Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Putting the Pieces Together
Putting the Pieces Together
Putting the Pieces Together
Ebook191 pages2 hours

Putting the Pieces Together

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

This book reviews the range of the psychology of normal individuals beginning with a short review of how the brain appears to be working followed by a look into life positions, states of being, Ok-ness, current existential positions, transactional analysis, personality types (with Myers-Briggs Types and Social Style. Then, it moves on into love, and play. The section on love includes a review of the works of Erich Fromm, Emotional Literacy based upon the word of Claude Steiner and including a section interactions involving mental injury and seeking of forgiveness. A new theory on how we play is included. And the last chapter looks and verbal assault and games that people play.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 2, 2014
ISBN9781310072987
Putting the Pieces Together
Author

Norbert Grygar

Norbert Grygar graduated from Temple Junior College (TX), attended St. Mary's University in San Antonio and then graduated from the University of Texas in Austin with a BBA. Afterward, I spent the next two years in the US Army during the Vietnam Era. Upon discharge, I entered the business world where I spent over thirty years in Casualty Insurance including earning the CPCU designation. During the time working, I became very interested in personality types after attending a seminar on Social Style which categorizes individuals as Amiable, Analytical, Driving, and Expressive. Much of the text of this book is the result of self study. Other interests include 10-15 years as a youth soccer coach including a stint as the local soccer association president. I am currently retired and living in Temple, Texas.

Read more from Norbert Grygar

Related to Putting the Pieces Together

Related ebooks

Psychology For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Putting the Pieces Together

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Putting the Pieces Together - Norbert Grygar

    Putting the Pieces Together

    Norbert Grygar

    Copyright by Norbert Grygar 2014, 2018, 2019, 2021

    Smashwords Edition

    All Rights Reserved.

    This ebook is licensed for your personal use and enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: Applied for

    Norbert W. Grygar

    Temple, Texas 76502

    Table of Contents

    Preface

    Introduction

    Chapter 1: Life Positions

    Chapter 2: Transactional Analysis

    Chapter 3: Social Style

    Chapter 4: Myers Briggs Type Indicator

    Chapter 5: Theory Unification

    Chapter 6: Play - Changing Styles

    Chapter 7: Love and Loving

    Chapter 8: Words and Games

    References

    The 2019 revision includes a re-write of Chapters 1 and 5.

    The 2021 revision includes a re-write of Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

    Preface

    This first half of this book has been written with the intention of showing inquiring minds how certain different books that were written in the last half the twentieth century fit together to provide a look at the range of individual actions. The books include I'm Okay -You're Okay – A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis (1967-69, Harris), Gifts Differing (Briggs Myers, 1988), Please Understand Me – Character & Temperament Types (Kiersey and Marilyn Bates, 1968) and Personal Styles & Effective Performance – Make Your Style Work for You (Merrill and Reid, 1981). These books present seemingly different looks at the psychological underpinnings of human behavior presented by authors from different schools within the field of psychology. Surprisingly, these works come together to provide a look at what constitutes a large part of the realm of human behavior.

    The second half of this book is about protecting our internal self within each of us. The sources begin with The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm and Emotional Literacy: Intelligence with a Heart by Claude Steiner, Ph.D. I have also used the three books by Suzette Elgin, Ph.D. on Verbal Self-Defense (The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense(1980), More on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense(1983) and The Last Word on the Gentle Art of Self-Defense(1987)). Drs. Berne, Harris, Fromm and Steiner were practicing psychologists while Dr. Elgin is an applied psycho-linguist and a professor of linguistics.

    The arrangement of the text will be an initial offering of earlier work done by others followed by suggested readings in that earlier work. The joining together of the different author's works into a coordinated whole is in a separate chapter near end the first half of this work. The second half of this book is about protecting our self from psychological harm. Here, my outline is to follow a progression of a description of the types of love, to learning how to grow in brotherly love, and then to recognizing and responding to psychological verbal attacks on our internal self.

    Return to Table of Contents

    Introduction

    My purpose in writing the first part of this book is to provide a framework to better understand other normal individuals, as well as ourselves, by uniting the works of others into a cohesive whole. The end result includes some ideas of my own.

    We cannot ever truly understand all that is going on in the mind of another person. We can be aware of our own conscious processes and thoughts and we can observe certain patterns in the actions of others. From what we observe, we can predict some responses with some degree of certainty.

    Our past shapes how we will react in a given situation but our intellect allows the choice to be ours. Prior life experiences, moral and religious training (and application of such training to our daily living), level of intelligence, and common sense, for starters, all contribute. To better understand others, what we can do is become aware of our own patterns and processes. And, we can train ourselves to recognize certain patterns and processes in others. Then, by being aware of those patterns and processes, we can reasonably predict how others will respond in some situations.

    The second part of this book is a structured look at protecting our self and is mostly based upon the work of others.

    What is different about this work is that the reader is asked to verify the writer’s solution by their own little test. In Chapters 3 and 4, the reader is asked to record choices that relate specifically to themselves. After you have recorded those eight choices, four from each chapter, the reader can jump to Chapter 5 or the last page of the book. There, they can see if the combining system solution relates to them perfectly. If the reader is not a perfect match, them they should find their Myers Briggs identifier in the same social style social style quadrant no more than one block away from their social style solution.

    Return to Table of Contents

    Chapter 1: Life Positions and Memories

    Life Positions, State of Being and Memories

    With the publication of I'm OK - You're OK (Harris 1967-69), many of us were introduced to the theories of Eric Berne. These theories have been grouped together collectively under the title transactional analysis. Actually there appears to be, at a minimum, three distinct parts. These parts are:

    1. The definition of a transaction and those theories that arise directly out of transactions.

    2. Life positions and, at a lower level, current existential positions. The life position describes our general overall guiding outlook toward living and current existential position describes a single relationship with a particular person or that toward a particular defined group.

    3. The diagnostics and communication tool referred to P - A - C. These three letters refer to Parent (P), Adult (A) and Child (C) which make up the key parts of a communications language to be used by diagnosticians and their patients to define and then proceed toward aiding and helping the patient or patients to heal. This language and pattern structure can be used both with groups and with individuals.

    The Transaction

    Harris wrote, Eric Berne, the originator of Transactional Analysis, has isolated and defined this basic scientific unit:(Harris, p.12) "The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other . . . sooner or later one of them will speak or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of others. This is called the transactional stimulus. Another person will say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and this is called the transactional response."(Harris. p. 12 and Berne. p.29)

    Neither Berne nor Harris discussed the properties of stimulus or the response. Spoken words in the form of requests or demands for something (including things, action/inaction, or information), offers of help, and simply saying hello all easily qualify as stimuli. Gestures, making a face (frown, glare, smile, sticking the tongue out, etc.), arm, hand, some leg movements, etc. also qualify as stimuli but are first thought of as being a part of a (transactional) response. The stimulus is all about getting or giving information or services by asking or telling and, with it, emotion is present. It is very easy to see the asking/telling aspect in the initial stimulus and the emotional aspect in the initial response. However, within the realm of human communication, both aspects are present in every stimulus and every response. The emotional content will be seen as ranging from low emotional content (mostly hidden - even so small as a added heart beat) to freely expressed emotional content. The non-emotional content is harder to label but it is mostly informational in nature. What is first wanted is somehow described by words or actions. Last, the initial response becomes the stimulus for the next interaction and so on in the transaction chain. Both the stimulus and the response have the same properties with an element of information expressed in the form of a question, a demand or an offer to aid or an reply to a question, demand, or offer for aid; and, an element of emotion is present that can range from mostly hidden or covert to an open or overt expression verbally or physically.

    Life Positions

    A life position is overall guide or philosophy of an individual in dealing with life in general over a period of time. These were named by a two part description of a relationship existing in the here and now. The terms so applied were; I'm Not OK - You're OK, I'm OK - You're Not OK, I'm Not OK - You're Not OK, and I'm OK - You're OK. These positions were named by Thomas A. White and presented to the public in his book, I'm OK - You're OK (1967-69), Psychologist Tone White has added two more positions based upon the work of psychiatrist Margaret Mahler. White wrote, I propose two additional ones based on the theories of Mahler (1965). She demonstrated that the newborn from birth to 12 months feels omnipotent. The infant sees mother/caretaker and self as having a common boundary and does not perceive himself or herself as being a separate entity. The infant is in a state of twilight existence in which he or she does not seem to know where he or she begins and where the other leaves off. It is only after achieving this strong attachment in the first 12 months that the baby spends the next 24 months endeavoring to become a separate individual. (White, p. 272) The new positions, then, should have been named, We/I are/am OK - You're Irrelevant and We/I are/am not OK - You're Irrelevant" recognizing that the infant does not recognize itself as being separate from its caregiver. Harris assumed the infant had a concept of self from the beginning.

    The meaning of OK-

    Harris did not explore this topic in I'm OK - You're OK, but the topic was discussed by Tony White in his paper on Life Positions. (269-276) For example, Stewart and Joines (1987) seemed to define the degree of OKness a person feels as the essential value (p. 117) that one perceives in oneself and others. This implies that it is more than just behavior. Steiner (1974) gave a more philosophical definition of OKness. He said that Berne had a conviction and 'faith in human nature' (Steiner, p. 2) about the OKness of people. As a result, we all are OK, even those who commit the most heinous deeds. Such individuals are not responsible for their genes or early backgrounds and thus are OK, even though their behavior is not. For his part, Novey (personal communication [with White], March 1, 1994) sees OKness as meaning I am an acceptable human being, with the right to live and meet my needs, and you are an acceptable human being with the right to live and get your needs met. For him, rights and acceptability are used in defining OKness. Finally, Harris and Harris (1985) saw OKness almost as a comparison of strength, power, and dependency between a child and his or her parents." (White, pp. 270-271)

    For those of us who believe in free will, we will have a difficult time absolving individuals of heinous behavior and placing the cause for such behavior almost exclusively on genes and background. But, the rest of the statements above probably each reflect aspects of what it means to be OK.

    The six OK-not OK positions are described as follows:

    1. I'm not OK - You're OK position: Harris proposed (pp. 37-53) the following reasoning.

    When we are born, a number of events occur. We experience hot and cold from our outside environments. Lights are very bright and sounds are really loud. We experience hunger for the first time. First and foremost, we are helpless. Most of all, we experience separation from our mother. Why?? What did we do to cause us to be ejected from a world where we felt no hunger and where we were warm and protected. Does our mother still want us?

    Whether from trauma of the birth experience itself, or from our comprehension of our helplessness, or from the experience of separation from our mothers and the following loneliness, or these factors in any combination, we develop strong feelings of not being okay. This is the first part of the first Life Position – I’m not okay.

    Our initial response to unsatisfied needs (such as being hot or cold, being hungry, feeling discomfort from a dirty diaper, etc.) is to cry. As our caregiver (usually our mother but it may be a nurse in a hospital nursery or another individual) hears our cries, she (or he) will try to figure out what is wrong and then try to make us feel better again. As the theorizing goes, we recognize that we are being cared for and that we are helpless in aiding the care process. And, we move toward the completion of the first Life Position of I’m not Okay – You’re Okay. I am helpless but am having my

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1