Transactional Analysis : The OK Corral

According to TA theory, at some point in childhood we all make some critical conclusions about ourselves and the people in the world around us. Called a life position it is a belief about ourselves and others that justify future decisions and behaviour. Some people call these beliefs life positions, existential positions, or basic positions. So imagine yourself as a baby, totally dependent on caretakers. Nice things happen to you, unpleasant things happen to you. As a newcomer to the world how do you make sense of these events? Well at some point you decide the explanation is in two components: (1)either you are an OK person; or that you are flawed in some fundamental way and not OK; and (2) you decide if others are basically OK, or flawed and thus not OK. For short form we use: I+ means I'm OK, I- means I'm not OK, U+ means you're OK, U- means You're not OK.

Having decided on these issues, the combination provides us with four life positions: I+U+, I+U-, I-U+, I-U-. We put these on our viewpoint of the world like sunglasses and sally forth into the future, forgetting how we came by them, and eventually even forgetting that we put them on. Henceforth, our life context becomes tinted with our life position. Remember the guy who's retina nerve fibres were accidentally surgically attached to his anus? After that he had a shitty outlook on life. Same idea. Some people see a glass half full of water and others see a glass half empty. How'd the glass get that way? Some people suspect half the water was stolen, the rest believe it came from a charitable donation. Context, existential position, whatever ... it all comes down to which of the four you decided to stand on.

To visualize these four positions and their influences, TA theory includes a chart called the OK Corral. Here is a simplified version: