I'm Ok- You're Ok by Thomas A. Harris | Chapter 2

 

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 child sees her eating cake at midday, the contradiction is too much. The child may simply turn off or block one of the recordings to protect against the confusion. 

This is only Chapter 2, so I’m hoping we get more on how that blocking works and what it costs the Child later. 

Harris spends a lot more time on the Parent than on the other two states in this chapter. It makes me wonder whether that was just because the idea was more prominent or because he finds those early authority recordings especially powerful. Two stories help make the point concrete. One is about a mother who taught her kids never to leave coats on the bed. When the kids finally asked why, it turned out her own mother had taught her the same rule because the neighbors had lice. The original reason no longer applied, but the Parent recording kept running. Another woman grew up in a place where all leftovers went to the pigs. Even after she no longer had pigs, she still refused a garbage disposal and kept saving scraps. Eventually her husband installed one and she was fine with it — once the Adult had a chance to update the old data. These examples show how Parent material can trail along for years, even when it’s no longer useful.

Because the original recordings were never questioned, it can take time for them to lose their force. As mentioned, we don’t get nearly as much about the Child in this chapter. What we do get is a reinforcement that the Child is the emotional, feeling part of us. Harris uses the example of a bride crying at her wedding (socially acceptable) versus a bride screaming at the groom (not). Both reactions come from the Child. This part of us is also described as inherently carrying the early conclusion “I’m not OK.” Harris then answers the natural question: do the Parent and Child keep recording after age five? His view is that by the time a child starts school, the major Parent recordings (the attitudes and rules from the parents) are already in place. Anything that comes later is mostly reinforcement of those early tapes. The same goes for the Child — he finds it hard to imagine that any emotion hasn’t already been felt in its strongest form by age five. The part that keeps growing and processing new experience is the Adult. 

At the end of the chapter Harris turns to the Adult and shows how the three states connect. He starts with a 10-month-old who can finally move around on his own. Up to that point life has largely been controlled by others, a kind of prison. Once the child can crawl and explore, the Adult begins to develop. the ability to move from what was taught (Parent) and what was felt (Child) into what can be figured out through testing reality. The timing roughly looks like this: the big Parent and Child recordings are laid down in the first five years, while the Adult starts emerging around ten months and keeps growing. A quote that sums it up cleanly:

“ Through the Adult the little person can begin to tell the difference between life as it was taught and demonstrated to him (Parent), life as he felt it or wished it or fantasied it (Child), and life as he figures it out by himself (Adult).”

The rest of the chapter shows diagrams of how the three parts interact. I’m going to save a fuller discussion of those elements for later chapters. For now, the key takeaway, as I see it, is that recordings from felt experience (Child) and taught experience (Parent) get processed, checked, and updated through the (Adult) once we start living more consciously.