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CONDITIONAL PROCESS STROKES
As their name implies, conditional process strokes are positive strokes that
are given to children when they engage in certain processes. Unlike
conditional performance strokes, they are not given by the stern Parent in a
mother or father to the Adapted Child in a young son or daughter, but
rather by the nurturing Parent in the mother or father to the
Natural Child in their son or daughter.
Typically, they are given to children who are
raised in unusually healthy families in which kids receive lots of
unconditional positive strokes (just for being), and in which they
receive very few negative strokes. When children in these families
perform poorly, mothers and fathers avoid judging and punishing their
kids from their stern Parent, but merely provide them with love,
understanding, and the knowledge that there are times when things just
don’t work out as planned, and that it is the process the kids
are engaged in (usually, the process of learning, or of improving their
personal skills) that counts – not their achievement of any immediate,
specific result.
Under these circumstances, a young person will learn to
perform tasks very well, but his interest in doing so will stem largely
from his Natural Child’s interest in learning, in growing, and in
building upon what it has already learned and experienced. It will stem
from the enjoyment the young person receives from adding new, more
sophisticated levels of knowledge and skills to the primary levels he’s
already mastered. Essentially, learning, growing, building on
knowledge, and honing his skills will become an enjoyable experience for
him, and the Natural Child enjoyment he feels will come purely from
having engaged in the process.
Most of us build vocabularies of thousands of words when
we’re just two or three years of age, and we receive few, in any,
performance strokes from the stern Parent in our mothers and fathers for
doing so. Essentially, we learn these words in order to broaden our
source of unconditional positive strokes, and we learn as we go through
the process of increasing our vocabulary, and of adding to our
existing knowledge, that the process itself is very enjoyable.
Thus, the process of learning and
broadening our skills comes naturally to all of us. When this
process is encouraged and reinforced by the stroking pattern employed by
our mothers and fathers, it forms the core behavior pattern that
provides us with all we need to achieve a self-actualized an fulfilled
life.
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