assuredly our children.
I The Internal Dialogue earching for something as simple as a dialogue in the brain's ten trillion synaptic connections is like looking for two bees saying "good morning" in a newly-hung swarm. Yet it is there, an ongoing inward talk made up of recordings of the thousands of exchanges between you and your parents, verbal and nonverbal, both comforting and castigatir 2, selfjustifying and self-defeating. The dialogue also is dated and most often plays just below the level of awareness, like a radio with the volume set low.
When we do become aware of it and, in fact, enter into it, we slip from the here and now into a past reality and temporarily leave whomever we're with. It is particularly disruptive to relationships if we depart in the middle of a conversation.
Staying OK with people generally means staying around. Understanding how the internal dialogue absents us is essential, therefore, to maintaining complementary transactions, which will be described in this chapter. What is the nature of our recorded internal talking? Our earliest "conversations" as infants were sights and sounds. S 49 50 Tht Internal Diologu The look on mother's face and the tone of her voice were primary communicators long before words were understood.
Touch, too, was a primary communicator. In fact, until recent years the tactile, skin-on-skin stimulation between mother and child has been emphasized as the main form of stroking experienced by the newborn. We now know that all sensory systems are "go" at birth, and the newborn sees and hean acutely in the bonding process between mother and child immediately after birth. When mother smiles, the memory is stored. How we made mother smile was our contribution to the dialogue.
It is an often-repeated "conversation" because mother's smile, signaling the anival of food or stroking, meant survival. In speaking of the inner dialogue, therefore, we refer not only to words but to the total interplay of visual and auditory sensations we once felt and remded. These sensations included words, but the earliest and most deterministic recordings were preverbal. These recordings replay in the present. When your beloved frowns at you over his oatmeal, gour feelings come not only from a present disapproving look but from all the disapproving looks or nonsmiling events of your life, with a contribution, perhaps, from your oatmeal data bank: cold, lumpy, sticky, daily.
Your brain replays the old exchange: Parent-like frown registers; Child feelings follow. This "oatmeal" scene reminds us of one of our favorite cartoons. The setting is the dinner table. A mean-faced father and a mean-faced mother, along with a mean-faced big sister, are all glaring at shame-faced little brother. Says father, "You're the only person in the world I know who makes a crunchy sound eating whipped cream. Their replay is what we mean by the internal dialogue.
When the internal dialogue replays in the present, the i , I I Child and Parent carry on as they once did, the Parent ten feet tall and the Child two feet tall. An indication that such inner talk is recorded is that we do in fact talk to ourselves or inadvertently spit out phrases or words that are hurled into our awareness in mutters, self-reproaches, and epithets: Stupid! Now you've done It!
Have you ever been talking to yourself inside your car as you waited for a light to change and then suddenly become aware the driver of the car alongside you was looking at you? What part of you was talking? What part became aware you were being observed? Willie Stark's driver in All the King's Men regularly sputtered "B-b-b-b-as-tuds, bas-tuds, bas-tuds" as he caromed his boss's big Cadillac through the traffic of Mason City. Who was talking? And to whom?
Whether we spit epithets outward, as Willie's driver did, or inward, as we often do when we hear a voice, our own, giving sound to an accusation, such as "hrwyou've done it!
Sometimes the internal talk might better be likened to the babble of voices at a po! The internal d i a l o w can best be unclerslood as c sh 9 if awarmess from th here and nou, Adult [email protected] to t b there and t h thold setting of tAe original parentzhild d i a l p.
On occasion we hear internal applause. Good b y! G m d girl! Our parents' compliments certain1y weren't lost on us. Especially cherished, they were recorded on primary memory circuits and reinforced every time we behaved in such a way that they would say them again. Because, however, we were little, dependent, untrained, and unsocialized, and because we crunched our whipped cream, much parental response was correcting, assumed to be blaming, if not in fact blaming, and negative: Bad boy1 Naughty girl!
For many children growing up was one humiliation after another: "Not those socks," "Pipe down, sit up, bend over. Or "You're not old enough to drink coffee! He may assume so. Thus, I'm not OK. Three centuries ago Pascal wrote, "Man is so made that by continually telling him he is a fool, he believes it, and by continually telling it to himself he makes himself believe it. For man holds an inward talk with his self alone, which it behoves [sic] him to regulate well.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. We have unique vulnerabilities, unique histories, and a unique Parent. This explains why some criticisms run off us like water off a duck's back and other criticisms cut us to the heart.
If you are self-conscious about your nose, all it takes to make you want to flee the scene is someone staring at it in fascination. Long noses run in my family, physiognomically, ' The Internal LXdogiu 53 not functionally, speaking. Heidi, at age ten, asked me, "Mother, did everyone have long noses in your era?
I did give era a second thought, having something to do with ancient, and went to the mirror to check for wrinkles. In Tom's family noses were an issue, though I think his nose is perfectly fine on his handsome face. He thinks it is t m small, hearkg the tape roll, "Son, why is your nose so small? Wy mother thought being tall was better than being short, that tallness meant one had been well-nourished and well-mothered.
She probably also took into account the fact that tall people, more often than short people, communicate power and leadership. Though shorter than I, and not unaware of genetics, she nonetheless said to me once when I was a grown woman, "I don't know why you are so short. You were so tall when you were little. One of the most helpful features of T A is that its circle symbols can be used to diagram conversations, allowing us to "see" what we say and what part of us said it.
We can also diagram what happens when the internal dialogue takes over and removes us from the scene. At this point a brief review of transactions is useful.
Talking Pictures: Transactional Diagrams When two people are taiking there are six people present: the Parent, Adult, and Child of each.
T h e basic unit of conversation is the transaction: I say o r d o something to you, and you say or do something back. T h e purpose of Trans- actional Analysis is to determine which pan of me, Parent, Adult, or Child, produced the stimulus and which pan of you responded. Because we can visualize a transaction on the diagram, two rules of communication may be stated in the following way: 1.
I have this whole report to finish by noon. Go have coffee with everybody else. Respmsc: "Why do you always leave t h i n g to the last minute? When vectms of stimulus and resfmw nws each other on the transacibnal diagram, communication stops. Figure 40 Stimuluc "What's the day today?
It's filthy I" Respo? Your got a broken arm or something? Stimuluc "You doing anything important? Also significant is how well the persons know each other and whether the tone of voice communicates humor, mockery, silliness, or sternness. Many transactional configurations are possible. For other transactions, including duplex transactions, where communication is taking place at two levels at the same time, see I'm 0k-you're OK, pages Another type of transaction is the cuttingout transaction.
It is also called the discounting transaction because the person who is "cut out" feels discounted, or, literally, "I don't count. Discounting Nothing is more unsettling than discovering the person you are talking to isn't listening. Worse yet is when you respond stupidly because you haven't been listening. A hairdresser reported, "This woman I was working on was talking away and among other things she told me was that her father had died, and I blurted out, 'Fantastic!
They are designated Adult because they are socially-agreed-upon ritual exchanges that get a conversation going. When someone asks, "What's' new? The anticipated response is something on the order of "Oh, not much, what's new with you?
During the ritual we make a fast computation of how far we will go with the conversation, depending on tone of voice, speed of delivery, facial expression. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.
We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Im OK - Youre OK may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.
If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book.
The first edition of the novel was published in April 2nd , and was written by Gayle Forman. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Hardcover format. The main characters of this young adult, romance story are Teddy Hall, Kim Schein.
Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in If I Stay may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.
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