LEARNING TO LOOK OUT FOR EVERYONE, NOT JUST NUMBER 1
By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA
Editor & Publisher, The Earthian newsletter https://blog.effectivelearning.net/,
According to Eric Berne, MD, the euhemerous of transactional analysis, https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=eric+berne%2C+md success equals adaptability plus flexibility. What humans have to adapt and flex to are human group imagos and personalities in chains of ego states. Shown above is my “Chain of Ego States Diagram,” first published in my article titled “The Chain of Ego States” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/036215377800800307 in the Transactional Analysis Journal, vol8, no. 3 (1978).
According to Silvia Baba Neal, a certified transactional analyst in the UK, Berne defined a group imago as https://www.silviababaneal-psychotherapy.co.uk/blog/2012/09/18/Group-Imago.aspx, “Any mental picture, conscious, pre-conscious or unconscious of what a group is or should be like.”
This definition covers a lot of ground. What is a mental picture, whether conscious, pre-conscious, or unconscious? What is a group for that matter?
A mental picture of a group would depend on how a person visualizes things in his or her brain which would be a function of many possible variables, genetic brain architecture and neurological hardwiring, and also subjective messages exposed to in life plus any decisions made about the messages. Would the picture include colors or wound it be purely black and white? Would it be accompanied with audio recordings as in some sort of documentary?
Regardless, it seems to me it is fair to say that all people have fantasies, ideas, and pictures in their brains of what groups are and what they are like, based on previous experience. Berne wrote a book titled Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Dynamics-Organizations-Groups/dp/0394172493 in which he discussed not only groups but organizations, that is, groups of groups.
So much for group imagos that have to be adapted to if you want to succeed. What about personalities that have to be flexed to? Well, they are the personalities of the people in the groups and organizations you have to work with. What is a personality? Well, it’s the way people come across to others. How many adjectives can you think of to descript someone’s personality? Cheerful? Gloomy? Stingy? Living? Conscientious? Most likely if you really thought about it you could come up with a hundred or more.
Eric Berne was a great believer in using Occam’s Razor, that is getting to the heart of the matter in the most efficient way possible, using the fewest possible words to get your ideas across, so he comprised all adjectives one might use to describe a human personality into three concepts: Parent, Adult, and Child. In other words, does someone have a Parent, Adult, or Child personality or persona? Or, in a particular moment is s/her coming across as parent-like, child-like, or adult-like?
In transactional analysis (TA) terms flexing to someone’s personality entails trying to please the person by coming across as parent-like, adult-like, or child-like.
To get along you have to go along, not only adapting to the group imagos of people but flexing to their personalities, in groups and organizations. Transactional analysis gives you concepts and techniques for discerning where you and others are coming from so as to maximize your chances of success in the situation.
What is success? It seems to me success is a matter of achieving your goals and objectives. If you want to feel, think, or do something and you do it you’re successful. The problem is what you want to feel, think, or do may not be what someone else wants you to feel, think, or do, which entails frustration, compromise, not being true to yourself, not getting what you want, especially in groups and organizations.
The first group humans are exposed to in most cases are families, composed of a mother and a father, such as Number 1 in the Chain of Ego States diagram above.
Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like. People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are working, socializing, teaching, training, having fun or whatever. They transmit messages from ego states in themselves to ego states in others in various combinations, parent-parent, child-child, child-adult, adult-parent, or whatever. The diagram above applies to situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian organization involved, such as parents dealing with children, or bosses dealing with subordinates in a business. Child-child ego state messages are known as injunctions, since they forbid feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of various sorts.
Script messages are transmitted socially and psychologically, social messages being represented in the Chain of Ego States diagram above by solid lines and psychological messages being represented by dotted lines. Social messages are verbalized overt auditory messages; psychological messages are covert non-spoken ulterior messages transmitted by body language, emotional states, and after the fact positive or negative stroking as people react to situations and feel and do certain things.
Scripts in families are created automatically when parents transmit various messages to their children from various ego states socially and psychologically, in and out of awareness. Scripts are life plans generally decided before the age of eight by offspring based on script messages transmitted to them by their parents. Since parents by and large transmit the same script messages that were transmitted to them before they were eight years old script messages in families can remain intact for many generations. According to transactional analysts script decisions made before the age of eight have lasting effects determining three general life outcomes: winner, loser, and non-winner. These decisions can be redecided and updated later in life but it’s not easy for most people.
Psychological Child-Child ego state script injunctions are what cause the most trouble for people in their lives. Script injunctions in most cases are currently inappropriate and ineffective emotional and behavioral requirements logically created by families through time to solve problems or correct injustices in past harsh inhospitable environments that cause problems for offspring in current different and possibly more benign and hospitable environments.
Opposing, or opposite script messages transmitted by parents can put a child in a Not-OK bind throughout childhood and adolescence, assuming a divorce has not already occurred, causing considerable trouble within a family, since the child cannot please both parents, which can put both parents in Not-OK positions vis-a-vis each other if the child makes a decision about which parent is right, creating Not-OKness in the family system as a whole.
What many people need is psychological permission to violate and ignore their own psychological outdated obsolete family Child ego state script message Injunctions, not only to increase their own OKness, but the OKness of all the living members of the family system.
I became a certified transactional analyst, a CTA, after passing written and oral comprehensive exams administered by the International Transactional Analysis Association in 1978, after undergoing three years of once a month training, all day Saturday and half of Sunday, at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
I have covered ego states and scripts in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, listing common Parent ego state script messages and Child ego state injunctions. All parents do not transmit the same script messages creating considerable variety among family scripts and outcomes. Certain life scripts conveniently fit certain roles, jobs, professions, careers, and what have you more than others, providing fresh recruits already trained for job openings, slots, and positions in an economy, which is fine so long as the economy does not change too much. Unfortunately in recent years in the United States the offshoring of high wage blue collar jobs to foreign low wage countries and the use of more and more automation has rendered many family scripts obsolete.
Here are some chain of ego states messages I have observed working in organizations and groups as a professor and consultant taken from a passage on pages 187-188 from Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning:
PARENT CHAIN OF COMMAND MESSAGES: Be productive. Work hard. Make money. Be strong. Hurry up. Be firm. Be slow. Be pompous. Be polite. Be serious and reverent. Be silly and irreverent. Walk fast. Use em- phatic hand gestures. Make small talk. Don’t violate the chain of command. Go through channels. Be attractive. Be unattractive. Be short. Be tall. Look harried. Please me. Be perfect. Make the organization look good. Use innocu- ous, euphemistic words. Take your glasses off, and point with them. Wear a pinstriped suit. Dress nicely. Drive a Buick Electra. Play golf. Drink scotch. Cross your legs nonchalantly. Stroll coolly. Have another beer. Have some wine. Don’t wear a tie or dress nicely. Go bowling with the guys/gals. Ride a bicycle. Get a Toyota. Be a nice gal/guy. Act/be old/young.
ADULT CHAIN OF COMMAND MESSAGES: Hiring costs are $100; firing costs are $97. We need 1,000one thousand more units a month to keep up with the present sales rate. Enrollment increased/decreased X percent. X percent of our students /trainees report back that our teaching/training was beneficial to them. X percent of our students think they learn valuable, relevant learning in our classes/courses/programs.
CHILD CHAIN OF COMMAND MESSAGES: Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t be powerful. Don’t feel what you feel, feel what I want you to feel. Don’t be close. Don’t be you, be what I attribute you to be. Don’t belong. Don’t be well or sane. Don’t be sexual. Don’t be intelligent. Don’t be imaginative. Don’t make it. Don’t feel glad. Don’t learn. Don’t achieve. Don’t grow up. Don’t be energetic and confident. Don’t be spontaneous.
It’s not that easy to take care of Number 1 in life much less everyone else; but given global warming and other problems around Spaceship Earth one can build a case we should at least give the idea some thought. The capitalist economic system based on the premise that taking care of number one is the highest possible ethical goal is no longer working for most people.
Are there now more unsuccessful people than successful people? Based on incomes and wealth alone so it would seem. If so, what should be done? One idea is to get involved in Game-free groups to discuss what people might do to become more successful.
Assuming Berne is right, what people need to do is get together and discuss script messages emanating here and yon to develop consensual ideas for adapting and flexing with economic, political, and environmental problems and issues. A major problem is separating relevant focal points from irrelevant noise in order to comprehend what is really going on.
It will do little good to play AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game identified and labeled by transactional analystsError! Hyperlink reference not valid. to stroke humans for being innocent helpless Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political systems manipulated and exploited by rapacious sociopathic Persecutor oligarchs and leaders and their corrupt bought and paid for lackey politicians for selfish gain, however true that might be in reality.
On the other hand, it will do no good for Earthians to stick their heads in the sand to passively pretend everything is just hunky-dory and swell, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game labeled GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive comments about the environment and their lives.
Regardless of the causes of the Earthian plight, it seems to me individual humans should assume responsibility and take action for conserving energy as best they can in their daily lives to reduce greenhouse gases; but especially they should select politicians who will create economic and political policies and actions to correct environmental and social problems on a mass scale.
An existential question right now is whether humans can learn how to look after everyone, not merely number one, to prevent the extinction of the human species.
In the last six months I have tried to set up a De-Gaming Democracy group as explained in my article, “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” here in Statesboro, Georgia, USA, where I live, hoping to engage citizens of various persuasions, whether red, blue, green, or any other color, in discussions of relevant economic and political problems and opportunities to develop consensual realistic approaches to the environmental problems we face, in what I call the Ogeechee Economic Forum meeting the third Saturday of each month, with little success. So far four participants have shown up. It appears most people are not interested in, or are afraid of, transacting in a Game-free Adult way in public dealing with environmental, economic, and political problems and opportunities. Hopefully interest in this forum will pick up. It seems to me right now that humans all around Spaceship Earth should get busy in Game-free groups right now developing consensual answers for problems threatening their existence as a species.
For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis to create better democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human LearningError! Hyperlink reference not valid.
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems read free my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc. for some management science ideas on how Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic and political system that is viable and satisfying for everyone.