How Your Adult Ego State Can Be A Lie

You have probably heard about ego states many times. But have you heard that your Adult ego state can be contaminated? By ego state contamination, I mean that states mix together. For instance, your Adult ego state might be mixed with your Child ego state. You think you are acting like an Adult, but your environment is giving you feedback, “This is not you. You are talking like a child.” You do not understand the world anymore, because for you this felt normal. But somehow you start to get an inkling that there might be something to it. When your Adult ego state is contaminated with other states, you do not get the responsible results you would like to achieve.

What do these ego states look like? When and how do you jump from one state to the next and how can they even be mixed together?

Ego

Other words for Ego are ‘personality’, ‘world view’, ‘belief system’, ‘psychology’ or ‘Box’ (as we call it in the context of Possibility Management). It is a complex assemblage of how you interact with the world and who you identify as.

State

A State is what you are in temporarily. For instance, your whole world view may have been shaken by an experience or by a realization and you no longer have any idea who you actually are — that is a Liquid State. Just as a substance can assume different aggregate states depending on the environmental conditions, your ego can be in different states.

Transactional analysis, developed by Eric Berne in the 1950s, states that the human personality consists of three ‘ego states’, each of which represents a whole system of thoughts, Emotions / Feelings, and behaviors from which we interact with each other. Berne distinguished between Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, and the interaction between them forms the basis of the theory of transactional analysis.

The Ego States | Eric Berne

Parent Ego State

The Parent ego state is a massive collection of recordings in the brain of external events experienced in approximately the first five years of life. When identified with this ego state, you hear either ‘praising’ or ‘critical’ Parent Voices in your mind that give you affirming or denying opinions about yourself, about other people, or about what to do to survive a specific situation.

Rules and Voices
These Voices in this rule-based worldview can sound like: “You cannot trust strangers,” “You have to be polite to everyone” or “You should clean up immediately.” A young child has no way to filter the data and so the events are recorded without question. Everything you feel in this state are inauthentic Emotions you adapted from ‘authority’ figures. These ‘authority’ figures can be, for example, parents, older siblings, the government, school teachers, institutions, advertising or religion.

The 12 Roadblocks to Communication by Thomas Gordon are the best example, as far as I know so far, of what a Parent ego state looks like and how you are interacting with the world.

Child Ego State

The Child ego state is a dead reference point from the past. It includes the ‘rebellious’ Child and the ‘scared needy adaptive’ Child. In this ego state you might be rebellious and love to ‘run away’, or needy and adaptive, in order to avoid encountering uncomfortable things that have once happened to you. You might try to continue encountering ‘lovely’ experiences that are naively irrelevant, because they are maintaining living in a Fantasy World.

In the Child ego state, you have Emotions, not Feelings. No matter how real the Emotions seem now, they all come from the past. Regardless of how present the fear, frustration, or how strong the neediness seems to feel, everything from the past is merely a memory.

Childhood Needs
The driving forces in the Child ego state are unmet needs. In this ego state, the ruling belief is “I cannot provide for myself.” As a child, you strived for certainty, adventure, love and connection, belonging and also significance. If one of these needs is threatened while you are in Child ego state, you will likely fall into unconscious behaviors to meet it. For example, as a child, you might have discovered that in order to meet the need for love and connection, it was important not to ‘rock the boat.’ One of your strategies for not rocking the boat was to not have wants or preferences and to ‘go with the flow.’ As an adult, this might show up when someone asks you, “Would you rather go to the movies or the park today?” and you respond with, “Either way is fine with me, you decide. I am good with it.” Maybe you appease with a shy smile already in advance.

The ‘Inner Child’
Nowadays, more and more people are referring to the ‘Inner Child’ as an active part of their being which they have to take care of. The idea behind this work is that the ‘Inner Child’ has needs, and a person can only be happy and whole if they ongoingly fulfill these unmet childhood needs.

Here’s another perspective: There is not such a thing as the ‘Inner Child.’ Childhood is over, you have grown up. The only thing which can happen is that you slip into the Child ego state, but that is not the same thing as turning back into a child. Trying to fulfill Child ego state needs as an adult is the same as trying to change the past: You will never succeed, because the unmet needs are in the past. You will never ‘fix’ your unmet childhood needs, the same way you cannot un-eat yesterday’s dinner. That time is over. As an adult you are responsible to take care of your incomplete Emotions around these wounds, around these unmet needs, but it is a fantasy world to take care of an ‘Inner Child.’

Adult Ego State

This is your free and natural ego state. The ego state of the Adult includes only the NOW. You use your authentic feelings to create your own life. In the Adult ego state, you acknowledge that you cannot change what has happened to you in the past. But you can take responsibility for your own thoughts and emotions and change your relationship to what happened to you. You can change the type of story about what happened and stop directing energy to the past, but create what is really important to you NOW.

Small Here & Now
In the small here and now, you are centered and you use the energy and information of your Feelings by having a low Numbness Bar. In contrast to the example above, here you have your Real Voice and can connect with others without emotional filters and triggers. This ego state is the only access to Archetypal Domains (see below).

Extension Of The Map | Three Further Ego States

In Possibility Management, founded by Clinton Callahan in 1975, the research about ego states has continued. In extension to Berne’s model, the following approach includes further domains in the underworld as well as upperworld.

Gremlin Ego State

Before diving into the characteristics of the Gremlin ego state, it is necessary to understand what Gremlin is. Gremlin is an active part or facet of your Being. It is a force of nature for non-linear creativity and acts mainly in the shadow or unconscious. Gremlin is the part of you that does whatever it takes to be successful in your Survival Strategies.

If you do not own your shadow world, your Gremlin, it owns you and is eating up your life. Gremlin is an integral part of you, no matter what ego state you are in. Just like your hand, it is always there, whether you are in the Child ego state or the Adult ego state. You cannot say that the hand does not belong to you, or that you are not responsible for what your hand does. Who moved your hand? When taking responsibility for that part of yourself, you transform an uninitiated Gremlin into an ally, who will stand by your side with his creative resources.

Distinguish between Gremlin and Gremlin ego state
It is also possible to be in a Gremlin ego state. This state includes behaviors like making sarcastic remarks or little evil jokes about people, trying to make them look bad so you look good. It is in your patterns to lie, cheat, invade spaces with your energy, make someone wrong, or to secretly hate others. The Gremlin ego state pretends to be Adult and is not easy to recognize. This state is dominated by the attitude “You do not get me” or “Before you get me, I will get you!”.

When your Gremlin ego state takes over, your purpose diminishes to mere Survival, at whatever the cost. This might even mean beating the shit out of yourself, hating others or yourself, being over-critical, and making yourself small or superior even if this means isolation and suffering.

Demon Ego State

Experience shows that when you repeat certain trigger sentences to yourself (e.g., “I am not worthy,” “I will never make it,” “I am a loser,” etc.), they invite an ego state called Demon. In this state, the trigger sentence opens a feeding space, like in a Café, for entities to feed on your life energy. This is part of a childhood survival strategy and gives you the advantage of reducing your energy to be less threatening or challenging to the authorities in your life, such as parents or teachers. By having less energy, you make yourself more harmless so they are less motivated to control, punish or attack you. The result is that you survived.

Being Vampired
You invite vampire entities by saying to yourself one of your trigger phrases. If you want to learn more about how to close that Café, please read SPARK 135 and reach out to a trained Spaceholder to go through the process.

Archetypal Ego State

In order to gain access to the Archetypal ego state, you must first be in the Adult ego state. You cannot get there from somewhere else. This means you need to do initiatory work first to be stabilized in your Adult ego state. That means you have taken back your Authority and have your Sword Of Clarity out all the time. You are designed to fly in that alive, archetypal domain. Through initiatory processes you can stellate (this word means, to change an absorbing planet into a radiating star) your four Feelings anger, sadness, fear, and joy, to ignite your inner Feelings Archetypes. These Archetypes are, respectively: the Actionist (Warrioress/Warrior), the Connector (Lover), the Sorceress (Magician), and the Spaceholder (Queen/King). If you want to get a taste of the Archetypal Domain, I recommend watching some of the latest superhero movies. All of these are mirrors of Archetypal Domains that we can perceive and from time to time inhabit together.

Different Ego States Create Different Results

You made it through the different ego states. I want to emphasize that an ego state is neither good nor bad. It is an ego state you slip in and in this state you have a different set of perspectives and resources available. The only difference is the results you are creating. In any ego state, which is not Adult or Archetypal, you are not present, and therefore you are in survival mode. Anchoring yourself into the small NOW of the Adult ego state creates a clear perspective. All the emotional baggage of the Child ego state drifts away from you when you affirm that you are no longer a child. When you are clear about the inauthentic Emotions, accompanied by voices, you can set a boundary and no longer obey these rules. It is up to you to create your life.

Your Life Is A Lie With A Contaminated Adult Ego State

When a person is in a different ego state than the Adult, it is relatively easy for both sides to recognize if they have dealt with this matter. You can even make your own map of what this looks like if you have slipped into the Child ego state, for example. Perhaps you become whiny, complain about the circumstances and demand that someone should finally do something about it.

And then there is a phenomenon that we discovered not too long ago in the context of Possibility Management and called it ‘Adult Ego State Contamination’. This contamination means that your Adult ego state is mixed with one or more other ego states — contaminated, so to speak. Just as water can be contaminated with mud or other particles. It is still water, but not pure, refreshing water. For the contaminated person, seeing their own contamination is often impossible at first. There are just too many blind spots obscuring the view. But for the outside observer, seeing another person’s contamination is as straightforward as looking into a glass of dirty water and pointing out the mud.

Another way to think about ego state contamination is to imagine that you are looking through a lens. Depending on the state of your ego, this is sometimes a clear lens, then a red, yellow or blue. But what if you never had anything like a clear view because your lens was contaminated with a bit of red, more yellow and a shred of blue? That would be your normal state then.

And it is the same with the contamination of the ego states. You think you are acting like an adult, but your results show you otherwise. Maybe you have already received the feedback “You are acting like my mother.” For you, this is not understandable at all, because your advice feels very adult. In reality, though, your advice is coming from your Parent ego state. Another example would be that you are never taken seriously at your work even though you bring well-thought out suggestions. When you observe yourself, however, you always make the suggestions from your Child ego state, speaking meekly so no one hears you or even has a chance to take you seriously.

If you are not 100% in your Adult ego state, but are instead contaminated with Child, Parent or Gremlin (in the rarest cases probably Demon), then the results will always differ from what you actually want to achieve. These results are proof that something else is going on with you.

Almost every human being has contamination. It is not an unusual thing. It is also not something to despair about, but to first notice. Recognizing and dissolving your own individual, childhood-created, ego state contamination is one of the greatest potentials for becoming the creator of your play world. Decontamination is a simple, although not easy, two to three year pathway where you will be supported by a coach and your chosen team. This process includes one-on-one coaching, Emotional Healing Processes, building inner Matrix, and consciously removing certain behaviors that do not belong in your Adult Ego. If Decontamination is your next step, please read on the following website the paragraph Decontamination procedures and reach out to one of the Decontamination Coaches. There are also several steps on how to prepare yourself for your personal path. Please find some possibilities below in the Experiments.

Love,

Lisa

P. S. For more information about Trainings & Coachings, please contact info@lisaommert.com.

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Experiments

Experiment 1: Notice other people’s ego states

For three whole weeks, pay attention to the different ego states of others and which kind of offers for intimacy / connection people make.

STEP 1: Notice what was the behavior that the other person did / did not that was Child / Parent / Gremlin ego state. Be specific (do not use general terms like “being adaptive” or “giving advice”).

STEP 2: Notice what happens in you: How do you feel, what are the kind of thoughts you have, and how do you act after their Child’s / Parent’s / Gremlin’s ego state offer?

When you have done this experiment, enter Matrix Code EGOSTATE.07 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.

Experiment 2: Listen to your own voice messages

Listen to your own voice messages you are sending. In which ego state were you in, when you recorded it? What does this sound like? How is the tone of your voice? Which words are you using? Can you hear underlying assumptions or expectations? Are you complaining? Advising?

Create a personal map about which ego state you are in when you are in contact with different people. Do this Experiment for at least one week and document your research in your Beep!Book.

When you have done this experiment for a week, enter Matrix Code EGOSTATE.08 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.