Simply

Chapter 3: The Four Life Positions Chapter 3 of I’m OK—You’re OK introduces what Harris calls the four life positions: I’m not OK — you’re OK I’m not OK — you’re not OK I’m OK — you’re not OK I’m OK — you’re OK At first, I found the language “I’m not OK” a little misleading. As adults, when we hear someone say I’m not OK , we naturally interpret it as something is wrong with me. That was also where some of our discussion about the chapter initially went. But Harris is talking about something that begins much earlier, before the age of five. Once I understood it from that perspective, “I’m not OK” began to mean something different. Imagine being a very young child surrounded by adults. They can reach things you cannot reach. They know things you do not know. They can feed themselves, go wherever they want, make decisions, and seemingly understand the world around them. Meanwhile, you are dependent upon them for almost everything. From that perspective, I’m not OK—you’re OK doesn'...

  The passion for truth  is silenced  by the answers which have the weight  of undisputed authority. -Paul Tillich Chapter 2 digs a bit deeper, and gives us a clearer picture of where "The Parent, Child, and Adult" come from.  The Parent is made up of recordings from roughly the first five years of life. These are the external events the little person (what we'll call a child moving forward to not confuse it with the term) saw and heard, what the grown-ups said and did. At that age, the little person has almost no ability to question any of it. Life is taken in like a sponge; it just is , and the brain stores it as truth.  Examples Harris gives include things like “the best people are Methodists,” “never tell a lie,” “pay your bills,” “you can never trust a cop,” and “busy hands are happy hands.” All of it gets filed as unquestioned fact.  Something interesting happens with conflicting recordings. If Mom says “you must eat dessert after dinner” but the...