As a result of the difficulties I have experienced and of my exposure to the works of James, Sartre, Berne, Steiner, Tielhard de Chardin, Flach, Harris, Gawain, and Jampolsky, to name but a few, I have had to completely rethink my ideas regarding my personal identity, my fundamental beliefs of right and wrong, and personal and social responsibility.

     My personal ethic, to this point, has consisted of a single universal truth; that a person has the right to do and enjoy anything which does not harm another. Ben Franklin is credited with putting it this way: "one man's rights end where another man's face begins." A similar sentiment is expressed in the words of Dr. Thomas Harris in I'm OK - You're OK , when he states that evil consists of treating human beings as if they were things.⁽¹⁾ But what is a good definition of harm and where does one fit in the concept of intent? What about self-harm? Unless one lives in total isolation, doesn't self-harm, in fact, harm others indirectly, especially those concerned with one's welfare? Regarding responsibility, Harris quotes the French, l'amour est l'enfant de la liberte' (love is the child of freedom). We must each free ourselves of restrictive and oppressive programming before we can be truly effective for those we love.

     I believe that many people will initially find the idea of their inner Child and Parent playing cloak and dagger games with each other somewhat appalling. I believe PAC is, however, currently the best model in existence of the human psyche, and TA contributes an exacting and profoundly elegant explanation to the patterns of human behavior. It provides me with a developmental model for my life experiences without visible seam or contradiction. It satisfies the highly-developed intuitive part of my mind, in addition to my spiritual and emotional selves, as a given mode of therapy must to hold any hope of success for me. This, I can see, has been the basis of my incomplete acceptance or outright rejection of all previous methodologies to which I have been exposed.

     The process which I am undertaking and recording within the pages of this book, I call Psychoself-Exploration (PSE). This is basically a self-mediated form of psychotherapy built around the principles of Transactional Analysis , Jampolsky's Love-based System of Thought,⁽²⁾ and my own theory of the Five Selves . Initially, orientation and problem definition were achieved through the concept of the Five Selves . Although the nature of interpersonal difficulties will vary from individual to individual, the existence of some dysfunction within the personality is virtually a given in this day and age. This must be resolved prior to other phases of self-improvement in order to get the most out of those later endeavors. TA, practiced in the pure form described by therapists such as Steiner and Harris, appears to be so far superior to any other psychotherapeutic mode or approach that it is the only one that can be seriously recommended as the substrate of a self-guided search for personal autonomy.

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     People decide to change when they have sustained sufficient pain to cause an intense dissatisfaction with the state of their existence. Once the decision is made, the problem defined, and the person commits to the transactional approach, there are two prerequisites toward maximizing benefit. First, one must familiarize oneself with the concepts of TA and adopt a provisional "I'm OK - You're OK" within the Adult (A₂). A review of basic literature is recommended such as: Scripts People Live - Claude Steiner,⁽³⁾ I'm OK - You're OK Thomas Harris,⁽¹⁾ and Introducing Yourself to TA - Leonard Campos.⁽⁴⁾ There are many others and Shea Books (1259 El Camino Real, Suite 209, Menlo Park, CA 94025) is an excellent mail-order source with a wide selection. Secondly, persons with hamartic scripts must suspend self-destruction in the interim while undertaking PSE. Institutionalization may have solved this problem for some, otherwise it requires the combination of a committed program of deconditioning through self-application of aversion techniques (see strategic countermeasures) and the enlisting of outside help from family, community, and/or professional support sources.

     I have accomplished these things, and produced the written review of the significant relevant events of my life, as I perceive them, which you have just read. The stage is set, and the characters have been developed; now begins the analysis which leads to the cure. Dr. Thomas Harris states, "If a person can put into words why he does what he does and how he has stopped doing it, then he is cured, in that he knows what the cure is and can use it . . . "⁽¹⁾

     Differing opinions as to procedure exist among the various individual schools of TA theory and clinical practice, which are probably all generally effective for the average client. It is my intent here to outline a rigorous approach which, provided that the client is totally committed, can be effective, even with the more recalcitrant and convoluted of problems. I offer a candid and detailed portrait of my own struggle, along with a look at the personalities of myself and my wife, the dynamics of my family relationships, and a description of the outcome to this point, so that you, the reader, may have a fairly thorough example of one person's response to the challenge of resolving his own developmental difficulties.

     During the course of this discussion, I will present elaborations of my own device as contributions to the body of TA theory, but which must be regarded as strictly Op-Ed on the part of this author. I am neither a trained nor certified transactional analyst, but I have, over the last six years, studied what is very probably the equivalent of a dissertation project on the subjects of psychology, psychopharmacology, and the self-healing of personality dysfunction. I am a trained scientific observer, with research experience, and I am succeeding with my own addiction, utilizing the techniques in this book. I therefore have confidence in what I am about to set forth.

     After one has familiarized oneself with TA and reviewed his or her subjective life experience, there remain four steps to the PSE therapeutic process. First is an in-depth structural and functional examination of the personality. Some experts do not see the necessity for this, and, in some cases, this might possibly be true. However, my own personal difficulty has been professionally described as a "worst-case-scenario," and I am certain that this type of thorough self-understanding has been essential to my success. Next, comes a careful elucidation of significant scripting, followed by the designing of a strategy of intervention and antithesis. Finally, one must practice what has been learned, until it begins to come naturally within the context of one’s lifestyle.

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     Professional transactional psychotherapy is a conjoint effort, divided 50/50 between the therapeutic group and the client. It, therefore, stands to reason that the rate of recovery and the degree of success could be increased, possibly dramatically, if the client could enter the group equipped with a reasonable degree of insight into his or her personality, its problem areas, and an understanding of the therapeutic process. This is an essential aspect of psychoself-explorative therapy. Since PSE is, by definition, initially a self-mediated process, the pre-therapy self-analysis is fundamental and necessary in order to get the individual involved at all levels.

     We will now examine the details of my personal difficulties as a specific example of the application of these concepts. Below, the symbolic representation of my Five Selves is intended to illustrate graphically the effects of the processes described in Part II of this book that, in combination, I believe produced a troubled personality and the behavioral problems arising therefrom.

     Summarizing briefly: early lack of awareness, and later, outright denial, of a primary developmental failure of my Emotional Self led, ultimately, to a reliance upon the artificial stimulation of drive reward centers with drugs to compensate for, or escape from, the resulting discomfort and joylessness. Hidden beneath the medical correction of a physical condition with which it was deeply intertwined, this contaminated behavioral response became a dysfunctional node within my personality that grew malignantly, disrupting my natural drive priorities for behavior, and blocking the development of the internal interface between my consciousness and my higher spiritual self in the process. Responding to these disordered drive priorities, warped the development of my character – a phenomenon to which I was blind, due to the very block just described. This lack of self-awareness, along with the subjective illusion that my strategy of "chemically enhanced cognition" had been responsible for the initial successes of my early adulthood, led to the idea that life was imperfect, and should be "fine tuned" through chemistry. From this philosophy, a distorted self-image and a perception of my physical being as nothing more than a bag of chemicals evolved, and I failed to learn to care for myself in a nurturing way. The drug itself suppressed my creative awareness and eroded my reason, effectively eliminating the very resources needed for growth, and making change virtually impossible from within this autistic reality that I had constructed for myself.

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     The process of healing and restoration must take place, as I now see it, on three existential planes – addiction recovery, script resolution, and spiritual harmonization. The diagrams on the next page are provided to illustrate this concept.

*This process began nearly a decade ago for me and should be maintained throughout life.

     In his ground breaking works on TA, Dr. Berne perceived the need for a simple, cogent, and straightforward theory of behavior and mental function which could be understood by both the client and the therapist. He believed that this, along with the development and use of a comprehensive, precise, and standardized language of descriptive psychotherapeutic terminology, would be necessary in order to eliminate the shameful but pervasive practices of obfuscating professional ignorance and ineptitude behind walls of self-serving sophistry, sinister casuistry, grandiloquent pomposity, and pyrotechnic feats of verbal legerdemain which permeate the history and literature of psychology. I agree wholeheartedly.

     It is nearly as important, I believe, that we are careful not to ignore essential complexities of the human personality in favor of over simplification. There are three areas in which I believe this to be especially important. While it is possibly unnecessary to proceed in such detail for effective therapy for many people, I think a more thorough examination of the operant processes in these areas may be indispensable in difficult cases. Since mine appears to be such a case, we will briefly reconsider the topics of: structural complexity of ego states, the existential position, and multiple scripting, before beginning the actual analysis.

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 Structural Complexity of Ego States

     Long-term memory is stored in at least two different formats within the brain. There seems to be an automatic involuntary encoding of the highlights of our moment by moment experiences into a permanent linear data string. Considerable scientific evidence exists to confirm the fact that we have stored in our minds a nearly continuous chain of memories of aspects of events and experiences which, for one reason or another, captured our attention at certain moments along the way, extending back, possibly, even before we were born. Some of this is consciously inaccessible, or accessible only with great difficulty and the use of special techniques, due to the fact that is exists only in an incredibly long, layered, linear matrix with few, if any, cross-references.

     In addition to this fantastic quantity of information, there also exists memory stored and organized for recall. Powerful emotion, or an act of will which attaches importance to ideas and feelings, may trigger this process, and cross-referencing of enormous complexity appears to exist. This vast storehouse of information within the intricate chemical structure of one hundred billion brain cells forms the basis of the ego states of each unique human personality.

     The concept of ego states is simple and easily understood. The precise details of structure and function are another thing entirely. Some elaboration of our original discussion of this subject seems to be in order before proceeding.

The Second Order Parent - (P₂)

     A great many difficulties arise from the Parent. This ego state has a certain natural tendency toward disjointedness since it exists as recordings of different aspects of different people. In order to achieve a useful understanding of the psyche of the individual, I think P₂ must be evaluated with regard to at least the following four criteria:

• Maturational level - This refers to how an individual's unique life experiences have influenced the rate and quality of the development of his or her Parent ego state? Were both of the natural parents present during the formative years? What type of parenting did they employ? What was the emphasis upon the learning of nurturing versus controlling information according to sex-role-programming within the primary family group? In other words, does the person have a strong, well-developed, or a weak and immature, Parent ego state?

• Content balance and coherence - Parent information is generally classified into two broad groups of either nurturing or controlling instructions. How much of each was actually learned from each of the significant early authority figures present within P₂? Is there a good balance of the two types of information from which the person may draw? How much of it is appropriate and effective and how much represents erroneous and prejudicial fantasies of the care-givers? Coherence is also a relevant criterion for evaluation. Do the recordings tend overall to be internally consistent or does considerable conflict or discrepancy exist?

• Integrity - A catastrophic effect of the extreme conflict of premises and incoherence of content is the disintegration of P₂. This loss of integrity or fragmentation can present such a distressing predicament for the Adult that it may chose to partially or completely block off the information contained within the Parent. This leaves the individual severely lacking in standards for evaluating behavior and with a drastically impaired conscience.

• Interface quality - The structural qualities of the interface between the Parent and the Adult must be carefully probed to determine its nature. If the Adult has decided that it doesn't trust all or part of the Parent's programming, it may have partially or totally excluded P₂ from the personality. The important idea here is that exclusions do not necessarily have to be total. One might, for example, exclude the nurturing aspect if the information there is believed to be scanty and/or unreliable, creating a fear within the person which causes avoidance of situations which require nurturing of self or others. The person may avoid becoming a parent or may rely totally upon the controlling side of P₂ with obvious detrimental effects to self and family.

     If the interface is not strong and well defined, overlap and contamination of the Adult may occur. When erroneous information from the critical controlling Parent bleeds over into the Adult and is then accepted as objective truth obtained as a result of observation and deductive logic, serious delusions, often in the form of prejudices, become unconsciously ingrained and the person may labor at length to manufacture "proof" to support her/his delusions.

The Second Order Adult - (A₂)

     Interface integrity/permeability is a prime consideration when evaluating the Adult ego state. A maturationally weak Adult may have difficulty achieving separation from the Parent and Child with mild to severe effects upon the individual's conceptual reality. Contamination by the Parent can lead to distressing character defects, and extreme permeability of the Adult/Child interface produces psychosis. In addition to social and developmental factors, drugs which affect mentation can weaken these boundaries considerably.

     More subtly, when evaluating the strength of A₂, one must also take into account the difference between the functions which require reference to the Parent or to the Child and the functions which operate independently. A person may have a highly developed Adult (good logic function, rational awareness, and extensive memory data stores), but, at the same time, display dysfunctional judgement, cause/effect reasoning, and/or confusion over issues with strong emotional content. Such behavior may, in fact, be the secondary manifestation of a problem which is actually located within P₂ or C₂, and which has impaired those of the Adult's decisions/predictions that were dependent upon acquisition and appraisal of Parent or Child information.

The Child - (C₂)

     The low accessibility of the Child ego state necessitates careful evaluation. It must be remembered that the Natural Child (C₁) may actually consist of two or more separate aggregates of sensory and emotional memory, corresponding to major changes in childhood self-image between birth and adolescence. These discreet entities may exhibit considerable qualitative disparity, including disposition regarding OK'ness issues.

     The content of the Primitive Parent (P₁) is profoundly colored by a magical quality, and though it may also contain nurturing messages, P₁ can probably generally be counted upon to contain highly charged injunctions and attributions posing a major OK'ness threat to the entity(ies) composing the Natural Child (C₁). This leads to a condition of dynamic tension in the overall Child ego state with the Little Professor (A₁) caught in the middle. The qualitative differences in the functional manifestations of autonomy, compliance, rebellion, and withdrawal are a direct result of shifts within the balance of this tension.

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The Existential Position

     It certainly seems to me, from observation and personal introspection, that the life OK'ness position is considerably more complicated an issue than I have seen described. Each ego state, being a fundamentally different entity in source, structure, and function, contributes to the existential position of the individual in its own way.

     I believe that, within most of us, the birth position of the infant Natural Child is the free position of mutual OK’ness. However, if changes in the childhood environment were abrupt or intense in their effect on the youngster's perception of the OK'ness of self or others, there may be other distinct entities within C₁, separated by discontinuities of time and place, whose position is different or even uncertain and confused. This would be most apparent in persons shuffled from one foster home to another as children.

     The primitive Parent (P₁) contains information of great potency which may be in direct opposition to the birth position, again creating the state of dynamic tension, mentioned above, within the Child and an epic struggle between P₁ and C₁. The little professor may be quite confused in its attempt to resolve this dilemma. I would guess that, for the majority of us, P₁ is a pig-parent carrying a powerful not-OK'ness from its injunctional programming with which it is usually able to terrorize C₁ into silence. As a result, the little professor probably maintains an uneasy truce, with the balance of power shifted toward P₁ and not-OK'ness.

     Since P₁ is largely unconscious, we are usually not outwardly aware of its position, though it is certainly possible to sense the fear and anxiety present in our inner Child ego state if it has not been excluded from the personality. Thus the existential position of the Child is primarily unconscious or preconscious and it is the primary position of the individual. Having been decided by the little professor (A₁) under duress of the pig-parent (P₁), it acts outside of awareness to powerfully affect behavior and is the driving impetus toward script development. I further believe that this may change at times when the natural Child is cathected strongly. The natural tendency toward OK'ness is resilient and surfaces when oppression lifts.

     A related set of circumstances exists within the outer or second-order level of the personality. The Adult must adopt a conscious position with regard to the OK'ness of self and others in order to experience itself as being effective in formulating policy, making decisions, and calculating probability. This secondary position is consciously externalized and may be in direct opposition to the primary position. The Adult has several sources from which to synthesize this opinion.

     The critical controlling Parent contains information, learned mostly from the mother and father, concerning the OK'ness of others and it also contains the driver messages which place conditions upon personal OK'ness. The Adult has factual observation data too, from which it may draw. It sees the effect of its behavior on its surroundings and upon the lives of others as reflected in their expressions and in their behavior. As we saw previously, our minute by minute security/insecurity index is determined by the continuous interaction of P, A, and C in the Miniscript Cycle that results from their intercommunication. While transitory in nature, this cycle causes the accumulation of emotional memory within the Parent and Child of which the Adult may apprize itself.

     Thus one can readily imagine a person with the depressive position (I'm not OK like everyone else) as his/her primary position of which he/she has little awareness. Further, this individual could conceivably have adopted the arrogant position (I'm better than you) as the secondary position, possibly from all of the information available, but, more likely, to compensate for vague, preconscious feelings of anxiety and inadequacy emanating from the Child. The resulting behavior would not be convincing to a savvy observer who identifies all of the subtle sabotage perpetrated by the not-OK Child.

     The ultimate goal here must be the deconfusion of all ego states harboring any of the three positions (arrogant, depressive, or futile) which contradict reality and promoting the adoption of the free position in each of these ego states. The implications are enormous. This consensus aborts the dynamic tension and replaces it with well-being and self-esteem. It frees up the mind from the waste of useless guilt, shame, blame, and worry which saps our creative problem-solving energy and from feelings in our Child of anxiety and inadequacy which paralyze our ability to act.

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Multiple Scripting

     I would like to briefly discuss one final idea before proceeding into my self-analysis. This is the simple proposition that a person may have one or more additional script sequences "piggybacked" upon the primary script or counterscript. The primary script theme and pattern were adopted by the little professor, usually before the age of six, to reconcile the disparity between the OK'ness of the prince(ss) and the injunctional programming within the pig-parent. Ever resourceful and creative, the little professor may elaborate and embellish with additional artificial behavior constructs along the way in response to feelings on social issues such as vocation, sex-role expectations, etc.

     Thus it would not be hard to imagine, say, a firstborn female with a primary script of the loveless/depression category with a failing at love life course and a never script pattern who goes from one unsuccessful relationship to another in response to childhood injunctions of don't love and don't trust . Furthermore, she might have a typical firstborn birth order superscript as the conservative bearer of the family standard along with a female gender superscript, such as Kerr's Tough Lady, if there was not strong permission to be a girl. I believe this idea is easily understandable without further discussion.