Why is it that I always feel so responsible for everything? Isn't it strange how things always seem to go wrong where Martha's involved? It's weird how Al always seems to get his way and get away with it, isn't it.
These and all kinds of other patterns abound in our lives. What they represent are lifestyles or "life scripts" that get laid down in the childhood home as "survival strategies" or "parent-pleasings". What happens then is that what was needed for successful functioning in the home becomes a "behavioral prison". That is, the style you develop in the home is taken out into the world, and it coerces, cons or "casuals" (by seeming insignificant) the environment into inadvertently supporting it. The result is that one's "personality" is "cast in stone" by this process.
The purpose of this book is to present an overview of the circumstances which have produced this process of "script-induction", and to describe a number of "personality patterns" that are commonly seen nowadays. For each pattern, there will be a description of its origins, its dynamics, its behavioral/functional playout patterns, its intervention requirements, and its larger purpose.
THE STATE OF THE FAMILY
Although personality derives from many sources, such as heredity, health issues, cultural/ethnic/subcultural forces, environmental characteristics, etc., the single most influential factor in the formation of personality is the family in which we grew up. And it's becoming increasingly clear that the isolated nuclear family is in a lot of trouble.
Government studies, scientific research, clinical practice, daily observation and even the media recently indicate that the family is under enormous pressures which make it almost impossible to function successfully. The family is being subjected to overwhelming demands that inevitably lead to breakdowns in its weakest links. Unfortunately, the weakest link of all appears to be in the process of rearing the children. Hence, our "personalities" are becoming increasingly maladaptive, due to the way we were reared.
There are many aspects of the situation of the isolated nuclear family that make it very difficult to cope with the day-to-day requirements of raising children. One of the most important of these is the lack of information and training for the tasks and realities involved. The fact is that it is perhaps the most difficult and important job in the world, and yet very few people get any training in how to do it before they are up to their eyebrows in it. (For information on this, see "On Parenting" by the author).
Which (the situation) is little short of disastrous, because these are the areas which due their enormous complexity and importance require the most preparation and training. What all too often happens is the "good person -- bad spouse -- worse parent" phenomenon. In essence, we are at our worst in the areas of intimacy and parenting.
In part, this is because these areas are so completely different in their requirements from those of general public citizen and competent work performance (though the latter should take the rules of intimacy and parenting as their starting point). The other major reason we falter so often in these areas is that they are so intensely difficult in their demands of us, especially given the inadequacy of our preparation and the "back seat" position they are relegated to in most of our cultural priorities. As a result of this, all to often we encounter individuals who are really fine people, but who do the most amazing things with their spouses and with their children.
What often happens under the circumstances is that we fall back on the only available source of guidelines in these areas, namely what happened to us when we were growing up. So we set up intimate relationships with people very much like "dear old Mom and Dad" in the way they make us feel, and the patterns we carry out are strongly related to those we witnessed as children. We end up either "doing unto others what was done unto us (with minor adaptations and variations) or we "bend over backwards" to NEVER do what was done unto us, which guarantees that we will pass a lot of it on anyway because we preserve most of the system by doing a 180 degrees opposite trip.
Another extremely important problem in the isolated nuclear family has been the gender roles we have lived under for so long. For instance, the traditional roles produce a very unequal relationship with regard to power, privileges and responsibilities, as well as with regard to the basic human needs.
Thus, while the male was placed in the position of the primary decision-maker, the bulk of information necessary to make the decisions falls in the province of the female's gender role. In addition, the woman is required to sustain, nurture and support all the family members while receiving little, if any nurturance herself.
Dad was supposed to be completely invincible, dependable and the "pillar of strength" who shares neither his load nor himself with anyone. He was to "bring home the bacon" and to "keep things in good repair", while Mom was given almost exclusive responsibility for dealing with all the emotional and basic needs aspects of the family life. This difference between the genders creates a disastrous limitation of and drain on each of them as fundamental human needs and capabilities are denied. It also makes for many frictions and misunderstandings between the partners.
For example, men express their commitment through instrumental activities and problem-solving, while women do it through nurturance and both physical and verbal affection. To the woman, the man's behavior feels like coldness and rejection, while to the man, the woman's approaches feel like space-invasion and demandingness. Or take their different responses to abuse. Women react with self-blame and serve-aholic atonement attempts and validation-courting. Men, on the other hand, typically respond with rage, acting out and destructive/assaultive reactions.
The net effect of this sort of thing is one of increasing distance between the parents, along with an almost sole involvement with the children by the mother. This puts the woman under considerable excess of responsibility and demands, and it has the effect of increasingly eliminating the man from the household. And it also results in his becoming more and more incompetent in the realm of closeness and care-taking, much less sharing his children's developmental process. The result is that they tend to end up "dead in the harness", so numb and hyper-rational that they can't experience life. Sooner or later, the children pay the price for all this.
But even the problems of lack of preparation and the gross inequalities and impracticalities produced by the gender roles pale in comparison to the impact of the major stress-producer for the family, namely the massive overload created by today's circumstances. To put the whole thing in a nutshell, in effect the isolated nuclear family is required to "attempt the impossible with nothing". That is, it is expected that the individual family will seek to meet all of its own needs with almost nothing in the way of resources provided. What has happened is that each individual is now required to carry out all the responsibilities that used to be shared by the entire community throughout our evolutionary history.
The effects of this situation are deeply felt by all the family members. For instance, the father is often a rarely experienced figure, leading to a desperate need for masculine contact in everyone. Furthermore, the relationship between the parents often deteriorates as a function of the isolation and excessive in-home responsibilities for the woman, the growing emotional encrustation of the male, and the accumulating bitterness resulting from the biological inability of each to be everything to the family as demanded by the circumstances of the isolated nuclear family. The family then becomes more of a contractual and payoff-based system than a commitment and caring relationship. The effect of this is to put both parents in a situation where their basic affection and nurturance needs typically become increasingly denied. They become starved for love.
Given these circumstances, it is perhaps not very surprising that both parents tend to begin to form highly intense relationships with the children which often carry a heavy undercurrent of sexuality due to the increasing chasm between the spouses. This has the effect of dividing the family even further, as rivalries, alliances, jealousies, and even warring camps develop. If current statistics are any indication, it also results in actual physical incest in something like 60% of the girls and 25% of the boys. Given the enormous practical impact of reporting this sort of thing, these data strongly suggest that the rate is much higher.
This puts the children in the position of having to deal with the profound boundary invasions and violations that feel like being raped by God. And that doesn't even take into account the impact of the increasingly frequent process of the parents' reversing roles with the children and requiring them to be the parents of the parents -- and this while this other is going on as well. It is perhaps surprising that there is not more negative impact on the maturing people who are forced to grow up in these conditions.
THE FORMATION OF "LIFE SCRIPTS"
The result of all this is that while the family hobbles along and stays afloat to some degree, all the members pay the price of sacrificing or crippling parts of themselves in significant ways in exchange for survival. The parents all too often deteriorate into hollow role-shells who long ago lost touch with their fundamental characteristics and full humanity, and the children end up carrying their family roles into life as their "script", "lifestyle" or "personality". The resulting "behavioral prison" then increasingly feels like all there is to the person, even to the person themselves, so that the individual ends up confined to a role that they had to take on in order to keep the family from perishing when they were a child. And they go through life caught up in a crippling "half-life" which they then transmit to the next generation.
And that happens through the process of "life-script-injunctions". That is, the "sinking ship" of the family requires that everybody pitch in to keep the ultimate catastrophe from happening. So in effect, each child is handed a bucket and told to "Go bail -- over there!". And the "bucket" they are given, with its associated station to bail at becomes the formative process of the "life script". It should be noted, of course, that life and people are so complicated that this analogy doesn't fully cover what is involved. It is more like the parents tell the kids to split into several parts and to go bail at several places. This produces the "multi-script" phenomenon that is by far and away the most typical outcome of growing up in an isolated nuclear family.
Incidentally, these "life scripts" become activated very early on, sometimes as soon as it is known that the child is coming. The parents develop and transmit expectations and precipitate events and orientations that powerfully affect the child from the very beginning (conception). Furthermore, these "scripts" also have a profound effect on the individual's early emotional body developmental processes, and the nature of the scripts the child has determines which and how many of several "developmental flatlines" will occur during the first two years of life.
The information on these "object relations period" developmental flatlines are contained in another book by the author entitled, "A Funny Thing Happened . . . On The Way To My Life!". The fact is that "personality" is in large part reflective of BOTH the "life scripts" and the "developmental flatlines" that a child develops as a function of what they encounter in their family. The scripts and flatlines are attempts to live and meet the needs of the situation and their own needs, but then they become self-enemies by taking on a life of their own.
This book will concentrate on the nature and impact of the "life scripts" the child is given in the family system. It is in effect an examination of the "bailing stations" that children are sent to. These "scripts" are the best the parents could come up with under effectively impossible circumstances. It is an example of the life force asserting itself through the most hideous of conditions, like a flower breaking through the asphalt.
What happens is that people have "dumb parts" sub-personalities that determine what they do when they are "in over their heads", when something activates old wounds, when they are inundated by profoundly painful feelings, or when they have been driven to distraction. An event occurs which leads to a distorted reaction/interpretation which generates "bailing instruction" behaviors that create particular outcomes that result in the child's developing a "script", when this happens over and over and over -- which it does under the conditions of the overwhelmed isolated nuclear family.
The "scripts" the child learns at their "bailing station" are "delusional conclusions" -- incorrect, primitive interpretations and survival strategies that display lack of cognition, magical egocentrism, no reality-testing, and self-limitations. In other words, they reflect the stage of development of the child at the time when they had to handle the "bailing process". They are based on the negative emotions that arise from the stressful circumstance and that connect with faulty thinking that lead to strategies that "solve" the problem in the moment but cripple the person for life. They operate like profound, pervasive and powerful "post-hypnotic suggestions" that go off in a million situations, and which activate the script pattern every time.
The reason it has this effect is that subsequent circumstances which activate the same negative emotions lead to a search in the "automatic pilot unconscious memory" for similar experiences to the present situation that gives an interpretation and reaction to use in the present moment. While this is an attempt to be effective, utilizing the normal ways our biology works, they backfire due to the distorted circumstances of the isolated nuclear family leading to so many negative events.
So the mechanism that once stood us in good stead in a child-rearing environment that included the whole community and corrected for each others shortfalls and mistakes now results in the child's "dredging up" past similar negative situations in a process that validates and reactivates all the fear or anger or guilt or despair or grief or apathy or whatever that was activated the first time. That, in turn, reproduces the full experience, which then elicits new experiences that validate the original interpretation/reaction. This thus produces a self-fulfilling prophecy effect that becomes self-perpetuating, and a "script" is born.
Once the script is in place, the individual distrusts their own perceptions, interpretations, feelings, capabilities and impetuses to action, and they believe that they have to settle for struggling to get bits of relief from the dreary parade of misery. They live in denial-dominated, fantasy-fixated, hope-addicted, dreams of a better future type of experiential environment.
"LIFE SCRIPT" DIMENSIONS
There is a large number of dimensions of the isolated nuclear family's stressful circumstances that "scripts" reflect. For instance, attention is the bottom line -- settle-for "stroke" when all else fails and nothing more viable/valuable is available, and it can become the lifeline under severe deprivational conditions. And out of this comes a person who is a "spotlight-addict" via all manner of "attention-getting mechanisms".
Some other dimensions that come into play are as follows. First there is the issue of acceptance or rejection, with its associated implications for worth, which in turn carries the right to live, to have quality of life and to experience love.
Then there is the issue of "cope-ability concerns", where the situations the person encounters frequently raise the question of whether they have what it takes to make it.
Then there is the issue of the degree of involvement with the family and the degree to which the family is involved with the individual. This is actually a dimension ranging from enslaving enmeshment on the one end to debilitating disengagement on the other. This raises issues of the right to independence and individuality on the one hand, and of belongingness on the other.
Then there is the self-attitude that results from their experiences with the family, particularly the matter of self-hatred and self-destructiveness in reaction to family messaging to the effect that they are evil or a burden.
Still another factor is the degree of felt connection and commitment the child experiences, with its associated implications regarding whether there are any "friends out there" or do they have to do the whole thing by themselves.
Next, there is the issue of responsibility. Some scripts result from the individual's being given the experience that they must take on much too much responsibility, while others involve the individual's assiduously shirking responsibility and accountability.
Anger/rage/aggression is another dimension that plays a large part in the formation and manifestation of scripts. Some suppress all of these, and others turn them into "racket emotions" or all that the individual does.
Escape and avoidance as a response is another factor that plays a central role in many scripts. That is, when the individual is confronted with a problem, they split. Or in other scripts, they found out that this is not an option and other things had to be developed.
Expression versus suppression is an issue that comes up in every family and they play a central role in many scripts -- either in the form of too much expression or too much suppression.
The role of joy, exuberance and pleasure is another major issue that scripts revolve around. Some are joyless and somber, while others drive the individual to build their life around keeping a steady stream of such experiences coming in, such as in hedonism.
Dependence -- independence -- interdependence is another "biggie". Some scripts put the environment in the caretaker role, others won't let anyone have any impact on the person, and still others can't cooperate or integrate with other people, with situations or with systems.
The degree to which the person becomes excessively internally determined or dependent on external guidance, inputs, resources is another common script issue.
Success is a central concern to many scripts -- either being compulsively compelled to go for it or odd ways of using it or systematic success-avoidance.
Issues of culpability, guilt-grabbing, blame-throwing, and the lack of conscience and concern are still another dimension underlying many scripts.
Finally, sexploitation, both physical and emotional/social, is a profound issue that precipitates and preserve scripts in a particularly virulent manner.
Now this clearly doesn't come near to exhausting the possibilities regarding the factors and dimensions involved in script formation and operation. What is intended here is to give a flavor, an idea, a feeling for what is happening when a script is being manifested.
SOME LIFE SCRIPT PRECIPITATORS
"Scripting" families won't allow anything but role-related events associated with the "bailing station" process. They use all manner of enforcement processes and "life script" dimensions to make sure that the individual can be relied upon to serve their crucial support function in the survival of the family.
As was the case with regard to the "dimensions" involved in scripting, there is also a wide variety of ways in which scripts can be precipitated, and we will examine a sampling of these to get a notion of how scripts are formed from this exploration. For brief characterizations of a very large number of these "script-precipitators", see "Problematic Parenting Patterns" by the author.
A very common pattern is "victimization" of the child, with its associated "drama triangle" roles of "persecutor" and "rescuer". Persecution of a child often involves "projective identification" with the child such that the parent thinks they see things in the child that are in the parent's "shadow" (the place where "unacceptable" things are sent during childhood, where they become grossly distorted and push for expression). The parent then attacks the child in a vicarious punishment of themselves experience.
The child ends up feeling that they deserve the punishment, and they are apt to develop a good deal of self-hate. But there are other dimensions to the "victim" trip, such as subtle satisfactions like self-pity, "safety in familiarity", superiority to those worse off, "noble suffering" and the "gambler's fallacy" (where they expect it to be better this time because it's been so long since the last reprieve), etc. tend to keep the pattern going.
Related to this situation is that of the development of "over-accountability", where the individual experiences many blaming events, and they come to the conclusion that they are evil and the cause of all negativity. They frequently become despair-freaks and self-flagellators.
Next there is the generation of the hater-avenger type. This usually happens when the parents do a lot of subtle or not so subtle attacking of the child, and then they fall back when the child lashes back at them, thereby leading the child to take the position that everything that goes wrong is the world's fault and that they have to fight back, attack, and destroy.
Then there are the accountability-avoiders of the world, who induce confusion and mystification of experience, trivialize and minimize, or verbally escape. This is often precipitated by parents who are too resigned or lost in inertia to hold the individual to the truth, or who are into sly vengeance or antisocial stuff and thereby teach the child to "cop out".
Nonsensical and inscrutable parenting is another common pattern. What happens here is that the parent manifests capricious causality, simplistic solutions, self-action-based evaluations ("Because I said so, that's why!), "floating flotsam" reactivity, and other behavior patterns that don't have an internal or realistic logic. It puts the kid into a "hopeless, hapless, helpless" mode.
Then there is the process of coercion that forces the environment and/or the child to engage in capitulation, withholding, lying, insincere commitments, etc. This has the unfortunate effect of generating self-fulfilling events for the coercer's script.
Denial is a real "fav" (favorite) in script-making. It is the utilization of the parent's "voice" to enforce or install scripts with assertions of non-reality, so the child drops reality perception for survival.
Over-generalization from current overwhelming circumstances to say to the child that this is the way it always is and always will be is a very potent installer.
Deprivation as a steady diet becomes a very powerful script-precipitator by activating self-numbing and the inability to "take things in when they do come" reactions to avoid deprivation-pain.
Intimacy-avoidance is an extremely common phenomenon that reflects the parents' need to avoid disclosure and to prevent vulnerability and emotional assault re-experiences. But it leaves the child convinced that they drove the parents away.
Lack of self-commitment that results in the environment's providing intense external motivators results in the child's learning to rely upon external "pitchforks and punishers" to get anything done for themselves.
Focussing on all the individual does that is wrong will generate demoralization and/or systematic success-avoidance without fail.
Repeated depressions that get nowhere and leave, only to return are guilt-alleviators and atonement trips that teach the child to become self-punishing.
"Double-binding" (where no matter what the individual does, it's wrong), mis-contexting, "gaslighting" (subtly manipulating and then denying it) and the like scare the hell out of the kid of the world because it is such a "magical misery tour" in their experience.
"Misery loves company" bringing the child down to the dreadful level that the parent is at is a very good way to generate self-hatred and/ or hatred of the parent.
"Self-checkmating"-induction comes when the parent uses a simple but vivid cue to the infant that threatens (unspecified) disaster if they persist in the behavior the parent doesn't want. The infant then activates all their survival resources to suppress the unwanted behavior and the parent has a "convenience kid" whom they can control with simplest of cues. But the individual then "checkmates" themselves every time they have a need, desire, goal or impact.
Teaching the child that they don't deserve anything but the very worst and then running to the rescue when the child does something self-destructive is a great way to install the use of self-destruction as a success, power and vengeance tool.
"If you ever cross this line, you'll die!" installs a "death implant", an "all points bulletin" to pull in a physical accident, illness or assault in response to "violating the Law" is a very good way to hold a child in place for life.
Insisting that the child is or must be "just like your dad (mom)" generates a very detailed compliance, along with a great self-hatred or rage at not being allowed to be themselves.
Some parents delegate their own unacceptable impulses to their "vicarious action arm" child, who then has to have some one serve as "Mission Control Houston" for them the rest of their life. A variation on this theme is where the child is put in the position of the "restrainer" for the parent, which generates a similar role for them everywhere they go.
"There's always room to do better" or "Not good enough" is a real classic unpleasable parent pattern that generates a desperate drive to get the "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from similar withholding people, systems and situations the rest of their life.
Catastrophic extremities of speech such as, "I'm starving!", "I'm freezing!", "I'm dying!" serves as a usually unconscious rageful attack on the world with indiscriminate insensitivity, and it very strongly tends to tell the kid that they are the cause of these extreme experiences, which generates self-hatred and termination-desiring on the part of the child. Now of course, an occasional comment like that, especially those above, is not what is meant here. It is a continuous barrage of such statements that does it.
The utilization of interference-running, illness-expecting, do-for-ing, and incompetence-messaging to generate studied incompetent care-coercing (SICC) is a personal power-derailment strategy par excellence.
"Care-coercing" by the child in the absence of the above precipitants usually means the parent is not using THEIR personal power, and the child is trying to get the parent to self-commit and own their power by making them (the child) cut it out. But it can backfire and become a behavioral prison.
"Strobe-light" parents who rapidly alternate between two very different if not "black and white" or good and evil" (the "Jekyl-Hyde" trip) "personalities" are very good at crazy-making.
"Slump-drops" where the parent falters and fails periodically due to perfectionistic self-expectations, hyper-anxiety, guilt-grabbing, withdrawing, self-immersion, self-crippling or conning throw the child into a real freak-out trip around unpredictability of life support systems in their life -- permanently.
A real destiny-deflector is for the parents to really advocate for the child to do the things necessary to manifest their destiny -- for all the wrong -- very wrong, reasons. It is in effect "devilish co-opting of reality", and it results in a demonic dedication to never do what they need to do.
Finally, there are the birth order processes, of which only three will be mentioned here. The first born gets to undergo all the "first time" errors and freak-outs of the parents, and the carry the responsibilities of keeping the family functioning. The youngest child is often over-protected to the point of irresponsibility- or fear-generation. And the "middle child" ends up the "lost child" -- left to their own devices a lot, precipitating the sense that no one does or should care.
SCRIPT-BUSTING PROCESSES
When you set out to work with an individual to free them from their scripts, there are several things that are worth looking at. For one, it is very valuable to assess the "meta-beliefs" behind the script, in the sense of what general existential positions are being held in place and serving as the foundation of the script. This provides very useful information with regard to how to approach the healing process with the individual. The answers to these questions come from observation, inquiry about, and inquiry of the person.
Then there is the question of where are they coming from? What motivator is there for the script and its maintenance.
With regard to the script "performances" (behavioral components), you can ask, "What does it mean to be (feel, do, think) "X"?
Then you can ask what they experience would happen if they DIDN'T do, feel, think, be "X". Then ask them what happens when they DO do, feel, think or be "X".
Another good question is where they would go or how far they would go if they did their script to the ultimate max.
An examination of the beliefs that are associated with and which underpin the script is also very useful.
Finally, do they find that their script is shared by others? If so, by whom and how? And what do they do with that?
This and other explorations of how the script works for them is very helpful in making sure that your interventions are attuned to their reality and to their needs.
Some more specific script-busting suggestions are to use a BIGGER fear to force the individual out of a fear-based script, especially if desensitization doesn't seem to do it.
When you are dealing with a "child"-loaded script, you have to use the "adult" resources of the individual to assist you in the process of teaching the individual with "child"-level technologies and experiences. In other words, enlist the help of the "adult" parts of the individual to "speak the child within's experience and language".
A real releaser from pseudo-advocating "double-binding" and "devilishly co-opted" destiny-deflection scripting (see "script precipitators"), is for you to do the same thing, but to do it in such a grossly obviously untrue way it blows the cover on the process for the person.
These are just some of the ways to work with helping people break out of their scripts. Of course, you also have to know the exact nature of script(s) you are dealing with in the person, and the approach to use with those. These are to be found in the chapters on the individual scripts that are coming up.
WHAT IS THE LARGER PURPOSE OF SCRIPTS?
This is the "gifts in the garbage" or the "creative compost" component of scripting. It refers to the fact that at the cosmic or entity-choice level, there is always some meaningful reason for undergoing the processes and struggles of having a particular script. It may be simply to experience that kind of limitation, which is a characteristic motivation at the younger soul levels. When this happens, the script acts like karma, in that the individual persists in re-creating it until they complete their lessons from that type of experience and they can move on.
At the older soul levels, there is a real propensity to use the script-learning and then the script-leaving process to expand their capabilities, compassion and comprehension for purposes of a "phase two" change of pattern as their destiny finally kicks in -- only after they have given themselves the experiences they needed to do the destiny.
In other words, it all makes sense and there is a good reason for everything. Incidentally, when you have tried "all the King's horses and all the King's men" and you can't put them back together again -- back off. They are holding on to it for a karmic or learning process on the entity level, and you owe it to them to let them go in peace.
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