I’m Ok, You’re Ok summary

When you hear the phrase “multiple personalities,” you might think of someone with a psychological disorder. However, having different personalities may be more common than you think.

Psychologist Eric Berne, who passed away in 1970, developed a form of therapy called transactional analysis, and one of the main principles is that everyone has three main personality components.

If you try to think back to your earliest memories, how far can you go? Most of us can’t recall anything from our first two years of life, but that doesn’t mean this period doesn’t have a lasting impact.

It’s important to remember that there is a difference between consciously recalling an experience and unconsciously reliving it. Evidence from transactional analysis tells us that our emotional reactions regularly cause us to unconsciously relive our earliest childhood experiences, even if we can’t remember them.

Even if you’ve sworn never to behave like your mother or father, chances are you’ll eventually catch yourself doing exactly that.

We’re all programmed by old patterns of behavior that are informed by the Parent and Child parts of our personality.

Part of growing up is learning to recognize the emotions of others by looking at their facial expressions. In a similar way, you can learn to recognize your own inner Child, Adult and Parent.

The best way to do this is to understand the different physical cues that accompany each one.

As the saying goes, “Two’s company and three’s a crowd.” And this goes for the different components of our personality as well, since they don’t always know how to peacefully get along with each other.

A common problem is that the Parent or Child can prohibit the Adult from functioning properly.

Children love to play games, whether it’s Monopoly or hide-and-seek.

But sometimes our inner Child can play some troublesome psychological games, such as asserting superiority over others.

Everyone, at one point or another, feels so overwhelmed that they believe things will never get any easier. But if you’re able to step back and look at things with a fresh perspective, you’ll see that this isn’t a realistic outlook.

There’s a similar process of recognizing your own emotional patterns that will allow you to arrive at the feeling of “I’m okay.”