Scripting 102: Script Messages

How do children develop their scripts?

Your life script was created through messages about:

• Yourself
• Others
• The world

These ideas were internalized unconsciously simply from the experience of being alive in your particular family and country. These script messages are the life experiences and interpersonal interactions that created your script decisions and beliefs outside of your awareness. These messages can be either positive or negative.

Where do script messages come from?

• Modeling: Visible ways adults and peers behave.
• Attributions: Being told “you’re just like…”
• Suggestions: Hints and encouragement such as “Always do your best.”
• Injunctions and counter-injunctions: Demands to not do or do things.

Most messages are unconsciously passed on to and received by a child from parents or other caregivers. Often the parents have also taken messages from their parents unconsciously. This creates family culture: “This is how we think, feel, and behave in our home.” These remain unchanged until something in that pattern is consciously or unconsciously altered.

Do we make script decisions or are they assumptions and expectations?

Transactional Analysis views the responses to scripting messages in children as “decisions,” but this is too strong a word—because decisions imply conscious choice and awareness. Young children learn conclusions and assumptions about themselves and others based on moment-to-moment interaction with their environment. Only later, with language and more developed cognition, do conscious decisions begin to form.

Script internalization begins when a child is very young and often remains largely unconscious throughout life without deep reflection or support in awareness. Until then, scripting shapes identity, behavior, and life choices for much of one’s life.

What are the different types of scripting messages?

Script messages can be:

• Verbal
• Non-verbal
• Mixed (verbal and non-verbal)

Familial scripting often involves permissions or injunctions passed early in life. Injunctions are powerful basic beliefs communicated through limitations, such as:

• “Don’t be yourself!”
• “Don’t reach your goal!”
• “Don’t be!”

Role models, attributions, and counter-injunctions also shape how children interpret norms, expectations, and limits.

Negative, Positive, and Mixed Script Messages

Script messages range widely based on family dynamics and life experiences. There are three main varieties:

• Negative Script Messages – destructive beliefs that limit possibility.
• Positive Script Messages – supportive beliefs that nurture growth.
• Mixed Script Messages – combinations of encouragement and limitation that create confusion or ambivalence.

Understanding these script messages and how they form helps you evaluate which parts of your life scripting remain useful and which patterns you may choose to change or transform.