I'M Ok Your Ok

Benjamin P. Welch

Mr. Barnard

Psychology 200

December 1, 2004

A simple summary of I'm Ok-You're Ok will not give the needed credit that the book and its author deserve. It is a book that one must read to fully or even partially understand it's meaning and the author's viewpoint of transactional analysis. The author, Thomas A. Harris M.D., explains in this book the vast amount of experiences that affect the way we live our life from the moment we are born to the second we die. He explains the different feelings a child experiences from being taken cared of and attended to and vice versa. These feelings are described as "I'm not ok-you're not ok, I'm not ok-you're ok, I'm ok-you're ok, and I'm ok-you're not ok." The author explains how the interactions between a parent and a child help develop each of these feelings and tells how each one is either healthy or unhealthy. The book talks about the way every human has an "Adult, Parent and a Child" in them all interacting with each other to perform certain task and make everyday decisions. It was amazing to read how certain verbal and physical actions can pinpoint which of the three we are using to perform whatever tasks we are doing. This book is a great guideline to understanding one's own interpersonal behavior and understanding how to find and keep the "I'm ok-you're ok" attitude in life.

Human development has always puzzled me in that I just don't understand why everybody is completely different. No two people are alike in their ways of thinking, acting, or even dealing with everyday stress. I still don't understand all of human development but after reading this book I do understand a great deal more about it. I did not realize that the development of a person's personality starts from the earliest moments of life. It starts to develop when his or her mother or father holds them for the first time and it and it doesn't stop developing and can always change. As I have grown up, I have realized that many of my actions are just mimics of what my parents did during my childhood. Just every day simple things such as chewing the inside portion of my lip while watching television, which is what my father has always done. The book explained to me that I saw these things being done by my parents and paired them in my mind as what an adult does, therefore I do them now because it is an unconscious action caused by memories of my parents doing it.

Another area that enlightened me was the relationship between the child and its parent when cuddling is involved or as Dr. Harris puts it "stroking." Cuddling brings a sense of "I'm ok-you're ok." "I'm ok" being the feeling the child gets because he or she is being shown love by a larger, more inferior character (parent) and "you're ok" being how the infant feels about the parent. I also learned that the other feelings are just as likely to appear as in this last one. Dr. Harris explains that a simple neglect of "stroking" can cause a child to think he or she has done something wrong therefore causing the belief that he or she is not ok but the parent is ok. There are so many different reasons why children feel and act the way they do. The book also made me realize that what we experience when we are just infants have strong pulls on how we act and think as adults. Everything we do seems to go back to how we were treated as infants and how we saw our parents.

After I got passed trying to understand the value of stroking in children I moved on to how adults interact with adults. I learned that there is not a whole lot of difference between children and adults. As life proceeds adults look for just as much comforting and stroking as young children. Although their ways of doing so are somewhat vastly different their goals are still he same. Adults talk to each other to form a bond that is healthy to them both. If they agree then their levels of happiness go up giving them an I'm ok-you're ok feeling. Often when adults talk their "parent" or "child" tendencies may come out. Having read the book I understand that two people can not talk if both are not using parallel tendencies. A quick example is two adults are speaking with each other and the first says "looks like we will be late again this year." Then the second lady responds "It never fails." These two just had a parent to parent (parallel) talk because they were both speaking like adults and both wre interested in the other's words. If the second lady would have rejected the first lady's comment (child) and insulted her by saying she was just impatient the conversation would be finish because neither got and I'm ok-you're ok feeling.

I somewhat have come to understand that other people need affection to get through life felling that they're ok just as much as myself. Affection doesn't have to be a kiss or a