Our Inner Voices are Running the Show Until We Learn to Listen to Them
I have written about the importance of using transactional analysis to discover which of your inner voices has the main track. Our feelings come from our thoughts. So if we are basically in our inner child, we may feel inadequate, angry, abused, etc.
TA teaches us that we have inner child, inner parent, and inner adult. Each of these three mind sets also have good and bad components to each of them. The components of each of these is explained very well by Dr. Claude Steiner. Dr. Steiner’s biography is here.
The components excerpts are from this page:
(1) “Ego States and Transactions: People’s interactions are made up of transactions. Any one transactions has two parts: the stimulus and the response. Individual transactions are usually part of a larger set. Some of these transactional sets or sequences can be direct, productive and healthy or they can be devious, wasteful and unhealthy.”
“When people interact they do so in one of three different ego states. An ego state is a specific way of thinking feeling and behaving and each ego state has its origin in specific regions of the brain. People can behave from their Parent ego state, or from their Child ego state or from their Adult ego state. At any one time our actions come from one of these three ego states.”
(2) The Inner Child is referred by Johnny Truant writing for copyblogger.com. His post is titled: “What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing”
“You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?”
“Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”
“In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.”
“You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.”
“Because that kid always remains at our core (and if you’ve ever caught yourself playing kids’ games with genuine enjoyment, you know that it does), our base motivations remain as well. They just get a little harder to see.”
(3) “Art of Attention: Awakening” by Elena Brower encourages self-observation:
“Self observation, leading to self mastery, is the most neutral scientific observation of one’s self in order to discover from which center [physical, emotional or mental] the current reactions are flowing. Translated: to see which part of your being is enslaved to some external circumstance right now. To do so, practice watching your tendencies with curiosity instead of dread or judgment; the slightest bit of agility with your attention is all you need to bring you back to what is really happening, and your heart becomes more nimble all the time.”
[Tangentially, an example for the parents: your child needs you to be unshakably calm. Through watching myself overreact with my child, I’ve learned that to be an attentive parent is just to offer the simplest, calm responsiveness — and that our calm is infectious every time. I write this so I will remember this.]”
