Venn Logic and TA

I always lke to inject a piece of my young child's perspective, becuase it helps explain things a bit about "the neighborshood." As we move through them. He asked me about the neighborhood that we were moving too, as if, that was the world. That was his question. "Is this the World," Dad? He was about 4 years old at the time. He's gone now, married, and leadng a very productive life.



The purpose of this picture above comes later down the length of this post. We are all not perfect, are we?

As a youth my first reading of this topic was from a book called, I'm Okay Your Okay, by M.D. Thomas A. Harris.

It helped in defining aspects of myself in context of what was happening in my environment, while being introspective. Is this always a good thing that we take stock of what is going on inside ourselves to wonder indeed what is all these parts of ourselves. How do we look at them in context of the way the "I" is being used.

These lessons were also derived from other places, so it becomes culminative in how one might look at society, and from it, a biased view forms no dfferent then one who has been transplanted from historical context of experience, moving from the lands of the Carribean to the UK society, held in context and views of the community in which they had lived, and live now. There were comparative features drawn from expeirence to consider here?

So as you move, you grow in perspective, all the while the pictures of mountains and similarities strike poises in our mind of of wnating recognition. Who was this person at the time of youth, who, like myself saw farms of a early history, to know that today this historical past is all but forgotten in the real world struggle of lives held in context of these farms? The picture today, contains the picture of our youth.

Parent ego state

This is a set of feelings, thinking and behaviour that we have copied from our parents and significant others.

As we grow up we take in ideas, beliefs, feelings and behaviours from our parents and caretakers. If we live in an extended family then there are more people to learn and take in from. When we do this, it is called introjecting and it is just as if we take in the whole of the care giver. For example, we may notice that we are saying things just as our father, mother, grandmother may have done, even though, consciously, we don't want to. We do this as we have lived with this person so long that we automatically reproduce certain things that were said to us, or treat others as we might have been treated.

As we grow up we take in ideas, beliefs, feelings and behaviours from our parents and caretakers. If we live in an extended family then there are more people to learn and take in from. When we do this, it is called introjecting and it is just as if we take in the whole of the care giver. For example, we may notice that we are saying things just as our father, mother, grandmother may have done, even though, consciously, we don't want to. We do this as we have lived with this person so long that we automatically reproduce certain things that were said to us, or treat others as we might have been treated.

Adult ego state

The Adult ego state is about direct responses to the here and now. We deal with things that are going on today in ways that are not unhealthily influenced by our past.

The Adult ego state is about being spontaneous and aware with the capacity for intimacy. When in our Adult we are able to see people as they are, rather than what we project onto them. We ask for information rather than stay scared and rather than make assumptions. Taking the best from the past and using it appropriately in the present is an integration of the positive aspects of both our Parent and Child ego states. So this can be called the Integrating Adult. Integrating means that we are constantly updating ourselves through our every day experiences and using this to inform us.

In this structural model, the Integrating Adult ego state circle is placed in the middle to show how it needs to orchestrate between the Parent and the Child ego states. For example, the internal Parent ego state may beat up on the internal Child, saying "You are no good, look at what you did wrong again, you are useless". The Child may then respond with "I am no good, look how useless I am, I never get anything right". Many people hardly hear this kind of internal dialogue as it goes on so much they might just believe life is this way. An effective Integrating Adult ego state can intervene between the Parent and Child ego states. This might be done by stating that this kind of parenting is not helpful and asking if it is prepared to learn another way. Alternatively, the Integrating Adult ego state can just stop any negative dialogue and decide to develop another positive Parent ego state perhaps taken in from other people they have met over the years.

Child ego state

The Child ego state is a set of behaviours, thoughts and feelings which are replayed from our own childhood.

Perhaps the boss calls us into his or her office, we may immediately get a churning in our stomach and wonder what we have done wrong. If this were explored we might remember the time the head teacher called us in to tell us off. Of course, not everything in the Child ego state is negative. We might go into someone's house and smell a lovely smell and remember our grandmother's house when we were little, and all the same warm feelings we had at six year's of age may come flooding back.

Both the Parent and Child ego states are constantly being updated. For example, we may meet someone who gives us the permission we needed as a child, and did not get, to be fun and joyous. We may well use that person in our imagination when we are stressed to counteract our old ways of thinking that we must work longer and longer hours to keep up with everything. We might ask ourselves "I wonder what X would say now". Then on hearing the new permissions to relax and take some time out, do just that and then return to the work renewed and ready for the challenge. Subsequently, rather than beating up on ourselves for what we did or did not do, what tends to happen is we automatically start to give ourselves new permissions and take care of ourselves.

Alternatively, we might have had a traumatic experience yesterday which goes into the Child ego state as an archaic memory that hampers our growth. Positive experiences will also go into the Child ego state as archaic memories. The positive experiences can then be drawn on to remind us that positive things do happen.

The process of analysing personality in terms of ego states is called structural analysis. It is important to remember that ego states do not have an existence of their own, they are concepts to enable understanding. Therefore it is important to say "I want some fun" rather than "My Child wants some fun". We may be in our Child ego state when we say this, but saying "I" reminds us to take responsibility for our actions.

Go ahead and Click on John Venn's picture

A painting of John Venn by Charles E. Brock. Photograph by Christopher Hurst, Hamilton-Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

IN a strange world where such things are to become part of our analysis of subjective experience will we have created the perfect human being? Such models becme the logic structure of new computerized systems of thinking that will somehow recognize these factors in the human beings that we are, to have it done better in a traditional methods of logic, formed around and in computerized thinking.

Science and TA by Chris Boyd

Do we selectively ignore other models from artificial intelligence such as Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic? This is a logic used to model perception and used in newly designed "smart" cameras. Where standard logic must give a true or false value to every proposition, fuzzy logic assigns a certainty value between zero and one to each of the propositions, so that we say a statement is .7 true and .3 false. Is this theory selectively ignored to support our theories?

I had engaged this kind of exercise on my own, as I moved through different research avenues trying to piece together in my own mind, a process held in context of these neighborhoods, and such. How such interactive phases might have been thought about in science procedures. Looking at the basis of this logic, I was looking to find comparsions for this thinking in which the foundational perspectives might make sense.

Science and TA by Chris Boyd

If deduction is another way of knowing in TA, where and when is it applicable? Berne did use Venn diagrams, circles either distinct or overlapping, which were borrowed directly from symbolic logic to visually describe transactions. Perhaps TA in part can be considered a theory that analyzes ones own deductions based on childhood primitive assumptions. Perhaps it focuses on how people become irrational in decision making. In this case, TA provides critical thinking skills for human relations and can be considered a basis for analyzing the accuracy of our reality testing. Much as mathematics provides the language for science, TA may provide the logic for human relations and can be at least in part a deductive language.

Now as usual I did not have many to direct my thinking as I was developing thought processes, that the statements I highlighted were recognized as features I myself found along the journey to make sense of characteristic features we have of our thinking minds.

As you see clicking on John Venn's picture I would like to draw science into how I am seeing to support this "model of thinking." For clear and consise methods incorporating that clear mind.

Do we have to be robots with parts of ourselves missing from the supposed framework of that perfect being? This is what makes us unique in our perspectives as we move forward and share our point of views. We would have had to have been you to become who you are today. So it is never easy to see and be all that you want everyone to be.