Love your child.

I love this theme....the inner child....makes me smile just thinking about what a fantastic difference this awareness can make in your own life, I really hope I can interest you to invest in some personal work on this topic once we've spoken here. Really there's no greater positive, creative resource that you have within you, right now, than your own 'child' self!

Our inner child self, is that part of us that's fun, energetic, exciting, inquiring, innocent, uninhibited, naive, boundlessly joyful, creative, enchanting, spiritual, loving, accepting, generous, open minded, ageless! These are just some of the attributes I see in my own child self, you have them too......mine can also be stubborn, irrational, demanding, selfish, self absorbed and thoroughly trying for somebody not in love with me!

The key is to be loved and accepted for all of ourselves, for who we really are and not to have bits of us that we must keep hidden because they are unacceptable to someone else. That would be conditional love and what we should all be striving for in our relationships in unconditional love....not necessarily unconditional 'liking' or unconditional accepting of everything and anything, that's not realistic......ahh it's all so complicated isn't it and this was intended to be a simple chat .....I've gotten all adult on myself!!

To get back to my point, I'll just say a bit about TA because I wanted to introduce this to you, I think you may find it helpful if you're curious to gain more control in your communications with others. I know for me it was like a light bulb coming on! And I could at last literally see what was going on in me with certain people I connected to. And it always follows, before you can change something you got to understand what's happening....



When I discovered transactional analysis I knew I had found a way of understanding how we work that is both really simple to grasp...especially for a visual person like me....and surprisingly relevant to our everyday communications and interactions - or our 'transactions' as they call this in TA terminology.

Very basically we have three parts of ourselves or aspects to our personalities from which we operate during all our transactions as they say in TA,  or to us, our  'interactions' with others. These three 'states' are  - Parent, Adult and Child.

I don't want to go on too much about TA other than to paint this picture for you so you can see where your 'child' fits into this picture. 

Depending on the relationship dynamic that exists between people, and our own experiences, we will tend to respond to certain people and situations from different parts of our self...even with subtly, or not so subtly, different voices as each state has a mood of it's own that shapes our mannerisms.

For example, 'critical parent' probably sounds clipped, sharp and judgmental, makes me immediately think of old skool style teachers!  This is one voice I think we can all easily hear within ourselves from our childhood memories, and possibly if we're really honest from our own use too! It's the one we sometimes catch ourselves using when we realise in horror that we're sounding just like our mothers! .

On the opposite end of the spectrum from our parent ego state, there's our child. It may have been some time since you registered your child having much say in anything in your life. Often this is the state that we think we need to put away when we become 'adults'. Lots of us keep our child hidden...in a metaphorical cupboard under the stairs so to speak while we try to be sensible and grown up, whatever that is.... and she/he may only show her/himself when we're upset, or funnily when we fall in love. 

Think about that for a  minute....under great emotional pressure we may slip into our child state...our voice changes and we can lose our 'adult' rationality, we're flooded with feelings that we can't manage and we may cry and whinge if we're upset at someone. This behaviour may solicit a critical 'parent' response from he other person. They might criticizes us for sounding like a child! Or, if they're more inclined to be gentle, their nurturing parent may comfort us and say in a kindly way  'there there sweetie, what's the matter...or something like that. You know what I mean I'm sure.

Being in love for example, brings out our playful, happy self...our child self. We laugh freely, giggle even and act irrationally, without adult consideration. It's fun and liberating to be in love, because it's fun to feel the freedom of a child to play. I think it's got to be a good thing to encourage our child within us to express themselves more often...we need to lighten up and laugh a little more often, life can be a dry old bone otherwise. 

Depending on who we're connected to we give and receive our 'transactions' from the various aspects of ourselves. Look at the model above and imagine arrows going back and forth indicating which aspect of ourselves each communication responds to. The idea of a healthy person, psychologically would be someone who is 'flexible' emotionally and able to move freely from state to state as appropriate to each situation and congruently to our true self. 

I hope this is starting to make some sense! See the simple diagram below for a basic transation model....It's can get alot more complicated than this,  but this is just to get you thinking and hopefully interested in looking at TA in more detail. 

If you can begin to understand your relational style, and learn which situations tip you into different states, you'll have a valuable insight with which to explore your history is with this sort of situation or personality. Through awareness you'll be better equipped to control how you respond, remaining in your adult mind, with emotions under control.  You'll  quite literally be able to change how others experience you which is key to successful negotiations of any sort.

The more understanding you have over why you do things, where that reaction comes from, especially when you lose your adult perspective... the better chance you have of taking care of yourself and remaining 'adult' and in control, in challenging situations.

I love this stuff as you can probably tell.  I love anything that gives me keys to understanding myself and my relationships, ultimately this is power in my life. I get to choose who I am!

Enjoy self discovering,

Bella