Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  People who want to understand the workings of their bodies and the diseases that affect them are accustomed to being discouraged by their physician. “I am the Doctor,” we are told, at best: “Leave your body in my hands.” At worst we are made to feel guilty about any desire to maintain control over the healing process, or (heaven forbid) our Doctor.

  Speculation, or mirror-gazing, was prohibited and punished in the Middle Ages. In the twentieth century women who, with the aid of mirrors, are congregating to do gynecological self-examinations are being eyed suspiciously by medical associations who claim that they conspire to practice medicine without a license.

  We have, however, the right and the capacity to understand ourselves, our bodies included. The capacity to understand the world—ourselves—is centered in the Adult ego state. There are two Adult ego states in the personality: one, the first-order Adult, or the Adult in the Child, or the Little Professor; and two, the second-order Adult. These two Adult ego states are suited for the gathering and processing of data from the world.

  The second-order Adult is ideally suited for rationality, the understanding of “hard” data or information which have been codified, that is, put into words or symbols. This ego state is thought to be “scientific” as opposed to intuition, which is supposedly not. However, this is far from true: non-rational thought has been an essential part of scientific research. Intuitive hunches and “irrational” leaps of thought propel all scientific research and many successful scientists have acknowledged that fact. Rationality is not more “scientific” than intuition. It is simply more accurate, when measurable information is available, than is intuition. On the other hand, when measurable information is not available, intuition is more accurate than rationality.

  The Little Professor or Adult in the Child, also called intuition, is more suited for the processing and storing of information which has not been coded and which is still, so to speak, soft, unformed, vague, but is nevertheless extremely useful. Intuition, or the Adult in the Child, works primarily at the frontiers of a person’s knowledge. As Eric Berne found in his investigations on intuition, it is a powerful tool which can be used to advantage. Even though it is not considered a valid source of information in scientific circles, it is in fact constantly used by most people. In the absence of “hard” data, intuition—along with tradition, which is the Parental approach to solving problems—is a useful and effective tool. Because we have so little “hard” data on the psychological workings of human beings, intuition is especially useful in that area of human relations.

  Both Adult ego states in the person are affected by basic, banal script training. As will be explained later in this book when Hogie Wyckoff writes about sex roles, the tendency in the home is to attack primarily one or the other of these two faculties. In men intuition is attacked. In women the second-order Adult, which is the rational, logical Adult, and which I have called rationality, is attacked. In any case, neither of these two faculties, rationality and intuition, which are the cornerstones of power in the world, are allowed, let alone encouraged, to develop fully. The defeat of rationality and intuition is accomplished through discounting and lying.

  Discounts

  The discount transaction is a common transactional event.

  A discount is a crossed transaction in which the discountee emits a stimulus from his Adult ego state to another person’s Adult and that person responds from his Parent or Child. Consider the following example:

  Little Mary goes to her parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and wakes up Mother.

  MOTHER: (Adult) What’s the matter, Mary?

  MARY: (Adult) I’m afraid

  MOTHER: (Parent)Don’t be afraid. Go back to sleep.

  Mother asks Mary an Adult question which Mary answers with her Adult; she reports that she is afraid. Mother’s answer, from her Parent, discounts the facts of the situation, namely that Mary is afraid. At this point Mary will probably get even more afraid and lose what little hold she has on her rationality. If she begins to cry, Mother may get angry or Mother may offer to let Mary come into bed with her. Whether Mother Nurtures or Persecutes Mary the effect of the discount is to diminish Mary’s Adult thinking capacities.

  Consider and contrast the following transaction:

  Mary once again has come to her parents’ bedroom.

  MOTHER: (Adult) What’s the matter?

  MARY: (Adult)I’m afraid

  MOTHER: (Adult) What are you afraid of?

  MARY: (Adult)I heard some noises, and I think there are some burglars in the house

  MOTHER: (Adult) Oh, I see. I think you are safe. There hasn’t been a burglary here for ten years, and (Parent) I would like it if you went back to bed. O.K.?

  MARY: (Child) O.K. But can I come back if I have another bad dream?

  MOTHER: (Parent) Yes, please go back to sleep now.

  In this latter transaction Mary, instead of being discounted and winding up afraid, has learned several important facts: that she lives in a safe neighborhood where there is very little to worry about in the way of prowlers in the night; that mother can be relied upon whenever she is afraid; and, finally, she has learned from mother how to deal with somebody who is afraid.

  Discounts make people crazy. Ronald Laing, who has an intimate understanding of the discount transaction, gives several examples of discounts and their effect on people in his book Knots:1

  JILL: I am frightened.

  JACK:Don’t be frightened.

  The above is a discount. The result of a discount is that the discountee becomes confused; her mind is set reeling. Laing follows:

  JILL: I am frightened to be frightened when you tell me I ought not to feel frightened.

  Frightened.

  Frightened to be frightened.

  Not frightened to be frightened.

  Not frightened.

  Frightened not to be frightened.

  Not frightened to be not frightened.

  Another example:

  JILL: I’m upset you’re upset.

  JACK: I’m not upset.

  Once again, this is a discount, and once again Jill’s mind is boggled.

  JILL: I’m upset that you’re not upset that I’m upset you’re upset.

  Jill is not the only victim of Jack’s discount. Jack eventually has to deal with the effects of the discount on Jill’s mind.

  JACK: I’m upset that you’re upset that I’m not upset that you’re upset that I’m upset, when I’m not.

  And finally, here is a knot that illustrates how discounts are connected with the feeling of being unable to think or being stupid.

  JILL: You think I’m stupid.

  JACK: I don’t think you’re stupid.

  Once again this is a discount. Jill has a feeling coming probably from her intuition that Jack in some way does not respect her intelligence. Jack proceeds to discount that feeling, and Jill in spite of being an intelligent woman is, once again, totally confused.

  JILL: I must be stupid to think you think I’m stupid if you don’t, or you must be lying.

  I’m stupid in every way!

  To think I’m stupid, if I am stupid.

  To think I’m stupid, if I’m not stupid.

  To think you think I’m stupid, if you don’t.

  Some of Jill’s thoughts above would be labeled by a psychiatrist (or psychologist or whatever) as “paranoid.” The affect that goes with these thoughts might be considered inappropriate. People who are constantly subjected to discounts and accept them indeed are prone to go mad and “exhibit” paranoid symptoms and inappropriate affect. Madness is the most extreme consequence of Mindlessness scripting.

  The discount, then, is the way in which parents and others in the child’s world interfere with the youngster’s potential for knowing the world and the way in which the growing powers of understanding of the child are stunted. There are several forms of awareness that are discounted in children: their intuition, their emotions, and their rationality.
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  Discounts of Intuition

  People are capable of making quick, uncalculated, intuitive appraisals of the states of mind of other people; in other words, reading people’s minds.

  We are able to know whether someone is happy, sad, excited, or feeling scared, guilty, confident, or suspicious. We can tell if someone is on the defensive or on the offensive, whether he is lying or telling the truth.

  Being able to read people’s minds is very important in being able to effectively relate to other people. Effective use of the information that we get from our intuition is a different process from the process we use with information from our Adult. (From now on I will refer to the second-order Adult—rationality—as the Adult.)

  Adult data can be used as is, with confidence. For instance, if we buy two dollars’ worth of gasoline and pay with a twenty-dollar bill, we know that we will receive eighteen dollars in change with, say, 99.5% certainty. We know this with pur Adult.

  On the other hand, let us assume we meet a friend on the street, and our intuition tells us that she is sad, exhausted, and frustrated, and that she may rebuff a warm greeting. We don’t know for sure, but we can estimate what she will do and act on our estimate. We may decide that there is a 60% chance that she’ll reject our stroke and so we approach her with a preliminary, cautious smile, waiting for her response or feedback. If she smiles back widely we readjust our estimate and take a chance, and so on. This is the effective use of intuition: because it isn’t 100% reliable it needs to be modified through feedback.

  We may decide that our friend is going to rebuff us and pass her by without a greeting. This would be an ineffective use of intuition. If we give intuition too much credit and don’t modify it through feedback, we are said to be paranoid. Even if we know that our intuition is almost always accurate, it is important to use it carefully.

  A person whose intuitions are repeatedly discounted is put in a situation in which the intuitive information from the Little Professor is contradicted, over and over, by the information coming from the discounters. This creates a great deal of mental stress in the discountee.

  A person being discounted can: ignore her or his intuition; ignore the discounter; or try to react to both the intuition and the discounter. All of these leave something to be desired.

  Ignoring our intuition helps make us unaware, mindless, and causes us to feel stupid. Ignoring the discounter makes us “paranoid,” unsociable, and hard to get along with. Trying to react to both our intuition and the discounter leaves us confused.

  The effective reaction to discounting is called accounting and will be explained fully in Chapter 23.

  Discounts of Personal Emotions

  Another important form of knowledge which discounting attacks is knowledge about one’s own feelings. We continually have emotions which are tied to the events around us. We are angry, sad, guilty, happy, depending on what is going on in the world at the time. These feelings can be unacceptable to those around us, especially if we are a young child.

  Some parents dislike their children to be sad; some dislike them to be happy; yet others dislike them to be angry, or to have loving feelings. When these emotions are expressed, parents may do everything they can to ignore them, cause them to be withdrawn, to invalidate them. In certain households anger is discounted while in others fear is discounted, and so on. At the same time, other feelings which are the family’s “feeling racket” (anger, sadness, frustration, etc.) are encouraged and applied universally to every situation. The outcome of this kind of discounting of feelings is that, once again, an important source of information and understanding is taken away from the child. Laing1 points out how invalidation of their feelings turns people into mental invalids. The result of discounts is that people become split within themselves. A whole portion of their being, their feelings, is not acknowledged and, perhaps, eventually not even felt. The feelings continue to exist, however, and affect large parts of the person’s bodily states and behavior. Unexpressed anger, shame, fear, sadness build up and eventually find expression anyway. Sometimes accumulated feelings (stamps) are unloaded all at once in an “emotional binge.” Sometimes they “seep” through and find constant expression in physical symptoms or in the person’s everyday behavior, as in the case of the man who grinds his teeth during his sleep or the woman who has a constant quiver in her mouth. Once again, a person whose feelings are discounted has three choices:

  1. To ignore the feelings and act as if they didn’t exist The result is a person who is detached from his feelings. Men often make this choice; they become “cold” and unemotional.

  2. To have the feelings and disregard the discounters. This person will be considered over-emotional and immature. This choice is often made by women; they become emotional and “irrational.”

  3. Attempt to live with both the feelings and their discounts. This causes confusion. The person will be erratic and anxious.

  Discounts of Rationality

  The most likely discount to happen in a family is the discount of a child’s intuition and/or emotions. However, rational thought, the function of the Adult, is also discounted in children; their clear perceptions of obvious facts and the logical connections they make are often interfered with. For example, one person reports that as a child she repeatedly witnessed her mother being lazy and irresponsible and she recalls thinking that there was an obvious inconsistency in her mother’s behavior. She asked the logical question: “Mother, how come you’re mad at Father for not mowing the lawn when you have a pile of dirty dishes in the sink?” This candid, logical observation made by the little girl’s Adult was met with Mother’s strong and angry disapproval: “You get smart with me one more time, girl, and I’ll knock your head off!” This statement was a clear and forceful injunction against the use of the logical capacity of the youngster’s Adult. It had the effect of severely inhibiting future logical, rational thinking in her. It amounts to a powerful “Don’t think!” injunction.

  Another woman recalled that her parents expressed a great deal of anger whenever she came home from school and used big words and talked about concepts that she was learning from a favorite teacher who encouraged her to think logically. The situation got so bad that whenever she used a big word the parents got very angry. This culminated one day when her father made a bigoted remark about a neighbor and she said, “That’s prejudiced!” Father turned to her and said: “Prejudiced? I’ll prejudice you! Don’t get sassy around this house!” and slapped her across the face. The statement “Don’t get sassy around this house” was deeply etched in the child’s mind. To her it meant that using big words and being intelligent was a form of insolence. Later, this caused her a lot of difficulty when, as a student in college, her father’s statement reappeared as a Pig Parent message saying, “You can’t learn this important stuff. Who do you think you are, trying to act big?”

  One way that the Adult is discounted and prevented from operating is in the way people confront difficult situations. Eric Berne1 points out how in certain families when something goes wrong the parents get angry, feel hurt, or become depressed, while in others when something goes wrong the parents react by searching for a solution to the problem. Looking for the rational solution to personal problems is seldom taught to children; the tendency instead is to use Parent or Child solutions.

  Schiff and Schiff2 describe the ways in which discounts affect people’s problem solving ability: when troubles develop, people’s responses can vary. The person can react by saying, “There is a problem here and I can solve it.” On the other hand, Schiff and Schiff point out, the person can say, “There is a problem here, but I can’t solve it,” or “There is no problem here,” thereby discounting her or his rationality and ability to solve problems.

  When problem solving is discouraged by parents, children develop a reaction of mindlessness, stupidity, passivity, and incapacity to think in the face of difficult situations.

  Scripting against problem solving often shows u
p in relation to emotional difficulties. People often feel that their lives are “fated” and can’t be changed. Some even feel that to apply the rational powers of the Adult to one’s personal life takes the romance or zip out of it. They will ask, “Must everything be analyzed? Is nothing sacred any more?” Often such an attitude is scripted by parents who were invested in discouraging their offspring’s Adult powers.

  Others feel that to think about solutions is akin to hexing them. Skid row alcoholics believe in the “alkie hex” brought upon those who discuss their accomplishments. Some people simply feel that Adult scrutiny will make good things vanish into thin air.

  The fact, however, is that expanding awareness means expanding power and expanding well-being. We can only effectively effect what we understand. Let me give an example more common to our experience.

  Mr. Bruto, whose life plan was to toil long hours until he died of a heart attack, was aware only of the daily routines connected with his work. He started the day driving to work for fifty minutes on a crowded freeway breathing polluted air. He worked hard all day and took two fifteen-minute coffee and cigarette breaks and one lunch break during which he gathered his energy for the next work period. He worked overtime on weekends and did plumbing on the side in his free moments. He told himself he had a good job, since his wages were $7.00 per hour and plenty of overtime (though he had no choice in the matter since he had to work the overtime offered him). The only problem he was aware of was his insomnia and the fact that he had blinding headaches and periodically went on uncontrollable alcoholic binges. Thus he was (understandably to him) never promoted at work and always slightly in debt. Every month’s bills left his pockets empty. Yet he was managing to pay for his car and house and bringing up his children to be good, responsible workers, though sometimes he worried and suspected that they were using “dope.”