What is OKness?
Are you OK? This is what we ask people that we care about. We're OK though we don't always feel that way. And that's where Transactional Analysis can be helpful.
When the book, I’m OK – You’re OK by Tom and Amy Harris first came out it struck a nerve. People want to feel OK, and they want to feel OK about other people too. The question was, how to do that? Hierarchies and cultural biases say otherwise. Some people are more OK than others, no? The official line, at least in the US and other democracies, is that we are all equal. But psychologically and behaviorally, we enact one-up and one-down feelings and actions.
The wonderful thing about Transactional Analysis, or TA, is that it provides a roadmap to living in an I’m OK – You’re OK – and They’re OK lifestyle. Our work as Transactional Analysts is to weed out our not-OK feelings and beliefs, and grow our ability to accept ourselves and others.
Accepting ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t want to change. Yes, we are changing and growing out of learned patterns and ingrained social constructs so that we can enjoy the much happier feelings of OKness. We can avoid passing limiting beliefs to our children, our partners, and our communities. We can turn idealism into reality through empowering beliefs and behaviors.
To do that, we uncover the sources of our early decisions, get in touch with what’s possible today, and practice being OK with ourselves and others. Eric Berne, MD, whose book Games People Play was wildly popular, promoted the idea that we didn’t need to have a doctorate to understand ourselves and our psyches. He created TA with simple language that we can all understand and use.
OKness is a statement that all people are born with inherent dignity and worth. Whatever we experience and decide after that is a response to what we experience in our early years. Then we live out those decisions, even though our toddler selves had no idea there was a world beyond our families and that we would be capable of much more as we grew up.
TA covers everything from those early decisions to the games we play to reinforce them and the life scripts that have predetermined, often negative, outcomes.
OKness is about outgrowing the early limiting decisions, reinforcing our ability to honor our deepest selves as well as the value of other people, and creating the lives we want to live in the world to which we want to belong. The simple language of TA can be deceptive. It addresses life’s persistent questions and supports health for oneself and in relationships. It is useful at home, at work, and in community life.
One way to learn about TA and begin to apply it is to complete the basic TA Practitioner Course, approximately fifty hours of study and application, with support for using it in your life and in your profession. Our version of that course is “OKness in Action,” because it is not academic but practical, as well as being fun and enriching. When that is ready to start, I will post about it here.