Strokes

Strokes can be positive or negative:

A) "I really value you as a member of this team "

B) "You're not welcome here "

Strokes can be unconditional or conditional. An unconditional stroke is a stroke for being - in other words, who we are - whereas a conditional stroke is a stroke for doing. For instance: "You are an important person here " - unconditional; "I like you when you manage situations like that " - conditional.

The negative equivalent of these strokes might be:

"You are a dead loss " - negative unconditional

"I don't like you when you're sarcastic" - negative conditional.

Negative conditional strokes give us the information about our behaviour which others wish us to change. It is of course still up to us as to whether we do in fact change it!

People often have a stroke filter. They only let in strokes which they think they are allowed to let in. For instance they allow themselves to receive strokes for being clever and keep out strokes for being good looking. One way to think about this to consider being out in the rain. The rain represents the strokes that are available to us, both positive and negative. There is a hole in the umbrella and some of the strokes go through and we save them in a bucket to enjoy in lean times. Conversely we might use them negatively to reinforce the negative strokes we give to ourselves. Of course, some just bounce off the umbrella - we might not accept the good strokes that are coming our way.

It is important not to simply see strokes as disembodied things that we exchange with each other. They only make sense in the context of relationships - and they can indeed be seen as the means by which we express ourselves in relationships. Where we experience a relationship as positive, it is likely that with the other person, we have found ways of exchanging predominently positive strokes.