In Scripting 101 you will learn…
An Off-Script Santa
(An interview with an example of socio-cultural scripting)
Santa: “Ho Ho Ho!”
Me: “What are you doing here, Santa?”
Santa: “Don’t ask me. You’re the one who conjured me up.”
Me: “This is supposed to be about scripting, Santa, not Christmas!”
Santa: “What is there about Christmas or me that’s not about scripting?”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Santa: “Little kids get scripted to believe I’m real even though everyone knows I’m not, right?”
Me: “Well, yeah…”
Santa: “And adults are scripted to celebrate the birth of a dying and resurrecting deity with pine trees and gifts, right?”
Me: “Hmmmm….”
Santa: “And everybody is supposed to be OK with those delusions, which are supposed to make them love everyone else and even feel good about themselves, right?“
Me: “But it’s harmless, talks about peace and brotherhood, and gets kids all excited about reindeer and presents that are going to magically appear!”
Santa: “Right. Good examples of why humans prefer to dream their lives away living in the fantasies of their life scripts. Without them, who are they? Where is the meaning of life supposed to come from?”
Me: “But a lot, maybe most of our scripting, like our language, behavior, and values, is useful and even necessary to grow up! No scripting would be a lot like leaving a child alone to grow up in the woods! He probably wouldn’t survive, and if he did, what kind of a human would he be?”
Santa: “Well, certainly one that would not be of any use to society, and probably one that would be a burden on others. So that’s just more evidence of how important and useful a fat elf like I am!”
So does off-script Santa have a point? Is our scripting important and useful, even if it is delusional? Why? Why not?
What is your life script?
Your life script is comprised of your inherited mind-set and “personality” as well as your familial, social, and cultural conditioning. Your life script is who you think you are. The reason it is important to uncover it, evaluate it, sort through it to keep the parts that remain beneficial and jettison those which are not, is to support your healing, balancing, and transformation. It is also to align your life script with the priorities of your emerging potentials and the priorities of your life compass. The implication is that you will not only thereby make better decisions and have greatly improved problem solving, but transform in ways that are both beneficial and lasting. You will find yourself in the right place at the right time more often and less often in the wrong place at the wrong time. Script transformation is foundational to the healing component of the IDL ten core competencies because it is about finding and actualizing your authentic identity. IDL interviewing, as a form of dream yoga, helps you to do this.
What is Your Biological Scripting?
Scripting in the broadest sense refers to the process through which we learn and internalize behaviors, beliefs, and norms from our environment. Your scripting is not only based on the input of your family and environment after you were born. You came into this world with a body type, a genetic profile, physical strengths, and weak links in your physical makeup – places where disease or disability are most likely to first take hold. An awareness of your biological scripting allows you to take advantage of your natural strengths and take steps to minimize or compensate for your natural, inherited weaknesses. For example, you will have either an ectomorphic, mesomorphic, or endomorphic body type. If you are an ectomorph, like I am, you will have a longer, thinner skeleton and muscles and ligaments that do well with cardio-vascular, aerobic exercise, like running and stretching, like yoga. If you are a mesomorph, your bones are neither long nor short and you are likely to do well with stop and start sports like tennis, martial arts, or baseball. If you are an endomorph, with shorter, thicker bones, you will do well with anaerobic exercise like weight lifting. Your innate reflexes, such as blinking in response to a sudden bright light, or pulling away from a hot stove are hardwired and don’t require conscious learning. Your body’s internal clock governs your circadian rhythm, which in turn regulates your sleep-wake cycle, determining whether you are an early bird or an owl. Your feelings of hunger and thirst as well as your response to pain are additional examples of your biological scripting. The more knowledge you have of your genetic strengths and weaknesses the more knowledge you have for fending off disease. For example, if you discover you have inherited immune system deficiencies, you can compensate by laying off sugar, which generates tissue inflammation that activates immune over-reactivity.
What is Your Familial Scripting?
Your familial scripting refers to patterns of behavior, communication, and roles within your family that have been passed down from one generation to the next. They are not really about you, although they comprise your identity, because they would exist even if you were never born. Familial scripts are essentially learned behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that you acquired as a result of growing up in your particular family environment.
Your familial scripting encompasses your style of communication, conflict resolution strategies, your beliefs about gender roles, values, and how you express fear, anger, sadness, happiness, envy, guilt, shame, and confusion in different situations. It includes things like your table manners, including how to use a fork and knife, not slurping or chewing with your mouth open and waiting for everyone to be seated before starting a meal. These behaviors are learned through observation and instruction. Some families encourage open and expressive communication while others emphasize more reserved or indirect communication styles. Families also pass down values related to work and responsibility. As a child, you observed your parents’ approach to work and likely adopted similar attitudes, perhaps the importance of hard work, dedication, and punctuality, or disorganization, procrastination, and laziness.
Your familial scripting is largely subconscious, operating below your awareness. Most people aren’t even aware that their attitudes, preferences, and beliefs are largely scripted by their family environment. You and I adopted and internalized the behaviors and norms we observed within our families.
Your familial scripting has strong and important positive and negative aspects. Positive scripting includes the transmission of healthy communication patterns, strong values, and supportive relationships. On the other hand, negative scripting includes the perpetuation of dysfunctional behaviors, toxic communication styles, or harmful attitudes.
What is Your Cultural Scripting?
Cultural scripting encompasses shared beliefs, values, customs, rituals, and behaviors that are transmitted across generations within a particular culture. Cultural scripts are deeply rooted in the values and traditions of a culture and change slowly. They generate family structure, attitudes about education, work, religion, and cultural identity, the majority of what makes an American an American as differentiated from a Spaniard, Russian, or Chinese. Different cultures have distinct ways of greeting one another. For example, some cultures may use handshakes, while others may prefer bowing or hugging. These greeting customs are learned and reinforced within a cultural context. Cultural scripting often includes expectations regarding gender roles. In some cultures, certain roles and responsibilities are traditionally associated with specific genders, influencing behavior and societal expectations. Cultural ceremonies, rituals, and traditions are scripted behaviors passed down through generations. This could include religious ceremonies, wedding customs, or cultural festivals that dictate specific behaviors and actions.
What is Your Social Scripting?
Social scripting primarily concerns the rules and expectations that guide your behavior in social situations. It focuses on how you interact with others within specific social settings. It involves the learned and often implicit set of rules, norms, and behaviors that guide you in social interactions, including your expectations and norms for communication, personal space, and other social behaviors within a particular social context. Social scripting can vary significantly from one social context to another, even within the same culture. It tends to be more flexible and adaptable than cultural scripting, varying based on your particular social context or group. Social scripts can change more rapidly than cultural scripting, and you may assume different social scripts around superiors than peers at work or in a cafe instead of the opera. For example, your social scripting influences how you engage in conversation with others. This includes turn-taking, active listening, and following social cues to maintain smooth interactions. Fashion trends are dictated by societal norms and expectations, and we wear clothes styles that align with current fashion standards within our social circles. Even when our clothes, tattoos, and piercings are statements of our individuality, they follow patterns of fashion standards of others in our society that are expressing their individuality. For example, European tattoos and piercings are different from African or Indian tattoos and piercings. Dating also follows socially scripted patterns. There are societal expectations regarding who initiates contact, where to go on a date, and how to express interest, which we learn and conform to through socialization.
How do biological, familial, and socio-cultural scripting interfere with access to the transpersonal dimensions of development and awareness of the sacred in the here-and now?
The cumulative effect of biological, familial, and socio-cultural influences results in the scripting and conditioning of our minds and behaviors. Scripting refers to the internalized narratives, beliefs, and patterns of thought that shape how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Conditioning occurs through repeated exposure to certain stimuli and reinforcement of specific behaviors and attitudes. Both scripting and conditioning can create entrenched cognitive patterns and emotional habits that limit our capacity to transcend egoic identification and access transpersonal dimensions of awareness.
Biological predispositions, such as genetic traits and neurochemistry, can influence your temperament, personality, and cognitive functioning. While you may have innate tendencies towards openness to transpersonal experiences, others may be more skeptical or resistant due to their genetic makeup. Additionally, neurological conditions or imbalances in brain chemistry may affect your capacity to engage in certain contemplative practices or perceive transpersonal states of consciousness.
Your family dynamics and upbringing play a crucial role in shaping an your beliefs, values, and worldview. Families may adhere to specific religious or cultural traditions that either facilitate or inhibit exploration of transpersonal dimensions. Upbringing in environments that discourage questioning or exploration of spirituality, or that impose rigid dogmas or belief systems, can create barriers to accessing transpersonal experiences. Similarly, familial trauma or dysfunction may create emotional blocks or psychological barriers that hinder your ability to connect with the sacred.
Societal norms, cultural beliefs, and social institutions exert significant influence on your perceptions of the sacred. Cultural biases, religious indoctrination, and societal expectations may limit the range of acceptable spiritual experiences or discourage exploration beyond conventional religious frameworks. Moreover, living in a materialistic and consumer-driven culture can prioritize external success and material wealth over inner growth and transpersonal development, making it challenging to prioritize and cultivate transpersonal awareness.
In summary, biological, familial, and socio-cultural factors can serve as both facilitators and obstacles to the development of transpersonal awareness and the recognition of the sacred in the present moment. Overcoming these influences often involves introspection, critical inquiry, and intentional practices aimed at transcending conditioning and expanding one’s consciousness beyond limiting beliefs and societal norms.
What is your life script?
Your life script is who you think you are. It is comprised of your inherited mind-set and “personality” as well as your familial, social, and cultural conditioning. In our first seven years of life we get a picture of:
- Ourselves
- Others
- The world as a whole
- What and how our life will look like
Most people are unaware that their lives are based on internalized scripting or “programming.” If you keep getting into the same uncomfortable situations, that is a pretty good reason to ask, “Why do these unhealthy patterns keep repeating in my life? How and why did I develop them? How can I go about changing them?”
When and how did you develop your life script?
You created your script at a young age as a survival strategy. You needed it as a child to structure time, space and relationships and outline boundaries. Without this structure you would be disoriented, without a clear sense of identity. You would not have known where you came from and where you should go in life.
Can you change your life script?
The good news is that it is possible to make new choices later and change your life plan. For example, if you are tired of drama playing psychological games, you can surface how and why you get sucked in and opt for a new behavior. With such new decisions you ultimately also change your scripting.
Why is your life script important?
The reason it is important to uncover, evaluate, and sort through your life script is in order to keep the parts that remain beneficial and jettison those which you have outgrown, that no longer support your healing, balancing, and transformation. It is also to align your life script with the priorities of your emerging potentials and the priorities of your life compass. The implication is that you will not only thereby make better decisions and have greatly improved problem solving, but transform in ways that are both beneficial and lasting. You will find yourself in the right place at the right time more often and less often in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Why is your life script important to IDL?
Script transformation is foundational to the healing component of the IDL ten core competencies because it is about finding and actualizing an evolving sense of who you are more in alignment with the priorities of your own unique life compass. IDL interviewing, as a form of dream yoga, helps you to do this. The script assumptions you have determine how you understand and use the other components of IDL: how you deal with drama in your life, with your thoughts, including your cognitive distortions, what goals you set, how assertive you are, how you go about solving your life problems, how you view the perspectives you interview, your success in meditation and pranayama, and the intentions you set that direct your life.
How important is your scripting?
If you don’t surface your internalized script assumptions and injunctions, they will control and limit your destiny. If you do not surface, evaluate, sort through, and align your scripting with the priorities of your life compass, your unrecognized scripted assumptions will control you, direct the course of your life, and bring it into paths that are not authentic and become hard to dislodge habits that are hard to change. Let me give you two examples. As a child I was scripted to feel guilt and to personalize, that is, to think that what others said or did was about me instead of what was actually the case – it rarely had anything to do with me and mostly reflected on their mental state and level of development. But because I assumed such things were about me, I often took things personally and got defensive. I would often feel guilty. It took me until I was almost thirty to surface and recognize this scripting enough to outgrow guilt feelings. This is why teaching children and young people about scripting is crucial, in order to provide them with the information and tools they need to make basic life choices before their scripting locks them into a difficult and treacherous life path. It is also why it is important to teach interviewing, particularly of dreams, to access and build a relationship with a relatively unscripted source of creativity and life direction while accessing authentic emerging priorities that children can use to align their priorities with those of their life compass.
Why is it difficult to change our life script?
Do not underestimate both how important and how difficult it is to expose to your awareness and then change your life script. Expect resistance, because your scripting was (and in many ways, still is today) highly adaptive. It was developed to see you through tough times. It did so, and now you no longer are in those tough times; you no longer have to adapt to the expectations and demands of your family of origin or your early education because you no longer are in your childhood environment. Still, your scripting is who you think you are, and you have to have not only good, but useful reasons to change to make any real differences in your scripting. It took me, I am almost embarrassed to say, until I was almost seventy-four, to finally outgrow personalization, although I had outgrown some of it over the years. While this may be a testament to how some of us are slow learners, it more likely reflects the depth at which fundamental toxic aspects of our scripting are entrenched and how resistant to removal they are -regardless of our degree of education and amount of self-work.
How do you change your life script?
This cannot be done until your life scripting is recognized, sorted through, and you have learned how to access the priorities of your life compass so you can compare them to the changes you have made to your life script. Most of the educational material on scripting in this module is adapted from a form of therapy called “Transactional Analysis,” developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Dr. Berne did a great deal of useful work at creating strategies for uncovering, understanding, and changing our scripting, and that’s why this module focuses on his contributions. His work is based on the concept of choice, that most of the problems we face in life can be reduced or resolved if we learn to make better choices. However, in order to make better choices we first need to learn why we made the choices that got us where we are today. That is where learning what our life script is and why we developed it is important. Uncovering, understanding, and changing our scripting is one of the major reasons why we do interviewing of ourselves and others, of dream characters and personifications of life issues throughout the IDL curriculum. Interviewed perspectives are not stuck in our scripting where and how we are. As we identify with them we organically outgrow negative elements of our scripting – provided it is not constantly reinforced by others, our culture, our thoughts and feelings.
Key components of script theory
In this first module of the IDL Coaching curriculum we focus on key components of Eric Berne’s script theory. His work embodies both the simplest and most practical way to understand and work with understanding, surfacing, and changing your life script that currently exists.
How does Transactional Analysis define “life scripts?”
Berne’s work on life scripts contains six elements: life scripts, script decisions, script messages, counter-scripts, script analysis, and script redecision. The first two deal with understanding your life script. The next four help you to surface your scripting so you can objectively evaluate what continues to be useful and what to toss away. The final component focuses on changing your life scripting.
A winning script: A person with a winning script achieves his/her goals and feels good about it. A person wanting to become wealthy has a winning script when they have a lot of money and can enjoy life. Winning in Transactional Analysis does not imply that somebody else loses. It is rather a personal success. Notice that the concept of a winning script in Transactional Analysis is different from that of IDL. Attainment of our own goals is not necessarily healing, balanced, or transformative. For example, we all can think of examples of wealthy people who are none of the above. Becoming wealthy is a winning script in terms of one possible set of personal priorities. IDL asks, “How do we know our personal priorities reflect the priorities of our life compass?” “Does it care if we have a lot of money or not?”
A non-winning script: A person with a non-winning script neither makes much progress nor much of a loss of progress. These people take no risks. To stick with the above example, they do not become rich, but they do not become impoverished either. Maybe such people ask themselves this question at the end of their lives: “Could I have done more with my life? Well … it was not that bad. ” From the perspective of IDL, a non-winning script is one that is not correlated with the priorities of our own innate emerging potentials and our own unique life compass. It is a non-winning script because we are seeking happiness, fulfillment, and integration from the attainment of goals and intentions that are not in alignment with what wants to be born within us.
A losing script: Someone has a losing script when they don’t reach their stated goal. It does not necessarily depend on their actual performance but on their attitude towards what has been accomplished throughout their life. If a person who wants to become rich stays poor, they will feel they have failed. They might be millionaires in the company of multi-millionaires. Another example would be somebody who became rich but suffers from the wealth, perhaps due to a sense of burden or responsibility. For IDL, those who do not surface, sort through, and align their script with interviewed emerging priorities are likely to have a losing script. They will work hard to conform to the expectations of their family, society, and culture, which they have internalized and made their own. They may succeed in doing so and thereby be a success in the eyes of others and even themselves. However, from the perspective of their life compass they may remain a bonsai, a diminutive representation of what their potential actually is.
Life Scripts
A life script is a set of assumptions you made out of your awareness in childhood and adolescence about how to live your life. Those assumptions were formed due to the rewards and punishments in play in your home, early life experiences, culture, and society. They were dictated by your need to find yourself and “fit in,” to your family, and later, to peer pressures, and society. It is important to understand that your life scripting is not rational or based on adult reasoning but is emotional and subjective in nature. It only becomes subject to adult reasoning as it is understood and surfaced.
Script Decisions
Your script decisions include beliefs, decisions, and conclusions that you formed about yourself, others, and the world. These decisions are unconscious assumptions that you experience as true for you in your world and life as a child and young adult. Such assumptions can be both limiting and empowering, and they shape your life choices and experiences for better and for worse, without your knowledge or consent. They provide a practical and realistic description of “fate,” “karma,” and “predestination.”
Script Messages
Your script messages can be positive, negative, and mixed. They confirm and maintain your life script. For example, if you have a script of “I’m not good enough,” you are likely to repeatedly receive messages that reinforce this belief.
Counter-scripts
Counter-scripts are opposing forces or desires that are at work within you, creating resistances and pressures that create internal conflicts and contribute to self-sabotaging behaviors. For instance, if you have a script of “I’m not good enough,” you may also have a counter-script that desires success and validation. Think of counter-scripts as compensatory mechanisms. Because compensations are reactions, they are no more likely to provide authentic balance and inner peace than the script itself.
Script Analysis
In learning about scripting in the first module of the IDL Coaching curriculum you are learning how to analyze and understand your life scripting so that you can help your clients to do the same. You will learn to identify your script assumptions, recognize the impact of your early life experiences, and how to make conscious choices to change or transcend your scripting. You also learn how to not simply choose a better life script but to contact your emerging potentials and life compass in order to align your life script with authentic, emerging priorities that transcend your identity.
Script Redecision
Script theory allows you to recognize and challenge your life scripting and make conscious decisions to change it. This process, known as “script redecision,” aims to help you live a more fulfilling and authentic life. In IDL, this is the process of practicing contact your emerging potentials and life compass in order to align your life script with authentic, emerging priorities that transcend your identity. This is done through the IDL interviewing process.
How do biological, familial, and socio-cultural scripting interfere with access to the transpersonal dimensions of development and awareness of the sacred in the here-and now?
The cumulative effect of biological, familial, and socio-cultural influences results in the scripting and conditioning of our minds and behaviors. Scripting refers to the internalized narratives, beliefs, and patterns of thought that shape how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Conditioning occurs through repeated exposure to certain stimuli and reinforcement of specific behaviors and attitudes. Both scripting and conditioning can create entrenched cognitive patterns and emotional habits that limit our capacity to transcend egoic identification and access transpersonal dimensions of awareness.
Biological predispositions, such as genetic traits and neurochemistry, can influence your temperament, personality, and cognitive functioning. While you may have innate tendencies towards openness to transpersonal experiences, others may be more skeptical or resistant due to their genetic makeup. Additionally, neurological conditions or imbalances in brain chemistry may affect your capacity to engage in certain contemplative practices or perceive transpersonal states of consciousness.
Your family dynamics and upbringing play a crucial role in shaping an your beliefs, values, and worldview. Families may adhere to specific religious or cultural traditions that either facilitate or inhibit exploration of transpersonal dimensions. Upbringing in environments that discourage questioning or exploration of spirituality, or that impose rigid dogmas or belief systems, can create barriers to accessing transpersonal experiences. Similarly, familial trauma or dysfunction may create emotional blocks or psychological barriers that hinder your ability to connect with the sacred.
Societal norms, cultural beliefs, and social institutions exert significant influence on your perceptions of the sacred. Cultural biases, religious indoctrination, and societal expectations may limit the range of acceptable spiritual experiences or discourage exploration beyond conventional religious frameworks. Moreover, living in a materialistic and consumer-driven culture can prioritize external success and material wealth over inner growth and transpersonal development, making it challenging to prioritize and cultivate transpersonal awareness.
In summary, biological, familial, and socio-cultural factors can serve as both facilitators and obstacles to the development of transpersonal awareness and the recognition of the sacred in the present moment. Overcoming these influences often involves introspection, critical inquiry, and intentional practices aimed at transcending conditioning and expanding one’s consciousness beyond limiting beliefs and societal norms.
Assignments and Homework
Reading:
Under “Essays and Interviews,” “Biological Scripting: Physical Health Issues.” read:
Accessing Your Inner Physician
Dealing With Pain and Physical Symptoms: http://www.integraldeeplistening.com/dealing-with-pain-and-physical-symptoms/
A Brief Walk Through the Ladder of Development
Summarize what you have read by answering the following questions: How does this essay relate to my own scripting? What can I take away from it to help me surface, examine, and rewrite my life script? How can I use it to align my priorities more closely with those of my emerging potentials? Submit your written summaries to your supervising team member.
Videos:
In the IDL video curricula, watch:
Why Recognizing Your Life Script is So Important
A script is based on the memorized and rehearsed lines and directions that an actor exhibits to fulfill his role in a play or drama. Eric Berne, MD, the creator of Transactional Analysis, took this concept in the 1950’s and turned it into a powerful, important and very helpful way to understand why we keep making the same dysfunctional choices throughout our lives, choosing addictions over freedom, irrational beliefs over knowledge, wisdom, and common sense, and crazy-making drama over peace of mind. Your script is your life plan, developed for the most part out of your awareness during your childhood in response to the expectations, priorities, rewards and punishments of your familial and cultural environments. It is your internalized framework for making sense of your world, built into the foundation of your identity from before you knew how to talk. Think of your script as your means of navigating your way through life by filtering out that information that does not validate or support it. Your script determines what you look for regarding success, partnership and happiness. Your script determines who you think you are and what it means to succeed and fail. You see, hear, and respond to life in ways that validate your script and ignore, repress, or deny the presence, reality, or importance of those things, ideas, feelings, and people that challenge or threaten the assumptions of your life script.
Interviewing:
What does interviewing reveal about scripting? About your familial, social, and cultural scripting? About the scripting of those you interview?
Over the course of this module: Interview yourself at least twice. Interview someone else at least twice. Have others you have interviewed interview you at least twice. Submit your written interviews to your supervising team member. To have your interviews automatically created for you, use the on-line interviewing format on this site. Focus on thinking about how your life issues may reflect your scripting and how the feedback and recommendations made by your interviewed characters impact your life script. What does your interview say about how, where, and when you are stuck in your life script? Are there recommendations about how to free yourself from negative aspects of your life scripting? If so, what are they?
Questions
- Write down your answers to the following questions.
- Share your answers with your other study team members.
- Discuss.
- Submit your written answers to your team supervisor.
Why is the concept of scripting important? What does it have to do with IDL? What are the formative factors that generate your life script? What are the advantages of creating a life script from childhood? What are the disadvantages of living under an unexamined life script? What are the components of creating, uncovering, understanding, and changing your life script? Why is changing our life script difficult? Why is it not sufficient to simply make new life decisions based on aligning our scripting with our present life priorities? How does an understanding of scripting relate to the other nine competencies of the IDL curriculum? How would you rate the usefulness of this unit 0-10? Why? How can it be improved?
Setting Intent
What do you want to take away from this unit to improve your life?
How would you like it to influence your dreams tonight?
How can you format that as a statement of intention to read over to remind yourself, before you go to sleep, to incubate in your dreams tonight?
Course Information
Course Instructor
