THE OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS

The operating instructions of my approach helps you to understand why you are the way you are-why you feel, think and behave the way you do. There are four basic areas that comprise the basic operating instructions. The basic idea is that you can figure out the whys of yourself by looking at these four basic areas. The four areas are: Unexpressed feelings, Unmet Needs, Family of Origin Scripting, and the balance of power and vulnerability. These areas are clear identifiable internal things that can cause unhappiness or when worked on improve one's happiness on all levels.

So Psychotherapy in one way or another ought to address these areas. And I do in my practice and it shows in my work with Individuals and Couples, Families and in our Group work.

More About The Four:

• Feeling and Emotions and how they are experienced, processed and expressed.

Unexpressed feelings whether from 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years can cause unhealthy psychological and emotional symptoms like depression, stress, paranoia, anxiety, irritability, and explosiveness. Many times unprocessed feeling from historical/childhood wounds will get triggered like emotional land mines and splatter onto the present. It is in fact one of the main reasons folks try to medicate.

• Emotional Needs that all humans have, and how met they are, and what we do about their unmetness.

Unmet needs from your past can still reside internally looking for some resolve. The pressure of these unmet needs don't disappear and they influence and distort our present day perceptions and behavior. This influence can cause us to look outside to someone else to meet these needs. These unmet needs can cause us to look to things, substances or accomplishments to meet these needs or cause us to shut down or numb out about our needs. None of these are good scenarios for happiness.

So the second reason that the child ego state is unhappy has to do with unmet needs. Think about what kids need. Kids need love, support, attention, acceptance, appreciation, respect, nurturance. To the extent that the kid part of us has been and is being satisfied regarding basic needs, then there is a sense of satisfaction and contentment. To the extent that the child ego states needs aren't met satisfactorily, then there either is a numbness, an unhappiness or an external focus or driveness. Again, the external focus is trying to get needs met either through personal accomplishments, job performance or significant others. If we didn't get what we needed as children, we continue to seek the satisfaction of these needs in the present moment. This external need seeking can be fairly conscious or unconsciously directed through manipulations and dramas. This external effort to get child needs met is usually doomed to fail or cause power struggles and disappointments. It's a setup to feel let down!

• Internal Programming, primarily from our past, and how it influences how we feel about ourselves, life and others; how we behave in conscious and unconscious ways; how we believe about ourselves, life and others.

Internal programming or life scripts can influence how we feel and think about ourselves and others and the world. These scripts decisions are the basis for our self worth, relationship with money and success, choice in relationships, etc.

This third area is based on the concept that scripting is located in the unhappy child ego state and has to do with your family of origin and the emotional baggage and old childhood hurts that you may still carry. TA's name for this area is "life scripts." Scripts are, in essence, the residue of what it was like growing up in our families. Scripts can influence emotional states, relationships and even your success in the world. This influence can be very pervasive. They can determine your most common positive and negative feelings concerning how you feel about myself, how you feel about others, and even the partners you pick.

Part of self parenting therapy is learning how to identify and then change the negative scripts to more positive scripts. Another way of saying this is one of our purposes in life is to make peace with our personal history so that it doesn't contaminate our present. The child ego state is pivotal here because it holds these core beliefs or life scripts. This area of self parenting involves first identifying the negative scripts which are decisions made by the child part early in life. Given that they are decisions, then new decisions can be made based on the support of a mature grownup instead of the scared kid. This is called redecision therapy and there are some fairly famous TA therapists (Bob and Mary Goulding), who wrote and trained about this technique. The upside of this work is that negative life scripts, which can be powerful in their negative impact, can be seen as decisions and redecided. The possible downside is these changes usually take a fair amount of working with the child part from a number of angles. One of these angles is going back to some of the hurt that inspired the unhealthy decision and clearing it. Hurt kids can sometimes be stubborn, resistant, and mistrustful about risking more hurt with a new decision. So, patience is the first requirement for self parenting redecision work.

• How our capacity to be powerful and active and our capacity to be receptive and emotional is configured and balanced.

Personal Power is our fundamental means of relating in an assertive, dynamic, influential and impactful way. In an imbalanced state, we are uncomfortable with our strong feelings and focused actions. Difficutly with personal power can leave us in the extremes of being either overly passive and pleasing or overly aggressive and controlling.
Vulnerability is our need to experience and be open to life and relationships. In a dysfunctional state, we allow emotional or literal invasive experiences to lead to over-sensitivity to the outside. Too often we find ourselves in extremes of either codependency and caretaking or being calloused, oblivious or prickly.

In order to have personal power we need to have internal permissions and healthy limits. In order to be vulnerable and intimate, we must have internal protection and boundaries. Having them both internalized and balanced yields maturity, calmness and confidence--grace.Grace is the ability to be powerful with sensitivity and to be open from a place of strength.

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