What Are the P-A-C Ego States? How to Meet the Parent, Adult and Child Inside You

“Why am I using my father’s tone of voice — the tone I hated so much — on my own child, exactly as he used it?” “Why do I, well past thirty, shrink like a child being scolded the moment I stand in front of my boss?” If you go through moments like these again and again, they may not be a flaw in your character. They may be scenes in which the structure of the mind shows itself. An ego state is a consistent set of feelings, thoughts and behaviors that belong together. The psychiatrist Eric Berne presented it in Transactional Analysis as the basic unit for understanding the mind. In his 1961 book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, Berne proposed structural analysis, which looks at the human mind in three positions: Parent, Adult and Child, or P-A-C.

Three people live inside me — P, A and C

P-A-C is not a division into a good mind and a bad mind. It is a map that shows which position you are speaking and feeling from at this moment.

• The Parent ego state (P) — a voice taken over whole from your parents or other important adults in childhood, and recorded. “You must” and “You mustn’t” come from here. It has two faces: the Critical Parent (CP), which points out faults and sets standards, and the Nurturing Parent (NP), which looks after and shelters.
• The Adult ego state (A) — the position that sees the here-and-now reality as it is, gathers information and makes judgments. It has nothing to do with age. A five-year-old has an Adult ego state, and in a sixty-year-old it may be asleep.
• The Child ego state (C) — the position where the ways you actually felt and behaved as a child are still alive. There is the Free Child (FC), which laughs, wonders and gets excited, and the Adapted Child (AC), which reads the room and fits in, or rebels.

When we go through the documents in a meeting, we are in A. When we ask a tired colleague, “Have you eaten?”, we are in NP. When we hum along to a song we love, we are in FC. If you can move freely among the three positions, your mind is circulating in a healthy way. Trouble starts when you get shut into one position, or when the boundaries between the positions blur.

Contamination and exclusion — when the positions of the mind get tangled

Berne described two ways in which things go wrong between ego states. The first is contamination. The contents of the Parent or the Child seep into the Adult ego state and feel just like here-and-now facts.

When P contaminates A, a belief you inherited hardens as if it were a tested fact. We believe that sentences like “Kids these days have no manners” or “Men just shouldn’t show their feelings” are our own thinking. But if you listen quietly, it is often someone’s voice from decades ago being played back unchanged. When C contaminates A, the fears and imaginings of childhood color the judgment you make today. “If I mess up this presentation, everyone will abandon me” — that is not today’s reality. The world a child felt long ago is being laid over today’s meeting room.

The second is exclusion: shutting the door on a particular ego state altogether. A person who has excluded the Child is called diligent and responsible, but strangely feels guilty when faced with rest and play. A person who has excluded the Parent looks free, but wavers, because there are no standards to protect them. When the Adult is excluded, the person goes back and forth between inherited rules (P) and old feelings (C), and cannot deal with the reality of the present. Behind repetitions such as “Why can I never rest?” and “Why do I always put off deciding?” there is often this exclusion.

What matters is that neither contamination nor exclusion is an illness. Nothing in this article is a medical diagnosis, and it does not need to be. Contamination and exclusion are habits of mind that once protected you, and a habit begins to loosen from the moment you notice it.

Why conversations keep going wrong — the crossed transaction

Where P-A-C really shows its power is in relationships. Berne called each exchange of words between two people a transaction. The fate of a conversation is decided by which ego state I speak from and which ego state the other person receives it in.

A wife asks her husband, “Honey, have you seen my car keys?” This is a plain question asking for information, sent from A to A. If the husband answers from A, “I saw them in the drawer by the front door,” the transaction stays parallel and the conversation goes on. This is a complementary transaction.

But what if the husband answers like this? “Why do you always leave your things lying around?” The question went toward A, but the answer set out from P and aimed at the other person’s C. The arrows have crossed. Berne called this a crossed transaction, and he held that the original conversation breaks off the moment the crossing happens. The wife no longer responds about the car keys. She responds with “Always? When did I ever!” — from hurt feelings (C) or from a voice that hits back (P). The subject of the car keys has vanished, and before they know it the two of them are standing inside the same fight they have repeated dozens of times.

Here is the answer to the old question, “Why do we start with something trivial and always end in the same fight?” The problem was not the car keys. It was the arrows. And if you can see the arrows, you can change them. When the other person’s words jab your C, pause for a moment and answer from A: “I’ll check the drawer. But what you just said hurt a little.” This small move brings the repeating script to a halt.

Looking at your own P-A-C right now

The script’s greatest power is that it cannot be seen. The same is true of ego states. As long as you cannot see which position you are speaking from, that position controls you. But once you know its name, it is no longer a fate that moves you. It becomes something you can look at.

For today, we suggest keeping this question beside you. Who inside me said what I just said? Was it an inherited voice (P), the here-and-now me (A), or the child from long ago (C)? And if you have begun to wonder which of your five voices (CP, NP, A, FC, AC) is unusually loud and which has been silent for a long time, there is a place ready for you.

Check the balance of your P-A-C as it is now with the free ego state test. After a few minutes of questions, a graph shows the voice that speaks loudest inside you and the voice that is quietest. It is not an exam with right answers. It is simply a time to call, for the first time, the three people inside you by name — the three you have lived with for so long.