|
POSITIVE STROKES AND NEGATIVE STROKES
Of all TA's basic concepts, the concept of
stroking is the one that our culture seems to have absorbed most
thoroughly in the past several decades. Yet even though many
people understand what stroking means in a general sense (that is, they
realize that a hug or a compliment is considered a "stroke"), few people
recognize the extraordinary influence that our need for strokes early in
life exerts on the way we relate to people later in life.
Generally speaking, strokes come in two broad categories
– positive strokes and negative strokes.
Positive strokes are strokes that not only recognize a
person’s existence, but that do so in a positive way – they include the
warm hugs, encouraging nods, smiles, grins, and affectionate glances
we’ve already spoken about.
Negative strokes are strokes that still recognize a
person’s existence, but that do so in a negative way – they include
various forms of physical and verbal abuse such as kicks, slaps, frowns,
scowls, insults, and other kinds of deliberate put-downs.
Positive strokes are signs of acceptance, whereas
negative strokes are signs of rejection. Yet it is far better for a
young person to receive negative strokes than it is for him to receive
no strokes at all. For without physical strokes, a young person might
actually die (which, as Harris pointed out, once happened in foundling
homes in this country, and still occurs elsewhere around the world).
Kids who receive large numbers of positive strokes when they’re young
grow up learning how to recreate both positive feelings and positive
situations for themselves later in life, and kids who receive large
numbers of negative strokes grow up learning how to become Kick Me
players, recreating negative feelings and negative situations for
themselves later in life. For these “Kick Me” children, early stroking
patterns can often become blueprints for a lifetime of misery,
discomfort, and pain. All this does not mean that an occasional slap on
the wrist, or an occasional spanking (used by mothers and father to
establish the limits of acceptable family behavior), will turn a kid
into a Kick Me player. They won’t. What turns a kid into a Kick Me
player is a continuous diet of negative strokes.
In some families, mothers and fathers have almost no time
for their kids. They pay little attention to what their kids do, and
spend most of their time ignoring them. Faced with this prospect, a
youngster will go to almost any lengths to obtain some form of
recognition. If nothing else works, he will call attention to himself
by getting in some sort of trouble. If he succeeds, he’ll receive some
sort of punishment or scolding – a conditional negative stroke
(conditioned upon his doing something “bad”). Recognition in this
negative way tells him that he at least exists, and it is far better
than no recognition at all.
In other families, kids don’t have to go out of their way
to obtain negative strokes. They receive them automatically,
unconditionally, just for being – particularly if they
weren’t wanted in the first place, or if they live in a family of
alcoholics or drug addicts. All they have to do is lie on the floor in
someone’s way, and they’ll get kicked. All they have to do is to start
crying – perhaps because they need to be fed, and they’ll be slapped.
In
both kinds of families, kids grow up knowing that no one cares about
them, or perhaps more precisely, that no one cares whether or not they
exist (or perhaps would prefer that they did not exist).
Your Free Tour
Continues
|
