Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Thus, I am more interested in the answer to the question, “What can you do now to free yourself from a decision to never trust anyone?” than to the question, “Was your decision not to trust anyone made due to a maternal injunction or a paternal injunction?” or, “Did the injunction come from P1, P2, C1 or C2 in your mother or father?”

  Structural analysis of scripts leads to a proliferation of subdivisions of ego states on the script matrix (the record so far is 28). Transactional analysis of scripts leads to a proliferation of techniques which can be used by therapists in problem solving groups to do contractual transactional analysis. Structural analysis of scripts can be pursued in one-to-one or individual psychotherapy; transactional analysis of scripts is best done in groups because it is based on the analysis of transaction between people.

  The Three Basic Life Scripts

  In order to devise a strategy for change, it is not only important to know the components of a script, but it is also important to examine a person’s life script in terms of much broader aspects, as follows.

  There are three basic ways in which people’s autonomous lives are thwarted and distorted into scripts. Looking over the many unhappy life styles that have come to my attention, and taking their extremes, I find that people can either become depressed to the point of suicide, go mad, or become addicted to some sort of drug. Depression, madness, and drug addiction are the three basic life disturbances and I call the scripts that correspond to these disturbances Lovelessness, Mindlessness, and Joylessness; or, for short, No Love, No Mind, and No Joy scripts.

  DEPRESSION, OR NO LOVE SCRIPT

  Large numbers of people in this country are in a constant unsuccessful quest for a successful, loving relationship. This is a difficulty that seems to affect women more often than men, probably because women are more sensitized to their needs for love and less capable of adapting to Lovelessness. Lack of adequate stroking, which leads to chronic stroke hunger and various degrees of depression, culminating either in suicide or in the most extreme form of depression—catatonia—is one large strand of human suffering. The Lovelessness script is based on the Stroke Economy, a set of early childhood injunctions addressed to the stroking capacities of children. Those injunctions very effectively cripple the growing child’s normal tendencies and skills for getting strokes. The result is various degrees of depression with feelings of being unloved and/or unlovable.

  MADNESS, OR NO MIND SCRIPT

  Another large portion of people live with the ever-present fear that they are going crazy and, according to statistics, about 1% are actually hospitalized. Every town across this country has within easy reach one or more mental hospitals—Ypsilanti in Ann Arbor, Bellevue in New York, Napa and Agnew in the San Francisco Bay Area, La Casteneda in Mexico City. Most people have, very much in the front of their minds, the awareness of the regional “nut house” or “funny farm” to which they might be relegated should they go mad; the fear of madness is present in large numbers of people.

  Going crazy is the most extreme expression of the No Mind script. Mindlessness, or incapacity to cope in the world, the feeling that one has no control over one’s life—seen in folk terms as having no will power, being lazy, not knowing what one wants, being stupid or crazy —is based on early childhood injunctions which attack the child’s capacity to think and to figure out the world. Training against the use of the Adult in the early years of life is the foundation for the No Mind script with the discounting transaction as its cornerstone.

  DRUG ADDICTION, OR NO JOY SCRIPT

  Large numbers of human beings in this country are in one way or another addicted to drugs. I’m not speaking here only of the visible, clearly self-destructive drug addictions such as alcoholism or heroin addiction, but also of the less visible but much more common reliance on drugs for the production of desired bodily feelings. The use of drugs for the attainment of bodily well-being includes drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, taking aspirin, and, of course, using barbiturates, sedatives, and amphetamines, as well as over-the-counter drugs which are taken to modify bodily feelings. People are, from early in their lives, prevented from experiencing their bodies and from knowing what will feel good or bad to them.

  If a person gets a headache, the usual question is not, “Why did I get a headache? What specific injury or injurious situation have I exposed my body to that is now producing a headache?” but, “Where is the aspirin?” This basic pattern is the pattern of all drug taking. People do not reflect why they need to have a drink after they come home from work, or why they need to take a pill in order to go to sleep, or why they need to take another pill in order to wake up. If they asked themselves these questions and remained in good touch with their bodies, the answers would be readily accessible. Instead, people are trained, from early in life, to disregard their bodily sensations and messages, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Unpleasant bodily sensations are medicated away whenever possible or passively tolerated whenever there is no medication which could affect them. Pleasant bodily sensations are not indulged in, and constant pressure is exerted to prevent children from being in touch with the exhilaration, the joy of a full bodily experience, and to distract them from their bodily feelings, pleasures and pains. The result is that many people are disconnected from their bodily sensations, their bodies are split off from their centers, they have lost agency over their physical selves, and are joyless.

  People may be racked by some sort of pain with which they are out of touch and don’t really feel. They are also out of touch with the joyful experiences which their body could afford them. The extreme of this alienation from the body is drug addiction; but, intermediately, people, especially men, although many women as well, are out of touch with their feelings—good or bad. They’re incapable of feeling love, incapable of feeling ecstasy, incapable of crying, incapable of hating, and live for the most part in their heads, disconnected from the rest of their bodies. The head is seen as the Center, the switchboard, the computer which reigns over the rest of the body which is just a machine designed to work or execute certain functions. Feelings, good or bad, are considered to be hindrances to proper functioning.

  These three life scripts—No Love, No Mind, No Joy—are, as I said earlier, exemplified in their extreme form by being completely and catatonically depressed, by going crazy, or by becoming addicted to a drug. Much more common in everyday life, though, is some intermediate outcome, such as going from one unsuccessful loving relationship to another, eventually living alone as an “old maid” or bachelor; or being a hardened, unfeeling, cigarette and coffee addicted, hard-drinking, unhappy person; or being constantly in the throes of crises due to incapacity for managing everyday problems. These banal manifestations of the three major scripts can also be mixed so that a person can be under the influence of a Loveless as well as Joyless script, or under the influence of a Loveless and Mindless script, or under the influence of all three.

  Each of these three oppressive scripts is based on very specific injunctions and attributions which are laid down by parents on their children, and each of these three scripts can be effectively analyzed and given up in a group therapy situation.

  Generally speaking, every person is affected in some degree by every one of these three scripts, even though he may manifest one of them most prominently. People can work through the early childhood injunctions, attributions, and decisions that affect their loving capacities, their capacities to experience their bodies fully, and their capacities to experience and control the world, and free themselves of these oppressive scripts.

  Transactional Analysis Diagnosis

  The word “diagnosis,” which means knowing a difference or being able to distinguish between two different situations, is an important word to anyone who wishes to solve a problem or remedy an undesirable situation. In medicine, being able to tell the difference between two diseases so that treatment can be aimed at the specific disease process which is causing the illness is of utmost importance. Ho
wever, the word “diagnosis” is not used only by physicians. Automobile mechanics use “diagnosis” to decide what part of a car to replace or adjust. Psychologists use the word in connection with psychological tests to diagnose emotional disturbance or “mental illness.” I will use it in this book in connection with the identification of scripts.

  Let me say, at this point, that I thoroughly object to the manner in which mental health professionals diagnose “psychopathology.”

  I believe it is one thing to look at a car and, after performing certain tests, declare that the difficulty with it is that it requires a new set of spark plugs rather than a carburetor overhaul. This seems as it should be, since it is not possible to ask the automobile any questions; so the only validation for the diagnosis is to change the plugs and then see whether the difficulty disappears. A diagnostician working with automobiles would probably be able to improve on her guesses if another person, as skilled as herself, took an independent look at the automobile and came up with a diagnosis of his own. Two, three, or four such independent diagnoses could be checked against each other and, if a number of them agreed, the likelihood would increase that the diagnosis was correct. Still, no matter how often diagnosticians agreed on spark plugs or carburetor, the final test of the diagnosis would be whether the difficulty disappeared when repairs were made. A similar process is reasonably followed by physicians when diagnosing physical illness.

  Psychologists and psychiatrists are, in my mind, most reprehensibly guilty of misusing the process of diagnosis as follows: first of all, if psychological tests are used, the scientific literature regarding psychological tests is pretty well settled on the conclusion that projective psychological tests, which are the type mostly used, when given by different diagnosticians, generally result in different conclusions. Their reliability is low, and this makes them useless as guidelines for therapy.1 But even if four diagnosticians agreed on a diagnosis, say anxiety neurosis, no agreement would exist about what therapeutic strategy should be used.

  Because the results of psychological tests tend not to agree with each other there is a tendency for diagnosticians not to check their conclusions against each other, probably because this would prove to be too embarrassing. My experience is that when two diagnosticians talk about the same case they avoid confrontations and tend instead to gloss over their differences. Diagnosticians act in many ways like politicians who may overtly take their differences very seriously but are always willing to shake hands in a smoke-filled room.

  My main objection to psychological and psychiatric diagnosis, however, is that it completely ignores the opinions and point of view of the person being diagnosed. After a disagnostician comes to the conclusion that the person suffers from an “hysterical neurosis; dissociative type,” or from “schizophrenia; schizo-affective type, depressed,” the absolutely last thing that he will do is ask the subject what she thinks about the diagnosis. In fact, diagnoses are elaborately hidden from their subjects; so much so that in certain circles it is considered a breach of ethics to actually communicate the diagnosis to the subject. This is justified on the basis of rationalizations to the effect that “patients” cannot properly understand diagnoses and that they would be too upset by them. I suppose that the reasons given are actually correct, since the fact is that most people would not be able to understand most diagnoses (I never really understood them myself even after years of studying and affixing them to psychiatric “patients”). Further, these diagnoses have a very obnoxious ring (how would you like to be called a Passive-Aggressive or Inadequate Personality?), being also often damaging to people because of the way they stick once they are made, and thus I suppose it’s true that people would be upset by them—and rightfully so.

  I personally consider some diagnoses insulting enough that if placed upon me or a person I’m close to it might cause me to react quite defensively, just as if we had been called a less sophisticated, insulting name such as “idiot” or “asshole.” I have often said that anyone who calls a friend of mine a schizophrenic would have to deal with me just as if he had insulted her and I would expect the insult to be retracted.

  Transactional analysis diagnoses can be as obnoxious as any other kind. Being told that you have a tragic loser script, with an injunction from your witch mother not to think, perpetuated by a game of “Stupid,” doesn’t sound any better to me than being called a “schizophrenic; chronic undifferentiated.”

  What makes a transactional analysis script diagnosis an instructive, human, and helpful statement is the manner in which it is arrived at and communicated.

  In transactional script analysis a diagnosis of, say, a certain kind of script, injunction, attribution, time of decision, or somatic component, is arrived at by culling information from a number of different sources:

  1. The diagnostician’s conclusions. These are usually arrived at by an intuitive blending of the Adult information. (This process is the same used by Berne to guess the professions of Army dischargees and the same process that he later used to diagnose ego states; it is centered in the Little Professor in the Child as well as the Adult of the diagnostician.)

  2. The subject’s own reaction to the diagnosis. This element in a script analysis diagnosis is of utmost importance. No matter how convinced the diagnostician is of her diagnosis, the final test of any diagnosis is the extent to which the subject of it finds it to be accurate, to feel right, to sit well, and to make sense.

  3. The reaction of other members of the therapy group. It is an essential distinguishing feature of a transactional diagnosis that it is arrived at cooperatively between the therapist, the subject, and other people in the group.

  Consider the following exchanges.

  JEDER: I feel very bad because I’m letting a lot of people down. I promised my daughter I’d take her to the circus, and I’m supposed to paint the living room. And I promised Mary I’d help her balance her books. I don’t seem to be able to keep my commitments to people.

  THERAPIST: You have an injunction from your mother. “Never say no.”

  JEDER: Oh, no. I have a very easy time saying no. Look at the way I discipline Johnny, and when the Fuller Brush salesman came to the door I absolutely refused to buy anything.

  THERAPIST: I don’t want to argue about it. That’s my opinion, and you may take it or leave it.

  JEDER: I guess you are right.…

  Contrast the above conversation with the following:

  JEDER: I feel very bad because I’m letting a lot of people down. I promised my daughter I’d take her to the circus, and I’m supposed to paint the living room. And I promised Mary I’d help her balance her books. I don’t seem to be able to keep my commitments to people.

  THERAPIST: I have an idea about your script injunction. Would you like to hear it?

  JEDER: Yes.

  THERAPIST: I think that your mother gave you a script injunction never to say no.

  JEDER: Oh, no. I have a very easy time saying no. Look at the way I discipline Johnny, and when the Fuller Brush salesman came to the door I absolutely refused to buy anything.

  THERAPIST: I see what you mean. Well, maybe your mother’s injunction was never to say no to women. Actually it does look as though you are quite capable of saying no to men. What do you think about that?

  JEDER: Well, I don’t know. It seems too simple.

  JACK (group member): That’s true about you, I think. I’ve noticed that if a man says something in this group you disagree with it, and when a woman says it you ’re much more likely to go along with it.

  JEDER: (Says nothing—seems to be thinking)

  MARY (group member):I agree. I think that’s really true. I think your mother did give you an injunction against saying no to women.

  JEDER: Well, it’s embarrassing because it makes me feel like I am tied to my mother’s apron strings, but I guess it is true. I can see it now that I look at it.…

  The above two interactions exemplify how not to and how to arrive at a tra
nsactional script analysis diagnosis. You will notice that in the first exchange the therapist’s diagnosis was actually incorrect, although it was partially correct. The ensuing exchange does not seem helpful especially because Jeder, though superficially accepting the diagnosis, rejected it inwardly.

  The second exchange has several distinguishing characteristics. The therapist asked Jeder whether he wanted a diagnosis made at that particular point. Having received his approval, the therapist made a tentative diagnosis. With the help of the group members the diagnosis was refined until it finally was acceptable to Jeder as being true. Acceptance of a diagnosis, let me hasten to say, is not necessarily an index of its validity; occasionally a person will accept any diagnosis that a therapist makes, no matter what it is. This is usually part of a game of “Gee, You’re Wonderful, Professor,” in which the subject comes on as a poor little Victim and the therapist comes on as a wonderful, all-knowing Rescuer. This kind of game is absolutely fruitless and often ends up with the person not really getting anything out of therapy and the therapist being angry and switching to frustrated Persecutor. Anytime a therapist finds himself being “right on” a great deal of the time with any one person he should check out the possibility of such a game being in progress.

  I cannot emphasize enough that transactional analysis diagnosis has as its principal goal to suggest therapeutic approaches to fulfilling the therapeutic contract, that is, solving the person’s problem. The basic therapeutic operation in script analysis is Permission. How a therapist gives Permission is explored in the chapter on therapy; at this point it is sufficient to say that Permission is a therapeutic transaction which enables a person to revoke his decision to follow the parental injunctions. The therapist is aided in giving Permission by an understanding of the person’s parental injunctions and attributions, their source, and content. She should be able to distinguish the counterscript from a genuine change in the script. Further, she should have a clear understanding of the aspects of the person’s decision affecting his everyday life, namely, his mythical hero, somatic component, and sweatshirt, as well as his central game. A list of relevant data will be supplied later in the Script Checklist (page 100). Keeping in mind my comments about the relative importance of this information, let me elaborate below: