Ego States — 6 Different Orientations in Your Life
A roadmap to find clarity in your inner universe.
The following distinctions and experiences emerged out of the context of Radical Responsibility and the gameworld of Possibility Management. The context defines which degree of responsibility you choose to relate with Life. This article might bring some triggers up in you. I invite you to take responsibility for them. Write them down in your research-book and ask somebody to hold space for an Emotional Healing Process.
During the last years I was researching about my contaminated Adult ego state. I was hitting internal walls of expansion. I knew something else must be possible and I could not step out of old habits and behaviors. My Being wanted to expand by holding space for bigger groups, writing articles, getting visible for the world, taking a stand for something bigger and greater than myself.
After more then ten years of Emotional Healing Processes and Inititation Processes I went on the next chapter of my personal development journey.
I learned about the different ego states and their tendency to blend and contaminate the Adult ego state. I discovered how they play out, how they taste, what consequences they are having and how they are blocking me to actually do the work what I am here for. Holding space for transformational spaces for groups and individuals.
These are my findings and discoveries.
Mixed Signals and Ego States
Mixed signals from people are signs of contaminated Adult ego state.
Arnold Mindell referres to it as Double Signals. Mixed signals are when a person sends two or more informations at the same time, which are not fitting together. It is almost like two identities are talking to you. Even the content of the words is clear, the voice might be off or a gesture indicates a no but the words are saying a yes. The body speaks its own language with gestures, mimics and behaviors. The spoken word says something else then the body language reveals.
What are ego states? A terrific question, which has occupied me for some years and I am getting more and more clarity about how these fields of consciousness express themselves in people.
Let’s break the term “ego state” down.
What is “ego”?
The ego is a set of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that you are identified with.
What does “state” mean?
A state is temporary. Like H2O has states, like water, gas or ice. It is not permanent but temporary.
An ego state is a temporary state in which the ego identifies itself from its inner orientation. An ego state has its own set of thoughts, beliefs, habits, behaviors and energetical and emotional imprints & patterns.
In Transactional Analysis (TA), Eric Berne described following 3 ego states.
Child Ego State
Incomplete emotions, unmet Needs, hurt, rebellion, tantrums, submission, adaptation
Feeling stuck in powerlessness, anxiousness, helplessness, emptyness are indicators that you are orientated in your Child ego state. What you feel are actually not feelings but a mix of emotions, that wants to be healed and intigrated. These emotions are incomplete feelings from the past and they are coming with a specific unique set of habits and behaviors. In your childhood you did not get your needs met for many different reasons. To survive you made decisions how you want to relate with people, life and yourself. The behaviors you have created to avoid pain, to soothe stress, to escape, etc., are still operating and are contaminating your Adult ego state.
Parent Ego State
Inauthentic emotions, rules, criticism & praise, Shoulds, Musts, Have-to
While growing up we were listening again and again to external authority figures. Authority figures included parents, grandparents, teachers, relatives, etc. What they said to us, to others and how they were relating to the world. Being by nature dependent as children provokes the intrinsic motivation to accept and agree and to make what was said and done normal, even if it was verbally, emotionally, energetically abusive. A common survival strategy is to internalize these voices and behaviors. Bad news is that these internalized voices and behavioral patterns are still active and are playing a major role in how we are relating. The two main strategies are being critical and superior or pleasing and over-nurturing, also known as mothering.
Adult Ego State
Using Feelings, small Here, small Now, authentic voice
From your Adult Ego state you are approaching life with the identity of a researcheress, an adventureress, a woman, a man who is interested in Life, which happens in the here and now. The now has no words and no time. One now is added to the next now. As an Adult I understand that I cannot change the past, I cannot change what has happened to me. What is possible is to change how to relate to what happened, the story I am creating. I use my ressources to navigate life, intimacy, creation and stay present in the experiential reality.
Building on these distinctions, researchers in the gameworld of Possibility Management discovered 3 additional ego states that were identified and characteristics expanded and adapted to the context of Radical Responsibility.
Gremlin Ego State
Defensive or attacking attitude towards life, the world, people
The Gremlin Ego state has so many aspects. Operating out of your Gremlin ego state comes with the flavor of survival on any costs. Hiding behind a wall, not meeting reality, creating masks, layer by layer to not be seen. The orientation towards life is an ongoing fight, an ongoing suffering from circumstances, protecting, hiding, attacking, playing small, playing superior, having all under control, being cool, being OK, being invisable, worthless, unworthy of love, unlovable, and many more. The ego state is not the action itself but the inner point of origin, from which you are looking and interacting with the outside world.
Vampire/Demon Ego State
Trigger sentences & sayings, giving off energies, letting yourself be sucked dry
In the Vampire ego state you have invited energy life forms to feed on you. By telling yourself sentences like “I am a mess.”, “I am ugly and unlovable.”, “Nothing will ever change.” ,“It will always be like this.” ,“I cannot do anything about it.” you are putting yourself into a victim possition. In this state you are denying yourself from power and energy resources you actually have. This has an effect on your energetical boundaries. With these sentences you are opening the door for entities, which will suck you out until they are fed enough to let go. You give unconsciously an invitation and permission to the universe “I don`t use my energy for my creation, this energy is available to you!” You are holding a low frequency. The unused energy is the attraction for life forms to say “Yeah there is energy to get, this human being is not using it, let`s have a feast!” To get into a state of being centered, grounded and holding your own space, having clarity of energetic tools and understanding that you are responsible for how you are opening your field to have been sucked out, is the way out.
Archetypal Ego State
Bright Principles, Winning-Happens, Speed of Love, Archetypal Intimacy
Accessing the Archetypal ego state is only possible when you developed a stable Adult ego state through initiation processes. The archetypal domain is built of Love, Clarity, Possibility, Creation, Connectedness, Transformation, Healing and other Bright Principles. Having activated your 5 Bodies and learned how to use your Feelings, keeping First Position, having developed observational skills like scanning and noticing, you are able to create archetypal intimacy with people, nature and Life.
I will describe to you the characteristics of the different ego states in more detail and give examples that make this abstract concept tangible and experiential.
General characteristics for contaminating ego states, we call it a contaminated Adult ego state, is when double signals go out from people and are mostly sent out unconsciously, i.e. when the intention of the communication is not congruent with the content or when information are perceived through a filter and causes reactions in various forms.
A very obvious example is when the phone rings from one of your friends, and their mom is calling. Once they pick up and start talking they shift their voice into a child-like singsong melody-voice. Another great example is you are entering a room with people you don`t know, once you pass the door your energy shrinks, your eyes are fixed to the floor, you are lifting your shoulders and you want to hide. Or when shaking hands you squeeze out a nice fake smile. Or you might even bend your knees when greeting someone as you would say hello to the King of England.
You have certainly experienced situations in your life in contact with people that have left you with more ambiguity. Situations where communication with people was made more difficult by an extra action, gesture, facial expression, emotion, movement or tone of voice. It was complicated to the point that you could not be sure of the clarity and accuracy of the statement. In addition to the spoken word, there was so much different information conveying unclarity.
Looking through your glasses, you may experience situations in such a way that you expressed something and your counterpart received and understood something completely different. You cannot comprehend how this could have happened, as you, from your point of view, communicated everything quite clearly.
When the Adult ego state is contaminated by different ego states like, Child, Parent, Gremlin, or Demon ego state, the results you produce are different then being centered in your Adult ego state.
When you are centered in your Adult ego state, clarity, integrity, responsibility and collaboration are fundamental principles, which are fueling your interactions with other beings.
When you are contaminated, the results are evidence that something else is playing out. One evidence is that you think you made your communication all clear but the receivers are getting again and again a different information. When taking radical responsibility as a sender of informations you will start to ask why people receive something else then you send out.
When you are walking the path to become an initiated adult, at a certain point of your journey you will hit a wall of expansion. Your Being wants to expand, but because your Adult ego state is contaminated with other ego states, there is nothing it can expand into. This is where the journey gets interesting and you have to activate your researcher identity to discover together with a coach what is really going on inside of you.
The Decontamination process is discribed by Vera Franco here and in a nutshell the process is about finding out the different behaviors, which are indicating that you are in your Child, Parent, Gremlin, Demon ego state instead of your Adult ego state. After identifying these behaviors it becomes a sorting process, one behavior at a time. The different ego states have an energetic signature, a space within yourself. The purpose is to put the behaviors into the related ego state space instead of letting your Adult ego state be contaminated by it. Once a behavior stays for at least 3 days within the ego state it belongs to, you start with the next one. Step by step you will free your Adult ego state. You can look at it as a cleaning process. You will not get rid of the behaviors, this is not the intention, but you gain clarity and choice to stay present in the small here and now, with a small I relating to Live in the moment without learned patterns and reactions intervening.
You cannot do this alone. If you want to reflect yourself all by yourself, you will fool yourself. I tried it and others did, too. It does not work. The Decontamination process takes up to 3 years, with a Decontamination Coach and a team of other researchers.
And to make it clear, it is easier to see the mixed information in others. This is an invitation to start noticing the differences in others, when they are talking to different people. How they change their posture, their tone of voice, their facial expression when talking to what they consider to be authority figures, when they talk to their parents or their pets, compared to their best friends, etc.
By observing others you might get the first hints about yourself. You might feel ashamed or embarrassed, which is actually a sign that you are reaching unknown, or better yet, suppressed and unconscious territory in yourself.
This is exactly the point, where you have the chance to get to know yourself better and gain more clarity and capacity to stay present in the here and now and unfold the overlapping ego states.
Every person is experiencing these states differently, because they are designed uniquely during childhood with very specific conditions of upbringing.
To gain clarity about your ego states it is important to pay attention to the dynamics between the ego states. For example the child ego state has a direct correlation with the parent ego state. It’s an interplay between these two, like a child and parent are talking to each other. Just because you are grown up and live in the body of a physical adult does not mean that the dynamics of the ego states inside you have ended. You have internalized your Parent voices and those of authority figures. You have accepted the rules, emotions, habits, beliefs as a child to be safe. As a grown up person, you are probably still using them against yourself or as projections against people who are close to you.
Additionally, the Child ego state would intertwine with the Gremlin ego state to protect itself. This means that parts of the Gremlin ego state are linked to the Child ego state so they are keeping the survival strategy alive.
When all of these ego states are overlapping, like you see on the map, there is not so much Adult ego state left to express itself. Only in the centered and grounded Adult ego state creation and alive expression of consciousness is possible.
Everything else is based on survival mechanisms and is a repetition of the past.
Therefore the focus of becoming an Adult (with capital A, which means an initiated adult) is to get more and more clarity about the ego states interplaying with each other and to step by step decontaminate the Adult ego state from the other ego states. This process is like I already mentioned above a 2–3 year process with a Coach and it includes various Emotional Healing Processes on the way to free the inner space from emotions and energetical patterns.
The following is a thoughtmap of the contaminated Adult ego state created and used in Possibility Management.
I will show you examples and start with the Child ego state and elaborate on all of the 6 ego states mentioned above.
Child Ego State
The driving force behind these actions are unmet needs associated with emotions that were not completed in childhood. For example, fear of not being heard, fear of being rejected, fear of not being able to take up space, fear of not being loved, fear of being alone, fear of not being there.
The actions arise from the old wound, the hurt from back then, which is activated or stimulated by a situation. The actions have a wide spectrum and express themselves very differently. The wounded Child ego, the rebellious Child ego or the angry Child ego are three main approaches of the Child ego state.
The basic needs of a child which were not met are:
Love
Belonging
Security
Adventure
Significance
When 3 of these basic needs were not met, children establish survival strategies and habits to try to meet them. These survival strategies and habits are still opperating unnoticed until you put your researcher glasses on and start exploring them. I never met a person who had no symptoms for Child ego state so far. We all have them established and many people will label these habits as being an adult, because the clarity and distinctions are missing to identify them as unconscious patterns operating since childhood.
Examples & situations in the Child Ego State
- You expect people in the room to recognize your needs and be there for you without having spoken to them about it.
- You say “I’m hungry!” into the room and expect your partner, friend or family member present in the room to respond.
- You get up in the morning and the first thing you say out loud to the room is: “ Oh, I’m so tired!”
- You meet a friend and in greeting you throw your arms out to the side without saying anything and expect a hug, in which you then snuggle up to the other with eyes closed.
- You ask, “Did I get that right?” — and wait for approval of an external authority figure.
- You point your finger at something (pillow, blanket, salt, butter, etc.) you want and expect someone to notice and bring or give it to you.
- You laugh or smile to make a situation “safe” for you.
- You use a high-pitched voice of a small child and want to get attention and support.
- You touch people, e.g., on the arm or shoulder when you talk to them without consent.
- You squeeze your shoulders together.
- You put your head to the side and smile.
- You rub your hands on your upper legs while listening, waiting or speaking.
- …
Parent Ego State
The inner orientation and direction of the Parent ego state is based on a rule-oriented worldview. Inherited emotions, rules, stories, prejudices, expectations of the parents, teachers, any external authority figure are internalized as a driving force and used as one’s own inner and outer critics or saviors. We refer to these inherited emotions as inauthentic emotions. The spectrum of actions goes from criticism to praise. The 12 Roadblocks by Thomas Gordon provide clear examples of how the Parent ego state expresses itself.
The 5 main drivers of the Parent ego state are:
Hurry Up!
Be perfect!
Please others!
Be strong!
Try hard!
Examples & situations in Parent Ego State
- Even though your partner has clearly taken on a task, before the deadline you agreed on is reached, you ask if she/he/they has/have already done it or when she/he/they will do it.
- You use the word “should” or “have to” or “must” when telling someone something.
- You give advice instead of possibilities.
- “You should finally start doing xyz!”
- “But, we still have to talk about it!”
- “You did a great job, keep it up!”
- “That’s an impossible behavior on your part!”
- “I don’t accept that”
- “You will apologize now, immediately!”
- “Do not do that! “That is not allowed!”
- “You did it right.” or “You did it wrong!”
- “I told you so!”
- “If you would have only listed to me, then you ….”
- “If you would have asked me, I would have told you, that…”
- “You have to…!”
- …
Gremlin Ego State
Before I go into the Gremlin ego state, a distinction needs to be made as to what Gremlin is. Gremlin is a part of the being, a force of nature for non-linear creativity. As children, we used this power to develop survival strategies, which kept us safe. By growing older our life circumstances changed but our survival strategies stay the same. You are unconsciously defending your survival strategies even they meanwhile block your personal development. Your Gremlin is executing your strategies to still keep you safe. This is what we call in Possibility Management the uninitiated Gremlin. All egos states, besides Adult and Archetypal, are designed and operated by your Gremlin. These ego states are survival strategies, and every survival strategy has a benefit.
Here you can learn more about what Gremlin is and about the path of Gremlin Transformation.
In the Gremlin ego state, you have an internal attitude of “You can’t get me” or “Before you get me, I’ll get you!” Shadow Principles, also known as underworld principles, are nurtured by this inner approach towards life. It’s an inner orientation rather an action.
Examples & situations of Gremlin Ego State
This state is mainly about the inner attitude and alignment towards the world and your fellow human beings. From the outside it smells like a hidden agenda, something in the communication with this person is off, probably this person is not keeping deals or does not show up for important meetings.
I discovered two dominant attitude towards life:
Attitude 1 “You don’t get me”
- You sit across from your boss and put on your best poker face , so he/she can not read you.
- You avoid to be “caught”.
- You are the lonely wolf, doing it all by yourself.
- In meetings with your fellow community members you put everything you noticed as defence strategies within yourself on the table, you leave nothing out. Noone will get you, can give you feedback, because you got yourself first!
- You have many different groups or friends that you are active in/with and everyone knows you from a “different side” and these groups do not know about each other.
- You look inside for mistakes made by others, you need to be better, always.
Attitude 2 ”Before you get me, I’ll get you!”
- You think people are inherently bad and you will prove it.
- You search for mistakes others do. Search enough, you will find something, then you have the proof! You got them.
- You are constantely alert about others actions. You are prepared to fight.
- You strategize about possible scenarios in your mind and prepare for the attack.
- You search for allies to defend your position.
- …
If you find yourself reading these examples and thinking, ‘Isn’t that just how people interact?’ it is likely that your Adult ego state is especially contaminated with that particular ego state.
Vampire/Demon Ego state
This ego state is based on the assumption that humans are used by entities as energy reservoirs. Experience shows that certain sentences, so-called trigger sentences open the energy system of humans so other forms of beings are unconsciously invited to serve themselves on the life energy until they are full and move on to the next person. During the energy feeding franzy, the person feels exhausted. You might find yourself lying in bed or on the couch doing nothing, because you simply can`t. Without no specific reason your energy level is back, you go on with your life as nothing happened, until the next door opener will be triggered and the next feeding on you starts.
Examples of trigger sentences
- “I will never make it!”
- ”What if that never ends?”
- “I’m just too fat.”
- “I cannot anymore!”
- “I will always be alone!”
- “No one is there for me.”
- “Life makes no sense.”
- “He/She doesn’t love me.”
- “I will never make it!”
- “What if they are right? I am a bad/stupid/worthless…person.”
- …
There is a very effective possibility for stoppping providing energy to entities and to close your “all you can eat”-buffet forever.
If you are interested to learn more, read S.P.A.R.K. 135.
Adult Ego State
The Adult ego state is the state of being where you consciously use your 5 body intelligence as a resource to navigate and shape your life. You distinguish between feelings and emotions. You are consciously using your feelings of fear, anger, sadness and joy. They provide information, which create possibilities from which you can choose your next steps. You consciously use your emotions as an invitation for Healing.
In the Adult ego state you are centered, grounded and you hold your own space, you are in a small here and Now and you use your authentic voice.
Only from the Adult ego state is it possible to navigate into the Archetypal ego state. The Adult ego state is the only state of being in which you have choice and transformation is possible.
In all the other states only repetition of patterns, survival strategies and behaviors is happening. It might be a shock to hear that a lot of your behaviors have nothing to do with the here and now. By facing this reality you get one step closer to become more Adult. You know where you are, where your X on your inner landscape map is. This is good news, because you know from where you start to find the treasure.
In the Adult ego state, you are aware that you have different states and you can distinguish and consciously separate them. You are noticing your repeating patterns and use your conscious anger to keep your inner clarity. You stay in your researcher identity while observing, sorting and starting new ways of relating to and with the world.
These 13 Tools are helpful to develop and create more space within your Adult ego state, so that your Bright Principles, Gaia and your Archetypal Lineage can start to do their work through you.
Archetypal Ego State
This state of being is still the least explored for me. Even though I`ve experienced this state before and I am able to describe how I felt and to name the results I created, I still cannot explain how I shift between the Adult ego state and the Archetypal ego state.
When I was in the Archetypal ego state I was feeling an inner calm contentment of being alive, nourished and well fed by Life itself. In this state often less words are neccessary, because the forces of nature speak a different language then words. Their language are Bright Principles like Clarity, Empowerment, Aliveness, Transformation, Teamwork, Collaboration, Winning Happening, etc. Bright Principles are archetypal forces of nature, which are doing their work through humans with the world
From my experience the archetypal domains are the most tangible and experienceable in consciously held transformational spaces, in which the context is held clearly by a Spaceholder who is anchored in the Adult ego state.
Once such a space is opened the Bright Principles can enter, flowing in and doing their job so that what is, becomes possible. In this state, a minute becomes an eternity and collaboration makes winning happen.
With the pace of Love, a conscious space is opened which allows synchronicities to happen that cannot be planned. Since all spaces are connected this state opens up access to it.
There is so much more to discover about the 6 Ego States and please see this summary as my personal research documentary.
Since 2023 I am holding space for the Child Ego Decontamination process for clients, who prepared themselves enough to go on this discovery and decontamination journey. If you are interested in having a conversation with me about this process, please reach out through my website www.christineduerschner.net.
You can find more information about this topic on https://decontaminations.mystrikingly.com/.
In connection with Life
Christine Dürschner
Child Ego Decontamination Coach
