Parent Adult Child

Hopefully this will be a shortish post.  If you know about Transactional Analysis you'll know about PAC: Parent Adult Child

And you may also know about Personality Adaptations. 

If not, I recommend TA today and Personality Adaptations. Two books by the same authors that I have found incredibly helpful in understanding my journey.  I also recommend seeing a counsellor if you're feeling at all wobbly, even if just a little bit because chances are if you've only just noticed you're a bit wobbly you've probably been misfiring for quite a while and everyone else will already know but have been too nice to mention it. At least that's my experience, your mileage may vary. 

Anyway, back to PAC.  Berne first suggested that all interactions between people form a transaction, with a stimulus and a response.  I'm not going to explain it further here, you can read his original book, Games people play.  The other book which developed this basic theory is called I'm OK you're OK.  They're a little dated in their written style now but still brilliant references. 

Berne suggests we have three basic voices that we use. Parent, Adult and Child. 

Modern wellbeing or meditation focussed on non judgement. And coming to rest. In my experience this allows one to move to observer, which is the Adult in PAC

The Parent is often considered to be sliced into four attitudes. Two are Critical Parent and two are Nurturing Parent. Within each the attitudes can be positive or negative hence four not two. 

Likewise the child has two primary attitudes, free child and adapted child. 

I have discovered that I have a lot of adapted child and critical parent in me. And they struggle with each other. I don't have much nurturing parent in me and as a consequence not much free child either. 

A simple example, for reasons I need not expand on here, my adapted child doesn't like going to bed.  My critical parent them starts to lay down the rules. I start to tell myself not to be so silly, and that tonight I am definitely going to bed at 10pm. 

Sure enough, bed at 1am having sat and watched complete garbage on TV. In the morning I'm tired and instantly berating myself. This is a negative feedback loop.

My adapted child then becomes fractious and anxious.  And so the anxiety feeds on itself and come bedtime... Off we go again. 

For several months now I've been aware of this.  And I've only just figured out how to resolve it.  

Nurturing Parent.  See, it's the adapted child that has anxiety. So Critical Parent is never going to help. 

I know, how many times have I been talking with friends of late about sitting down next to the inner child and providing comfort... I really should take my own advice. 

So I'll give that a go instead tonight.