Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Vision and hearing are severely limited from their possible scope by being made the servants of rationality. Children’s eidetic vision is turned into the impoverished perception of grownups. Looking at a rose we don’t see the luscious velvety fuzz of the petals, the sparkling droplets hidden within their folds, the subtle variations in the deep red hues. We see a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose. As Ronald Reagan has said about our redwoods, “You see one, you’ve seen them all.” When the purpose is performance, productivity, competition, and making a buck, eidetic seeing will only slow you down, so forget it. And forget it we do. We similarly forget what hearing is like. We hear words, not their intonations; we hear motors, horns, jet engines, buzzers, bells, and since they don’t have much to say we forget how to listen to haunting melodies, the happy or sad ring of people’s voices. All we get is a black and white, alphabetically coded read-out for our computer.

  Our vision and hearing are encapsulated in a rational shell which takes out 90% of their sensing capacities. I believe that psychedelic drugs and rock music are used by many young people to shatter this shell. When music is loud enough, you can feel it all over your body just as when you used to hear your mother’s lullabies. And LSD, mescaline, peyote bring back the visions which we have forgotten how to see; a rose becomes, once again, a wondrous universe of texture, color, and smell.

  Not only are our senses controlled in how they perceive but also in what they may perceive. Children must not see nudity, hear or see sex or anger, touch other people’s bodies or certain parts of their own bodies.

  Children’s tendency to explore everything around them is severely curtailed with respect to a large selection of items. Children are clearly enjoined from viewing or touching certain parts of their bodies and others’ with enjoyment. In more extreme situations children are made to sleep with their hands above the covers of their bed; they are told that their genitals and other body parts are dirty; they are told that masturbation is sinful or dangerous; and they are told in no uncertain terms that they may not touch live skin (their own or others’) with pleasure.

  In addition, children love to run and jump, skip, tumble, scream, cry, laugh, and express themselves emotionally. Emotional expression is pleasurable, but is often ill-received by parents, who are annoyed by its energy or honesty. When parents unilaterally squelch and curtail the emotional expressions and, consequently, the pleasures of children, they are laying down the injunctions and attributions of joylessness.

  Children are trained to live in discomfort. Because they are not given an opportunity to choose what feels good for themselves and have to do things chosen for them by others, they are often in a state of mild or acute discomfort. Wearing uncomfortable clothes, sitting quietly, being scared or hurt without having permission to express unhappiness —all of these are painful situations which are a child’s lot. As a consequence, children learn (and this is especially true of boys) to bear pain without complaint.

  It is an important fact of human tissue that it adapts to stress and pain. We may react violently to the first drag of a cigarette, but after a number of such insults to our respiratory system we no longer react with pain and rejection because our bodies adapt to noxious stimuli. This is true of all sorts of pain, including the pain associated with fear, or unexpressed rage, the pain associated with breathing polluted air, or with backbreaking labor. Adaptation to pain, which superficially may sound like an advantage, can be quite damaging. Constant adaptation to pain can only be achieved through a split in which the part of the body which is under stress is split off from the body’s Center. The Center, namely the place where we consider ourselves to be, the part of ourselves which constitutes our self, has to detach itself from the part under stress; and having adapted to stress, we may become permanently split off from large parts of our bodies.

  In addition, children get a great deal of encouragement to use drugs for the production of pleasure as well as for the avoidance of pain. Illness is not dealt with as a situation in which one can effectively use one’s energy to fight the disease and contribute to the mending of one’s body. Instead, children, by example, learn that the answer to disease is the passive taking of drugs. They also learn that the most direct way of producing pleasure is, once again, drug-taking.

  These are the factors that cause the banal scripting of joylessness. Some tentative suggestions for the therapy of this script will be explored in Chapter 24.

  11

  Rescue: The Banal Scripting of Powerlessness

  Scripting robs people of their autonomy. The more thorough the scripting, the less control the person has over his life and the more he feels powerless. When feeling powerless people can’t think, can’t express themselves, can’t work or study, can’t enjoy themselves, can’t stop smoking or drinking, can’t wake up in the morning or go to sleep at night, can’t cry or can’t stop crying. Some people feel constantly utterly powerless; others only at certain times.

  I have tried to show how basic training attacks the capacity to love, think, and feel in people through the stroke economy, discounts, and body splits. In this chapter I want to show how the game of Rescue is played and how it promotes feelings of powerlessness in children.

  The Rescue Game

  I believe that people are by nature cooperative and have a deep-felt need to work together and help each other. Situations where one person is in need of help and another person is capable of offering it are common in social groupings, and when one person helps another it can be a joyful, profoundly satisfying, cooperative experience. I wish to distinguish such a positive helping experience from the unpleasant and destructive one which I call the Rescue game. An analysis of the game follows:

  Thesis: The theme of this game revolves around the fact that at times people need help to achieve what they want. Those who play the game, however, believe that people who need help can’t really be helped and that they can’t help themselves either.

  Berne pointed out that certain games, which he called Life Games, “offer more opportunities than others for lifelong careers.” Rescue is such a “career” game and is played as such by many physicians, nurses, and other members of the “helping” professions. It also seems to be a game played, perhaps less intensely, by almost everybody.

  The three Roles of the game are Rescuer, Persecutor, and Victim; and they can be arranged in a triangle to indicate how people switch between them (Figure 8).

  The Victim’s position is “I’m not O.K., you’re O.K.” (I am helpless and hopeless; try and help me). The Rescuer’s position matches the Victim’s, namely: “I’m O.K., you’re not O.K.” (You are helpless and hopeless; nevertheless, I’ll try to help you). The Persecutor’s position also is “I’m O.K., you’re not O.K.” (You are helpless and hopeless, and it’s your fault).

  The roles are interchangeable as are the feelings that go with them. In the Victim role the person feels helpless and ashamed; in the Rescuer role he feels guilty; and in the Persecutor role she feels angry. Rescuing doesn’t work and usually leads to Persecution. Though everyone plays all three roles, people tend to prefer one of them with its accompanying feeling (racket), and this role may be a central aspect of their banal script.

  The roles of Rescuer, Persecutor, and Victim first appeared in the psychiatric literature as roles in the different games described by Eric Berne in his book Games People Play. Berne postulated that game roles were interchangeable so that any person who played a game while in one role would eventually also play the game in another. For instance, he speaks about a group game called “Why Don’t You—Yes, But” (see page 38) in which one person comes on as Victim and the rest of the group comes on as Rescuer. The Victim asks questions from a position of powerlessness, and the Rescuers attempt to give answers. Every suggestion is discarded, and a new one is offered until eventually the Rescuers get angry, switch roles, and persecute the Victim.

  Berne postulated that every person who plays a certain game will switch to every other posit
ion in the game so that the person playing Victim in one round will eventually play Rescuer and then Persecutor in later rounds. Berne especially noted this phenomenon in the game of “Alcoholic” in which the Victim (the alcoholic) eventually plays Rescuer, Persecutor, Connection, and Patsy at different times with different people. Stephen Karpman, in his article “The Drama Triangle,”1 made a brilliant synthesis of the above observations by Berne and postulated that the three basic game roles are Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer, and that these can be arranged in a triangle in such a way as to indicate how people switch around from one to another.

  Figure 8

  Powerlessness

  Hogie Wyckoff pointed out (page 169) that the family is the training ground for the Rescue Game, which is, in effect, training for powerlessness. Children are forced into the Victim role while the roles of Rescuer and Persecutor are taught by example, as provided by the parents.

  Training children into the Victim role of powerlessness is done by interfering with the areas in which they have potential power. Three important areas of power are attacked almost universally in every family; the power to love, that is, the power to successfully relate to other human beings; the power to think, that is, the capacity to understand the world; and the power to enjoy ourselves, that is, the capacity to experience and make full use of our bodies and emotions. These correspond to the three banal scripts described in Chapter 6.

  To the extent that children can do things such as love and understand the world and themselves, and to the extent that they are not allowed to do these things, they are forced into a Victim position with the parents acting either as Persecutors who oppress them in their abilities, or as Rescuers who then do what they have actually prevented them from doing for themselves. For instance, in a day’s time, a seven-year-old boy could, if left alone to learn it, get out of bed, get dressed, make the bed, cook himself some breakfast, make some lunch, take out the garbage, clean the dishes he dirtied, go out the door and down the street and to school. He can do chores such as cleaning the table, sweeping the floor, going to the store to buy anything he wants. If he comes home and finds out that there is no one there he can figure out that his mother is probably at her best friend’s house, call information, find out the number, make a phone call, and make plans to have dinner with a friend and stay overnight. All of these things that a seven-year-old can do are not usually allowed of seven-year-olds. That is to say, most households prevent a seven-year-old from freely using his powers to that full an extent, so that most seven-year-olds have to be wakened by their mothers, who then cook breakfast for them, take them to school, pick them up, bring them home, cook dinner for them, and arrange for their entertainment and social life. In that situation the child is a Victim who is being Persecuted when he is kept powerless and who is later Rescued when things are done for him that he could have done for himself.

  You will notice that the Rescue situation described above involves: 1) training in powerlessness in relationships by not allowing the child to make his own social contacts and his own decisions about whom he wants to be with and when; 2) training in powerlessness in knowing the world by not allowing a child to come up against situations in which it has to understand the world well enough to make decisions and to think in it; and 3) training in powerlessness in which a child is not allowed to learn about himself, what gives him pleasure, how he feels, and how to act upon it.

  Different households train children more or less intensively in powerlessness and also select different areas for training. For instance, some households leave relatively free the capacity to love while they attack the capacity to think or to understand oneself. Most households treat males differently from females so that males are trained to be powerless in their capacities to know themselves and in their loving capacities, whereas women are trained to be powerless in their capacities to know the world (see Chapter 13).

  Children who are trained as Victims grow up with varying degrees of disability or incapacitation. Most everyone is somewhat incapacitated by their early childhood training, but some people are turned into full-fledged Victims who spend their time looking for Rescuers with whom they can perpetuate their powerlessness.

  The latter form of extreme defeat is found in persons who are labeled “mentally ill,” “schizophrenic,” or who become psychotically depressed or addicted to drugs. They represent situations in which the basic training in powerlessness, which is needed to make sure people grow up to be docile, manageable, and lacking in autonomy, has gone awry. They are cases of a “powerlessness overdose” which the society then assigns to psychiatrists and jailers for institutionalization.

  Powerlessness in the population is a requirement in an oppressive society, and the family unfortunately often trains out power and autonomy and trains in discipline and docility to authoritarian rules. Powerlessness training, playing Victim in the Rescue Game, causes people to grow up with a feeling that the world can’t be changed. When feeling powerless people will say, “What’s the use of voting (or demonstrating, or writing letters to lawmakers)? It won’t change anything,” or, “What’s the use of being generous (or loving, or good) when everybody else is selfish?”

  The Rescue Triangle in the Nuclear Family

  The Rescue Triangle is exemplified in the classic, banal family script. Father is the Persecutor; Mother is the Rescuer; and the kids are the Victims. In a situation like this the roles switch around so that Father becomes Mother’s Victim when she Persecutes him for hurting her children, and then Mother becomes the children’s Victim when they take advantage of her kindness. Later the children may Rescue Mother when Father attempts to beat her up while she passively submits, and so on. As the children grow up and begin to acquire some power independent of the parents, they begin to cash in on the longtime resentment for having been Victimized and thus become the parents’ Persecutors. The more extensive the Rescue and Persecution by the parents, the more severe the retaliation of the children; so that in a home in which Rescuing and Persecuting is very prevalent, children are prone to set parents up in all manner of bad situations: middle-class children often do this by doing badly in school, by refusing to work, by becoming drug addicts and/or getting themselves arrested. Children know that one of the most terrifying experiences parents can have is for their child to be arrested and that they, the parents, will then be humiliated by the police, lawyers, and judges. Children who are resentful of their parents’ Rescues very often enjoy being arrested and being taken to jail and making their parents, the police, the judge, and all the grownups involved look like fools. That is the game of HIP “High and Proud,”1 which is designed as a retaliation, from a one-down position, against long-term Rescue and Persecution from grownups.

  Less dramatic but even more common is the situation in which parents Rescue their children for the following reasons:

  Common, especially among divorced parents, is guilt about their supposed inadequacy as parents which causes them to overprotect and make no demands upon their children. Also, parents underestimate their children’s potentialities and expect very little of them.

  Expectations placed on children are centered on school performance, namely preparation for the job market, so that very little else can be asked beyond discipline and school learning which takes up most of children’s energies. Here parents are putting their energies into raising a work force for exploitation by industry and commerce much as farmers who fatten cattle, but (unlike farmers) for no profit to themselves except the pride of having a hardworking son or a daughter who is a good housekeeper.

  Children raised in the shadow of the Rescue Triangle become grownups who are firmly entrenched in the three roles: Rescuer, Persecutor, and Victim. The Rescue triangle is an efficient training ground for the acceptance of hierarchies of power in which every person is one-up to some and one-down to others.

  By the time we achieve maturity, all of us have had ample experience in being one-down through having played the Victim role. No one
enjoys the one-down position. The Rescue triangle does not provide for equality between people. One can only be one-up or one-down in it. Thus, after having been in a powerless position, we make ourselves feel better by taking and assuming power over others as Rescuers or Persecutors.

  Having observed our parents Rescue and Persecute us, we endeavor to do the same. We are amply encouraged by folk myths about the value of Rescuer (The Good Samaritan) and Persecution (Spare the rod and spoil the child).

  The Three Roles

  RESCUER

  The Rescue role is especially mystified in our society. Selflessness, doing for others, generosity are encouraged. Even cooperation is encouraged as part of this mystification. What is not pointed out is that we are encouraged to be selfless, generous, and cooperative with people even if they are deceitful, selfish, stingy, and uncooperative with us. As an example, the exploitation of workers and little people by politicians and the super-rich who rule this country is made easy by the Rescue tendencies in people which encourage them to be “cooperative,” helpful, hardworking, and therefore easily exploitable.

  Mothers and wives are especially mystified about how oppressive the Rescue role is. To give up Rescuing is not seen as a service to the Victim, but as an injurious act. Continuing to Rescue is seen not as injurious, but as selfless, generous, and cooperative. This is because sex-role programming is designed so that women will be an unpaid work force which makes the lot of males easier to bear.