I’m O.k., You’re O.k.

There is a very remarkable book by Dr. Thomas Harris, a practicing psychiatrist. The title is “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” and the book has had phenomenal success. Without doubt, it is one of the most talked about books of the last ten or twenty years. Dr. Harris insists that one of the basic problems all of us face is that no matter how happy our childhood was, no matter how loving our parents were, we come out of those early years with a basic “I’m not O.K.” feeling deep down inside ourselves. Deep down, he says, there is a sense of insecurity, a feeling of inferiority. If it becomes extreme, we express it by withdrawing from people or by being afraid to face people or even by having paranoid feelings that we are being persecuted by people. Sometimes we lash out at people whom we love because we are hurting in this way. We become noisy and pushy and arrogant. When we see a person…