Strokes

While playing with my infant daughter, I would tickle her belly. As she grew, the physical touch was not required. Even if I held out my fingers at a distance, she would giggle uncontrollably and run away.

However, this stimulation would happen only in relation to her dear ones, not others. Obviously, the feeling was beyond real touch. It was linked to a person she recognised as someone she could associate the feeling with.

In Transactional Analysis (TA) such an occurrence is referred to as a ‘stroke’. According to Eric Berne, the founder of TA, ‘a stroke is a unit of recognition’. Woollams and Brown took to further to say: ‘A stroke is a unit of attention which provides stimulation to an individual’.

Every person needs physical and psychological stimulation. Berne chose the word ‘stroke’ based on the infant’s need for touching. Growing up, we learn to seek other forms of recognition to compensate for the lack of physical touch that was available to us during infancy.

Without getting into intricacies of TA, when we find distancing affecting relationships, we can choose to keep in touch through strokes. We can connect through the spoken or written word. We can convey through gestures of body language or gestures (actions) of responsiveness.

We must heed that strokes are positive or negative as well as they can be conditional or unconditional. Berne said unconditional strokes are related to what you are, while the conditional ones are about what you do. Let’s ensure that what we are and what we do is the same: positive strokes!

When distance deters from keeping-in-touch

Unconditional positive strokes can do much!

~ Pravin K Sabnis