preview

Im Ok Your Ok Essay example

Good Essays



A simple summary of I’m Ok-You’re Ok will not give the needed credit that the book and its author deserve. It is a book that one must read to fully or even partially understand it’s meaning and the author’s viewpoint of transactional analysis. The author, Thomas A. Harris M.D., explains in this book the vast amount of experiences that affect the way we live our life from the moment we are born to the second we die. He explains the different feelings a child experiences from being taken cared of and attended to and vice versa. These feelings are described as “I’m not ok-you’re not ok, I’m not ok-you’re ok, I’m ok-you’re ok, and I’m ok-you’re not ok.” The author explains how …show more content…

Harris puts it “stroking.” Cuddling brings a sense of “I’m ok-you’re ok.” “I’m ok” being the feeling the child gets because he or she is being shown love by a larger, more inferior character (parent) and “you’re ok” being how the infant feels about the parent. I also learned that the other feelings are just as likely to appear as in this last one. Dr. Harris explains that a simple neglect of “stroking” can cause a child to think he or she has done something wrong therefore causing the belief that he or she is not ok but the parent is ok. There are so many different reasons why children feel and act the way they do. The book also made me realize that what we experience when we are just infants have strong pulls on how we act and think as adults. Everything we do seems to go back to how we were treated as infants and how we saw our parents.
After I got passed trying to understand the value of stroking in children I moved on to how adults interact with adults. I learned that there is not a whole lot of difference between children and adults. As life proceeds adults look for just as much comforting and stroking as young children. Although their ways of doing so are somewhat vastly different their goals are still he same. Adults talk to each other to form a bond that is healthy to them both. If they agree then their levels of

Get Access