My Readings: I am OK - You're OK By Thomas A. Harris

 I am OK - You're OK By Thomas A. Harris

This is a very very very important book to read. I recommend everyone to read. It's important for us to understand why do the things we do and how we turn out the way we are. It also helps parents understand their children behavior and how to interact with children of different ages. The beauty of Transactional Analysis (the main subject of the book) is that it is easy to understand and very efficient in my humble opinion.

Transactional Analysis was originated by Eric Berne in his "Games People Play", which is now on my Want-to-Read List.  Following is a quote:

"The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other ..... sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response."

Thomas Harris defined Transactional Analysis (TA) in the book as follows:

"Transactional Analysis is the method of examining this one transaction wherein 'I do something to you and you do something back' and determining which part of the multiple-natured (Parent-Adult-Child)  individual is 'coming on'. "

According to TA, each one of us is made up of Parent-Adult-Child (P-A-C). The Parent is a collection of recordings we store during our early years, roughly our first five years. It makes ups all external events we witnessed where our parents or parents substitutes acted. It creates the rules that we prohibit our lives with, our morality whether they were good or bad.

The Child are another set of recordings that we store from our early years, however that represent our inner experience, how we response or feel towards our life events . 

The Adult is our thought process, our microprocessor that processes the stored information and compare it to the reality we live in. 

It's the data stored in each element of us and the relationship between these elements that makes us who we are and affects how we lead our lives and interact with others.

The book discusses how illness and disorders can be developed due to malfunctioning elements of our P-A-C. 

What's really interesting is that it can be easily taught to children and teens to help them through the instabilities and hardship of growing up.

The last few chapters is very captivating as the book dicusses morality, religion and society in terms of P-A-C and how collectively P-A-C afters nations.

Reading our past and coming into terms with it is important as much as accepting our responsibility of the NOW. TA helps us do that.

I recommend the book to everyone, read more here.