My Readings: I am OK - You're OK By Thomas A. Harris

 I am OK - You're OK By Thomas A. Harris

This is a very very very important book to read. I recommend everyone to read. It's important for us to understand why do the things we do and how we turn out the way we are. It also helps parents understand their children behavior and how to interact with children of different ages. The beauty of Transactional Analysis (the main subject of the book) is that it is easy to understand and very efficient in my humble opinion.

Transactional Analysis was originated by Eric Berne in his "Games People Play", which is now on my Want-to-Read List.  Following is a quote:

"The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other ..... sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response."

Thomas Harris defined Transactional Analysis (TA) in the book as follows:

"Transactional Analysis is the method of examining this one transaction wherein 'I do something to you and you do something back' and determining which part of the multiple-natured (Parent-Adult-Child)  individual is 'coming on'. "

According to TA, each one of us is made up of Parent-Adult-Child (P-A-C). The Parent is a collection of recordings we store during our early years, roughly our first five years. It makes ups all external events we witnessed where our parents or parents substitutes acted. It creates the rules that we prohibit our lives with, our morality whether they were good or bad.

The Child are another set of recordings that we store from our early years, however that represent our inner experience, how we response or feel towards our life events . 

The Adult is our thought process, our microprocessor that processes the stored information and compare it to the reality we live in. 

It's the data stored in each element of us and the relationship between these elements that makes us who we are and affects how we lead our lives and interact with others.

The book discusses how illness and disorders can be developed due to malfunctioning elements of our P-A-C. 

What's really interesting is that it can be easily taught to children and teens to help them through the instabilities and hardship of growing up.

The last few chapters is very captivating as the book dicusses morality, religion and society in terms of P-A-C and how collectively P-A-C afters nations.

Reading our past and coming into terms with it is important as much as accepting our responsibility of the NOW. TA helps us do that.

I recommend the book to everyone, read more here.

The Sound of Silence

It is the loudest of all sounds, silence. Silence is where you hear all the unheard sounds. You can listen to your soul, your spirit. you can finally listen to you. Silence is the shore in which every human being should set an anchor every now and then. It's our home, our refuge.

Life beats the hell out of us everyday, every minute, every second. We lose our connection to who we really are, in the midst of the everyday. We run, trying to catch a bus or train. We run trying to seize an opportunity, run trying to be and prove we can be.

RUN, RUN, RUN,.........

We lose our essence, our reason to go on gets duller and duller everyday until we realise we need to get back.  We grow restless, looking for something we can't define, or express. We need to sit alone. We need to remember who we are and love ourselves back. No one can love love you as much as you can. And you deserve that love. Whoever, you are, you deserve to be loved by you. No one can help you through this earthing process. You need to do it on your own. You need to learn to return to your base, your core, yourself whenever you feel lost, on your own.

Just sit in silence and listen. Listen to yourself. Return to your foundation, your base.

People who are scared of silence or scared to be alone, on their own are sick. Not physically sick, but in their inner self. Their souls are ill and need care. They act as if they're just too busy, or that being alone is a waste since they have a lot of fun doing things elsewhere. Indeed, they are scared but won't admit it, even to theirselves. They don't even give themselves time to think about it. They just keep busy all their lives. They are indeed, scared of themselves as a child can get so scared of an imaginary monster that never he never so, yet so convinced that it existed.

There's nothing more peaceful that talking to yourself in silence. Time spent alone in stillness or even meditation can be a lifesaver. Just give yourself time to face and digest everything. Listen to what you have to say, process the accumulated data inside you without biases, without haste. See things for what they are not what you thought they are. We all need these moments of frankness with ourselves, we need these revelations.

In silence, in our private chosen aloneness, we accept who we are, we learn to live, enjoy and go on.


This is what jWoman has to say for today.

Airport sickness

I have airport sickness.

I feel sick nauseated and a terrible headache attacks me when I sit in an airport lounge or stroll through the shopping areas of an airport.

Airports make me feel small and entrapped, confined in a limited area, confined within myself. In this confined space, my only companion is me. So here I m doomed to face my fears and nightmares, I m doomed to spend my hours with myself.

I always had this fear that there may not be enough oxygen for us to breath in this big box they call the airport.

Love manifests itself in airports. You can see people hugging in farewell, or kissing in excitement or just holding hands in reassurance and support. That's when my aloneness grows way out of proportions and I grow so irrationally lonely and smaller. I shrink into myself.

The worst  part of the trip is arrival to find no one waiting. The process of finding your way out of the waiting crowd wishing someone special was waiting for you there with a smile, makes arrival so much a dream of the impossible, a process doomed to disappointment. And once you arrive you are on your own as ever, trying to figure out the mean of transportation to take and what to do next.

It might not be too dramatic as I bad it sound. Maybe at times I enjoy it all and it gives me an ecstasy or an enjoyable sense of accomplishing and dependence. Maybe yes, but at others I feel so much pathetic self pity.


This what jWoman had to say today
Extracts from the diary of an independent but alone woman.

How do you get over someone you still love?

I tried to give up but failed
I tried to give in and also failed.
My heart is so persistent and my head too stubborn.

"How do you get over someone you still love?"

I don't have an answer to this question. I am still trying every mental game to trick my mind into accepting and going on.

I am not even sure that there is a solution, or an answer. For me, the main problem was that I never had a final closure, no ending. In addition, one question still hung in my personal energy circumference. This question was WHY?

I fought with that question so long. It ate my days and consumed my energy without an end. I started questioning myself, is it my fault? And found myself slowly falling into the pit of self-pity, self-doubt and self-hatred. Things at this point goes south so easily.

I am not a weak woman, I have a good career. Everyone I know likes me, respects me, appreciates my presence and my existence and to some people I make a difference. I reminded myself of that.

I do believe in God, and I saw how He extended his hand to me and supported my back so I don't fall. He sent me people to remind me of my worth. It might sound pathetic to need reassurance from others but truly, that's what you need at this low point of your life, when you feel you are a loser.

Everyone, and I really mean everyone, deserves to be loved and appreciated. I believe in that. However, sometimes, our souls and minds interact with the universe in ways that we don't completely comprehend giving us the things that we think we don't want and taking from us what we think we wholeheartedly desire.

I, also, believe in karma and the rules of the universe, where "What goes around, comes around." Believing in that means to me, that I have to give in to what I can't change and accept to pay price for things I don't understand or acknowledge. It, also, means that I need to give love and forgiveness more.

To forgive is to forget, Jesus taught his disciples to forgive. Can I really forgive him, can I forget the pain? As a weak human, I can't. But I try to do that slowly, gradually. Maybe I will one day reach that point of forgiveness.

It seems my brain is working against me, in that perspective. My memory works so well in bringing him up in every occasion possible, indeed in every moment of my waking hours and unfortunately, my subconscious creates illusions of him in my dreams too.

My very dear friend and my support told me once that I am still holding on to a very fine thread. I am still holding on to the hope of getting back together and that's why I can't get him out of my mind. I know she is right. However, I don't know the technique of letting go. And that's why I am writing this. To me writing had always been a way to better understand myself. It was my method to mend and heal my broken pieces. In the past, it always helped me figure out how I feel, and made me face the reality I was hiding from.

I am dealing with it now as an addiction case where I have to suffer from withdrawal symptoms and pains to get clean. I am detoxing my life of his presence and it is a long painful process. I am not sure of the state I will be in at the end of this tunnel. What are the losses, I will have to endure.

Some researchers say that heartbreak and breaking up can give you pain that your brain perceives as actual pain. Studies even showed that people with heartbreak show similar symptoms to cocaine withdrawal. So facing it and being patient is my only way out, my only way to regain control over my life.

With the help of my friend and her loving family, I can go through this and emerge in a better state. Friends are your life saver during hard times.

Finally, I think to get over someone you still love you should,

• First take the decision and be strict in acting accordingly.
• Use the help and care of your support circle, friends and family.
• Stop playing the role of the victim and face reality. 
• Love yourself, your faults before your virtues.
• Don't live in the drama but live in TODAY, in the NOW.
• Do things you love.
• Don't postpone living your life, don't wait for someone or something to happen in your life.

Just let go and give in to life, let Karma play its role and soon good will come your way.

This is what jWoman has to say today.

My Movies: Frequencies

Frequencies, a most capturing movie you can watch. It asks all the unanswered questions  about humans and the universe.

Do we have free will, do we have imagination? Does the universe really serve our wills or are we complex but predictable machines that work with a certain repeated code and can be manipulated.

Indeed, I think, we are all that combined together with different extents.

It makes your mind goes in whirls trying to make out what you yourselves believe in and questioning it all.

But in the end the question is, "Does it matter? Does it make a difference?" That's what Zak and Marie concluded in the end.

Edit LATER:
After some thought, I feel that the movie was more about the effect and power of love. A friend was telling me that it was the power of the spoken word. But to me, I felt it was the power of love and human empathy, human communication that makes all the difference. It's the passion that drives us to make something comes true.

That's why when in the last scene between the Zak and Marie, they were confronted with the fact that maybe they didn't choose to fall in love and their only answer was 'We don't care' because love was the end that made them happy whatever the means that got them there.

This is what jWoman has to say

My Readings: She came to stay

Simone de Beauvoir always captures me with her characters and how she draws deep images of them and their actions. The relationship between her and Jean-Paul Sartre is of a unique kind that is worth exploring and understanding. Whether you agree or not with the idea of an open marriage, you will always find the depth and closeness of their relationship fascinating.

They were real partners and very good friends before anything else. Their analytical and curious nature drove them to try the extremes, like the trio relationship that Beauvoir describes in this book, and it leaves you quizzical and wondering about the  essence of relationship.

I do believe in exclusiveness in relationships and to me it is a condition for survival but I find her narration of their relationship with Xaviere and all the stages that they went through with this restless, envious, self-centered being astounding and worth exploring.

Xaviere is a repulsive yet captivating character, you can't predict her next step and find yourself all through the book, angry with her and wanting to argue or fight or even slap her on the face. I was even angry with Pierre and Francoise (Francoise especially) for tolerating her and keeping her in their life. But when I contemplated the situation more deeply, I found that it do happen sometimes, maybe so many times in our lives, that we meet someone that don't look at all similar to what we are used to, and maybe that attracts us to them. We make the mistake of curiosity, of wanting to know more. We forget, always, that "CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT". And once we let them in and closer, one thing leads to another and the operation of extracting them out of our lives becomes so difficult and sometimes seems even impossible.

The chapters describing their trio was painful to me. The words and pages were full of mixtures of feeling that people can live and die without experiencing. It's an richening but painful experience to go through. The pain Francoise went through to make peace with the trio, to accept the sharing and yet be continously pushed to the peripheral edge of the relation. She was constantly treated as a shadow and pushed aside away from the centre by Xaviere. I was exasperated by Francoise attitude but I constantly felt a unity with her and an understanding to her almost unacceptable actions and reactions.

"I've won ", Francoise ended chapter eight by saying that.

"I've won", thought Francoise trimphantly. 

Once again she existed alone, with no obstacle at the heart of her own destiny. Confined within her illusory and empty world, Xaviere was now but a futile, living pulsation.

The book keeps you in whirlwind, whether to pity the restless soul Xaviere  or the independent strong woman Francoise or blame whose selfishness or evil nature. In the end, it's the complexity of human nature that is not white or black but all shades of colors that changes with time and circumstances. However, the last chapter of the book surprised me beyond limits, I wasn't anticipating this end and I am still wondering whether I like it or not.

I am still dumbfound with how it ends. But maybe it was what she really wished to do in real life but never got the courage to do so she took her revenge in the book. How painful must this relation have been, to make her feel like killing the woman and ending her misery once and for all.

The book is a journey worth embarking on.


This is what jWoman has to say today.

Hitting Bottom

Freefalling through all life events.
Some events push you even deeper, others are like a gush of fresh breeze that blow you up towards the surface, but you never see sunlight, just a glimpse of what might be. Then, you bounce back and dive even deeper.

There comes a time when you get impatient to hit bottom and get over with this waiting. Transitional period kills you more ruthlessly then actual death. You think "The bottom of this pit must be near now. It can't go any deeper."

Maybe, when we hit bottom we can bounce back and get out of this pit, the hopeful you looks for a way out. The restless you looks for a relief, maybe when we hit bottom, we will go into an eternal repose, tranquility.

In the journey to the bottom, the most important thing is to keep your sarcastic spirit and keep smiling at yourself in every reflection you face :).



This is what jWoman has to say today.