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THE ULTIMATE RECOGNITION
When a puppy wants strokes, he whimpers,
flattens his ears, wags his tail, rolls over onto his back, and makes
sure that he looks every bit as cute as he possibly can. Usually,
if he wants lots of strokes, he continues doing this until someone picks
him up, pets him, scratches the back of his neck, and gently strokes him
from head to tail. When a baby wants strokes, he usually holds his
arms out imploringly, looks longingly at his mother or father, and gives
every possible indication that he wants to be picked up and held.
In
its most direct, simple form, a stroke is the recognition of one living
being by another through touching or bodily contact. When a baby is
born, and makes his way out of the womb and into the world for the first
time, he is picked up, held, washed, and wrapped in a warm blanket. In
a very real sense, this physical touching represents his first direct
contact with the new outside world. It is also the first indication a
baby receives that the outside world isn’t quite as miserable, cold, and
uncomfortable as he first thought it might be.
As Tom Harris explained in I’m OK - You’re OK,
this comforting act of “stroking” shortly after the moment of physical
birth, “is the point of Psychological Birth. This is the first
incoming data that life ‘out there’ isn’t all bad. It is a
reconciliation, a reinstatement of closeness. It turns on [an infant’s]
will to live. Stroking, or repetitious body contact, is essential to
his survival. Without it he will die, if not physically, then
psychologically. Physical death from a condition known as marasmus once
was a frequent occurrence in foundling homes where there was a
deprivation of this early stroking. There was no physical cause to
explain these deaths except the absence of essential stimulation.”
Jut Meininger's explanation of what happens next, set
forth in Success Through Transactional Analysis, picked up where
Harris left off. It pointed out that, “As soon as a child is old enough
to walk by himself, he loses the best opportunities he ever had to
obtain physical stroking – he no longer has to be picked up. For
several years longer, however, many children think to extend their arms
out imploringly to older people, looking for physical contact. Even as
we grow older, although we don’t go through life constantly embracing
people, one of the most comforting things we can do to someone is to
hold him close. The best way to console a person, to show that we
really care, is to hug him, put our arms around him, or let him cry on
our shoulder.
“But as a child becomes separated from his mother and
begins to walk about for himself, he can no longer expect constant
physical stroking. He learns to look for, and to accept, other less
direct substitutes – substitutes which still provide the necessary
recognition and feeling of closeness and belonging. Physical contact is
now more likely to be reserved for very special occasions.”
The primary substitutes a child learns to accept are
visual and verbal forms of acknowledgement. A loving glance, a warm
smile, or an encouraging nod from his mom or dad, soon become as
important to a youngster, or at least almost as important to him,
as a physical hug once was. Yet glances, smiles, and nods draw much of
their power from the words that accompany them, and it is the world of
speech that provides a youngster with his most important, new,
high-stroke environment.
When people speak to each other, they attract each
other’s attention with words, eye contact, and gestures, and they hold
each other’s attention by processing what the other person says and then
responding in kind. The give-and-take of conversations, accompanied by
smiles and frowns, by warm tones of voice and angry groans, and by
gestures that can be both friendly and aggressive, presents an
extraordinarily compelling environment for a young child to enter.
To most youngsters, the effect can be mesmerizing.
Typically, it is a child’s craving to enter this new world, driven by
his intuitive need to replace the warm physical strokes he no longer
receives in quite the abundance he did just a few months ago, that turns
on his desire to speak. Yet the dilemma all children face at this
moment in life is that they have absolutely no choice as to the kind of
“stroking environment” they are destined to enter. This environment is
predestined to be the one that their parents are most familiar
with – the one that, through the luck of the draw, they have simply been
born into whether they like it or not.
Yet to every young child, every stroke has some value,
whether or not it brightens or darkens his life – whether or not he
feels “good” when he receives it, or whether or not he feels “bad”.
(The growls and the frowns he receives are strokes, just as the smiles
and warm glances are.) And for better or worse, every youngster enters
this new, high-stroke environment with his tape recorder on every moment
of every day, recording every word that is said, every phrase that is
uttered, the nuance of every voice that he hears, the rhythm of every
sentence, as well as all the gestures and facial expressions that
accompany them. After a while, this great mass of data becomes part of
him. Slowly, his Parent and Adapted Child begin to take shape, and as
they are formed, the manner in which he gives and receives strokes can
become set for the rest of his life.
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