Category Archives: Inner Child Work

From Claude Steiner’s web page:

THE PARENT The Parent is like a tape recorder. It is a collection of pre-recorded, pre-judged, prejudiced codes for living. When a person is in the Parent ego state she thinks, feels and behaves like one of her parents or someone who took their place. The Parent decides, without reasoning, how to react to situations, what is good or bad, and how people should live. The Parent judges for or against and  can be controlling or supportive. When the Parent is critical it is called the Critical Parent. When it is supportive it is called the Nurturing Parent.

One ego state can dominate a person to the exclusion of the other two. An example of this is the excluding Nurturing or Critical Parent, which happens when a person is unable to use their Child or Adult. This person is at a great disadvantage because in order to be a well-functioning human being, the ego states must be available when needed.

With an excluding Parent as the only functioning ego state a person has to live without the benefit of his Child or Adult and is therefore cut off from two thirds of his human potential.

The Parent uses old “tapes” to solve problems, and is therefore usually twenty five years behind the times (though it may be 250 or as much as 2,500 years behind the times.) and is useful when there is no information available to the Adult, or no time to use the Adult to think. The Child, on the other hand, will create novel solutions based on intuition but these solutions may not be as reliable as the fact-based Adult decisions.

Photo credit.

From Claude Steiner’s web page:

THE ADULT. When in the Adult ego state the person functions as a human computer. It operates on data it collects and stores or uses to make decisions according to a logic-based program.

When in the Adult ego state the person uses logical thinking to solve problems making sure that Child or Parent emotions do not contaminate the process. People may conclude from this that emotions are not good. But it only means that in order to be rational and logical we need to be able to separate ourselves from our emotions. It doesn’t mean that to be rational and logical is the best way to be at all times. In fact, just as an excluding Parent makes for an incomplete human being, so does an excluding Adult have the same deadening effect on people. People will also object: “I am an adult and I have emotions!” and they are right. Being a mature human being or grownup is not the same as being in the Adult ego state. Little children can be in their Adult and well adjusted grown-ups use their Parent and Child all the time.

The Adult computes all the facts fed into it. If the facts are up-to-date, then the Adult’s answers will be timely and more effective than the Parent’s solution. If the facts are incorrect, the Adult computer will produce incorrect answers. A very important function of the Adult is to predict outcomes and to provide a fact-based critique of the effectiveness of people’s behavior in the pursuit of their chosen goals. This fact-based, critical function is different from the value-based function of the Critical Parent.

Sometimes the Adult uses information which has its source in the Child or in the Parent and which may be incorrect. This is known as contamination. When a contamination comes from the Parent it is called a prejudice. For instance when someone assumes that women prefer to follow a man’s lead instead of making their own decisions this is data which comes to the Adult the from the Parent, and is a contamination because it is accepted as a fact without checking it against reality.

The same unchecked acceptance of information can occur with information fed by the Child in which case it is called delusion. A delusion is usually based on a Child fear or hope that is accepted as reality by the Adult. For instance when a person is convinced that he is being poisoned by the government this is probably based on his Child’s fears which the Adult accepts, rather than on fact. An extremely important process in transactional analysis is decontamination of the Adult.

Photo credit.