Professional Development


9 - The Adult
Finally, we have the Adult component, the Adult ego state. We are speaking of recordings, of information, that each of us have been acquiring and filing away by means of exploration and verification. It is true to say that to be able to explore and verify, the person needs a certain degree of autonomy; that is why we are speaking of "from 10 months of age," that is to say, from when the person has the capacity of movement and their autonomy grows. What they do is verify the Parent and Child recordings, and if their parents' guidelines help in reality, the confirmation will provide corroboration contributing to the person, through their own Adult, experiencing a feeling of integrity and wholeness. However, if testing does not confirm the reality of the recordings, a question mark will be generated which sooner or later will appear to be like a kind of crack in their confidence in behavior.The Adult verifies data from its Parent component and its Child component and confirms it or rejects it. However, these verifications do not erase the recordings contained in the Parent and Child. The subject whose Adult is developed may decide not to reproduce them among the stimuli that could evoke them. As the subject grows, the Adult gains more proficiency in control with respect to the inputs that it receives from the Parent and Child components. It may decide not to reproduce inputs suggested by its Parent or Child component, which does not mean that these recordings have been erased, simply that the Adult has gained the capacity of control and has decided not to reproduce them.