7. I’m OK, you’re not OK.

Professor Feminita faced her Psychology 1 lecture class each Tuesday morning at 9 AM. She was always punctual, appropriately attired in a business suit, and well prepared. She was proud of her syllabi, and very good at public speaking. Sometimes she lectured, though more often she’d lecture briefly and then engage with the class in dialogue. She was one of those professors that tolerated note taking on laptops, but expected the students’ attention. If she discovered a student on Facebook or whatever else the students liked to do on laptops (or phones), she’d ask the person to leave. If she kicked you out more than twice, you started to get in trouble with her rubric. She would, on the other hand, send the students off on a web search. They were free to Google away; not infrequently they were expected or asked to do just that. So Dana Feminita strolled the room, beaming engagement and awareness. The student population was diverse in the rural community college where she and her husband Julian taught. The faces that looked back at hers were varied, but the demographic was predominately Caucasian. The language they spoke was often inflected with the accent of the rural American south, Northern Virginia version. She loved to teach. Her students generally loved her teaching. As a result of all of this, and for so many other good reasons, her colleagues esteemed her. The students, at her insistence, called her Dana.

Today, she was following up a reading assignment. She had assigned hunks of Thomas Harris’ famous popular psychology classic, “I’m OK, You’re OK.” They had been talking about TA for the past few sessions in their overview of current and past trends in psychological thinking. Transactional Analysis was a past trend, but because of the Harris book, it was relatively easy for the students to get it.
“Good morning!”
(The students express that sentiment in a murmur.)
“I hope you enjoyed the readings. I hope that most of you actually did the reading! We have learned a little bit about Eric Berne and his ideas in past lectures and discussions, but today I want to have a discussion about this famous little yellow book with the circles on the cover. You can’t judge a book by its cover, certainly. Can anyone tell me what those circles represent?
(A few hands are casually displayed at half-mast.)
“Don?”
“The circles represent adults, children and parents.”
“They do?”
“Well…they don’t represent the actual people. They represent the states of mind represented by those words.”
“I’ll take it. I want somebody to tell me Berne’s term for those “states of mind.”
(Several students speak the words: ‘ego states.’)
“Yes. ‘Ego states.’ Exactly. Now we know that Berne says the ego states are formed during childhood development and form patterns that can frame interactions throughout life. We learned that the ego states are similar to, parallel to, not identical to or completely harmonious with, Freud’s concept, “ego,” and we talked about how the term is misused by us, the lay public.”
“You have a big ego, Professor Feminita!”
“I most certainly do,” she says, her warm laugh rising from her throat. “That’s because I’m OK, and you’re not OK, Steve!”
(Laughter.)
“So we have our inner child, our inner parent, and our inner adult. Can you give me an example of the kind of thinking that would represent the child from your own lives?”
(No hands.)
“Let me go first, then. I’ll give you a very positive example. I like to garden. When I get out into the sunshine and the dirt, I feel glad. I enjoy the intimacy I have with the earth. I like getting dirty. That’s a child state.”
(Laughter and some hands.)
“Ashley, tell us!”
“Well… I am a music student. I lose myself when I play.”
“Perfect. Lovely. What do you play?”
“I play the flute.”
“Don again?”
“I got a speeding ticket. It really pissed me off.”
(Laughter.)
“Excellent, Don. You now turn us toward the equally fascinating dark side. I hope you weren’t so upset that you cried.”
(Laughter. Don waves the suggestion away with a flick of his wrist.)
“I cried when my boss told me I was fired,” a gangly fellow in the back of the room volunteered.”
“We’re all sorry for you.”
“I cried when my dog died,” volunteered a soft-spoken woman right beside the spot where Dana stood. She said this so quietly, that Dana repeated it.
“Did you hear what Kirsten said? She said she cried over a loss. Her dog died. Now that is more complicated. Grief, I think, is not childish. It’s not just that you cry, it’s that you cry because you are in a childish ego state. We mustn’t think that every emotion is childish.
“What about sex,” said a lovely lad in the middle ground?
“What about it?”
(Huge laugh.)
“The book said, or maybe it was something I read about Berne’s ideas in the Berne materials, something about intimacy being associated with the child ego state.”
“Quite true, that’s part of it. Also, if you notice, when you blurted out the word ‘sex,’ you got a laugh for you spontaneity. That’s the child. Wonderment, delight! You offer many many good examples. Let’s think about the parent.”
“So much easier!” Don blurts out, still being spontaneous.
“Let’s hear it.”
“You’re right in front of us being the parent. Or my parent will say, ‘don’t forget to put the milk away’ to my loony roommate.”
“Yes. On the edge of too much info, but that’s parental. I, by the way, disclaim any parental role regarding all of you. I prefer to facilitate. I prefer andragogy to pedagogy. We are all on the path.”
“You’re much farther down it than we are.”
(Laughter, muted.)
“Anybody else care to offer an example of the adult state? Yes Linda?”
“I yelled at my lover when he was late for our date.”
“How did he respond to that, Linda?”
“He looked at the floor.”
“Keep that in mind. That’s where were going with this. The adult ego state is the prized goal of our development, supposedly. According to TA. Let’s be adults. How is that? What’s that like?”
“Not as much fun.”
(Laughter.)
“Perhaps not. Objective. Unemotional. Balanced.”
“Like Fox News?”
(Laughter.)
“I can’t go there with you, but that’s interesting, John. I think Fox is certainly on the parental side, as would be any political candidate. So, no. Not Fox News. Nor any other news channel. Though the seeking and evaluating of information is high-level adult state. Next, having given the adult short shrift, I want to ask you to name the four types of interactions that Harris mentions.

In short order, lapsing into the pedagogical trope of having the students spit information back, the four stinkers are enumerated:
1. I’m OK, You’re OK.
2. I’m OK, You’re not OK.
3. I’m not OK, You’re OK.
4. Neither of us is OK.
(She writes these on a whiteboard.)
“So what does Harris claim to be the most common interaction?”
“The title one! I’m OK, you’re OK!”
“Wrong, Shelley. Did you read the material?”
“I’m not OK, but you’re OK.”
“Bingo! Why?”
“Maybe because we…”
“Go on, Mr. Jefferson…”
“…because we spend so much time as children, as learners. Feeling like we don’t have all the answers.”
“Very well put, sir. Harris actually posits that it is the position of the abused to feel that nobody is “OK,” or that they are OK, but others are not. These might become pathological positions.”
“Isn’t it true that sometimes it is an adult analysis to determine that someone is not OK. That you are, in fact, right, and someone else is in the wrong?”
(Now the students begin to debate among themselves, to really thrash out the issues that swirl around those games people play. The title of the Berne book does indeed come up, and also the Joe South song. Dana leans back and let them have at it. She has done well with getting this little flame fanned into this roaring fire, this rich debate.)
“I love that old song!”
“Yes!”
“To hell with hate.”
“Meditate.”
“Make each other cry.”
“Covered up with flowers.”
“Right, right! It’s all right there in that song. We go through our lives interacting as we have learned to do, oblivious to the scripting, playing the same damn games over and over, until it’s all over. Period round dot.”
“Shanna, I love that telling of it. You are so straight up with that. It’s like, we’re going to get ourselves back to actually listening to each other, and being adult about it. We’re going to stop using the coded words, like don’t, can’t, won’t, shouldn’t…”
“There you go.”

It turned out that in the transactions that lie ahead with Julian, Dana would sometimes think back on this spirited classroom conversation. She would reflect on the childish enthusiasm her husband formed about that blogger. She would remain the adult, avoiding the scolding. Not consistently. She was a passionate human. She lost it a few times, for sure. The way it all turned out, with its deplorable, pathological tragedy, she groped her way back to the little circles on the cover of that book, tracing the ways she might keep her head above water and not drown. Not everyone was so lucky. Some were engulfed and consumed in the third degree games.