Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  For instance, the spouses of alcoholics have a great deal of difficulty seeing how their endless sacrifices, their “selflessness,” and their willingness to endure abuse followed by forgiveness is, in fact, harmful rather than helpful to the alcoholic.

  Being a Rescuer gives us the feeling of being one-up, and this is its only pleasure—it does remove us from the Victim, one-down role. We can also get one-up by becoming Persecutors, but this role is not sanctioned as fully. Generally, to be a Persecutor we have to have some sort of official title or badge which legitimizes our persecution.

  PERSECUTOR

  The Persecuting role is the inevitable outcome of the Rescue and Victim roles. Any person who Rescues by helping someone else when that person is not helping himself is inevitably going to become angry with him. Every time the person in the position of Victim is Rescued by someone else she is perfectly aware of the fact that she is one-down and kept one-down by the Rescuer and that the Rescuer is interfering with her ability to be powerful. Therefore a person who has played the role of Victim vis-à-vis a person who is a Rescuer will also inevitably become angry. So it is possible to predict that every Rescue-Victim transaction will eventually result in a Persecutor-Victim transaction.

  VICTIM

  There are Victims and victims. A victim is a person who is being oppressed by another person. Some people are “pure” or actual victims and are not contributing to their one-down position. As an example, a person being run over by a truck, or a person being robbed on the street—these are actual victims. But most situations in which people are victimized include the Victim’s cooperation with the victimization; the person does not work against or resist what is wrong.

  When a person is being overpowered or oppressed by another person or situation, the Victim colludes with the oppressor when she discounts her feelings of being persecuted and/or doesn’t use all of her own power to overcome her one-down position. To distinguish true oppression from oppression which involves some self-perpetuation or which is the result of lack of struggle against it, the word victim can be used with lower case (true victim) or capital letters (Victim).

  The same device can be used with regard to the Rescuer role to distinguish it from the true rescuer like a fireman or a lifeguard whose function is to help true victims. The main difference between a rescuer and a Rescuer is that the former expects to succeed and usually does while the latter expects to fail and is usually rewarded in his expectations.

  Another difference between Rescuers, Victims and rescuers, victims is that rescuers are usually thanked by the victims they help, while Rescuers are usually persecuted by the Victims they help.

  No one enjoys being one-down, but it is pleasurable to let go and have others take over. One can let others take over for short periods of time without playing the game, especially if one has agreements to reverse the situation later on. The feeling of being a powerless Victim, however, is hellish and is only made worse by people who agree with one’s powerlessness by Rescuing. No matter how weak we feel, it is good to hear that we are not completely powerless; and it is energizing to be asked and expected to take our power and do our part by someone who is willing to help.

  We resent being made powerless, especially when we don’t ask for it, and when we find out that someone has been doing for us what they didn’t really want to do, we feel humiliated and enraged.

  People wanting to extricate themselves from the Victim position can ask not to be Rescued and can demand honesty from those who help them. Often these demands need to be made over and over of people whose tendency is to Rescue and who have trouble with feelings of guilt when they stop.

  Powerlessness promoted by the Rescue game can be worked against effectively in therapy. The three roles of the game can be avoided, and then people find that they do have capacities and can develop skills they never thought they could have. Women become logically minded, mechanically skilled, strong, able to walk, run, and hike as far and long as men. Men can become sensitive, emotional, nurturing, and can learn to relax, feel love in their hearts, and enjoy life. By avoiding the roles of the Rescue Triangle and operating out of our Center we assume power over our lives and stop preventing others from doing the same. How this can be done is described in Chapter 19.

  12

  Competition: The Banal Scripting of Inequality

  The Rescue game always includes one person who feels one-up and O.K. (Rescuer or Persecutor) and another that feels one-down and not O.K. (Victim). This type of unequal one-up/one-down relationship can be contrasted with the relationship between equals characterized by the mutually held position: “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.”

  Allied with the lessons of the Rescue game, the typical household teaches its offspring another lesson which is as American as apple pie: competitiveness.

  “All people are born equal” is another way of saying “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.” No one is better than anybody else; we are all complex, interesting, worthwhile, and in the long run equally important or unimportant. What we know in one area is more than made up for by what we don’t know elsewhere. We are all experts in certain areas and ignorant in others.

  This is what we are told by judges, the Christian ethic, our Constitution, and by our teachers and politicians. Yet we don’t really believe this at all. We are compelled to see ourselves as better than others and to see others as our betters. To think and believe that we are equals with all other people is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain.

  The difficulty which we have in feeling equality with all other human beings is the result in part of our banal training in competitiveness and individualism.

  We white North Americans are members of a society thoroughly indoctrinated in individualism and competitiveness—traits which have been presented to us as desirable from early in our lives. We are told that, if pursued assiduously, individualism and competitiveness will lead us to happiness and success in life, and these qualities have become an integral part of our life scripts.

  This mystification has as its main purpose to shape us into pliable workers easily exploited by a ruling class which profits from our competitiveness turned into productivity. I believe that competition and individualism actually destroy our potential for harmony with ourselves, harmony with each other, and harmony with nature. In our mad scramble to the top we forget how to love, how to think, and we lose track of who we are and what we really want.

  We seem to live on a ladder with people stepping on our heads while we step on the heads of others with at most two or three people on our rung with whom we are equals. Once in a while some of us get on top of the ladder and look down triumphantly, and sometimes we are thrown to the bottom. But we usually are somewhere on the gray middle struggling to get up, one rung at a time, to the distant top, or to just stay in place.

  The experience of one-up/one-down is so common to us that we think it is a natural experience to be expected and one that we should react to by trying as hard as we can to “get ahead.” Most of us actually dislike the competitive struggle. Indeed, we don’t really struggle to get ahead, but simply in order not to fall behind as everyone climbs over our heads. Yet we are locked into constant competition and power plays.

  Competitiveness and individualism are two most highly touted qualities of the “good” American. As a consequence they are scripted into people’s lives so that they interfere with cooperation and equality between them.

  Individualism

  Individualism gives people the impression that when they achieve something it is on their own and without the help of others and that when they fail it is, once again, on their own and without the influence of others. Belief in the value of individualism obscures any understanding of the way in which human beings affect each other in both good and bad ways; thus it mystifies both oppression and cooperation. Individualism results in the isolation of human beings from each other so that they cannot band together to organize against the forces that oppress them. Ind
ividualism makes people easily influenced and also easily targeted when they step out of line and fight their oppression without support from others. When people are unhappy or dissatisfied, individualism keeps them isolated. Instead of finding each other and cooperating to remedy their oppressive conditions, people wind up individually defeated, each person in her or his separate, impotent, paranoid system.

  Individualism as a way of relating to other human beings, while highly touted, can, in fact, be a most self-destructive form of behavior.

  I want to stress the difference between individuality (uniqueness, identity, selfhood) and individualism (selfishness, disregard for others, self-seeking behavior). Individuality tempered with respect and regard for others need not become individualism. We can be ourselves without exploiting or ignoring others. Individual action, or self-centered behavior, can be of benefit to the person and her fellow human beings. In fact it will be shown later (Chapter 23) that self-assertiveness is an important requirement for cooperation between people. I am claiming, however, that individualism (as opposed to individuality) is not a good trait to be pursued or taught to children.

  I am simply attacking the notion that individualism is a super-trait, to be pursued and admired. It is clear that some individuals and their individual actions have been of ultimate benefit to themselves and others. In fact, it is the valuable individual actions of leaders, scientists, and politicians that are used in schools as showcases to highlight the value of individuality for the purpose of instilling individualism and competitiveness in the young. What is not taught is how individualism and competitiveness are harmful and how valuable cooperation can really be.

  Competitiveness

  Individualism goes hand in hand with competitiveness. Since we stand or fall strictly on our individual efforts, it follows that we must think of everyone around us as individuals equally invested in succeeding and, in the mad scramble to the top, also necessarily invested in achieving superiority or one-up status to us. Being one-down is intolerable; the only alternative in our society is to try to stay one-up. Equality is not comprehended by us and often not even considered. Competitiveness is trained into human beings from early in life in our culture.

  There is some interesting research evidence in this area.1 Studies of competition show that white American city children, when confronted with a situation in which cooperation can obtain a reward for them, choose to compete even though by competing the chances for obtaining rewards are lost. Older children compete more than younger ones, which strongly indicates that this kind of self-defeating competitiveness is learned.

  Yet not all human beings are bred into competitive styles of life, and the same research shows that Mexican-American children are less likely to be competitive in a self-defeating way than Anglo-American children. In an individualistic, competitive society, a person who is not highly competitive cannot keep up and becomes chronically one-down and eventually highly alienated. It is because of this that competitiveness persists in appearing to be a good trait, since when everyone is fiercely competitive it is impossible to achieve any well-being without having very strong competitive skills. The only alternative to individualism and competitiveness which has potential for the production of well-being is collectivity and cooperation between equals. But while we are well trained in the skills of competition, we know very little about how to cooperate or be equal with others. I have observed many situations (communes, relationships) in which people worked hard to cooperate and establish equality with each other. Most of these efforts collapsed, giving way to the well-established and familiar competitive and individualistic banal scripting.

  Scarcity

  Competitiveness is based on the premise that there is not enough to go around of whatever a person needs. If the material needs of human beings are in drastic scarcity, it follows obviously that competitiveness is the mode for survival. If there is one loaf of bread daily to feed twenty families, it is pretty clear that all twenty families will starve. If a competitive member of this group manages to obtain the whole loaf of bread for his family, that one family will survive while the others will still starve. The net effect of competitiveness in scarcity is actually a positive one for those who compete and win and for the survival of the species. But as scarcity becomes a thing of the past, as it is, for now, in the United States, competitiveness actually creates scarcity and hunger. The hoarding behavior which goes along with competitiveness causes certain people to have a great deal more than they truly need, while large numbers of others, who could be satisfied with the surplus of those few who have, go without. Competitive, hoarding behavior is predicated on unrealistic anxiety based on fears of scarcity. Oppressive as he is to others, the hoarder is himself oppressed by it. The stroke economy is an example of artificial scarcity in a basic human need—strokes. O.K. feelings are in scarcity, and people have difficulty feeling smart, beautiful, healthy, good and right-on except by proving that others are not—as if there were only enough beauty, intelligence, health, and goodness for a few. It is possible to hoard, compete for, and create scarcity of O.K. feelings in the same manner in which food and strokes are hoarded.

  I first experienced the relationship of competition and cooperation in the fall of 1969 in the Santa Cruz mountains at a camp for the War Resistance. One evening everyone sat around in a large circle in the center of which everyone had placed the food for dinner. To my scarcity-oriented eyes it did not appear that there was enough to go around. I was scared by the prospects of going hungry and in great conflict about the situation. Portions of food began to be passed around the circle, everyone eating from them as much as they wanted and passing them on. The food circulated over and over, and to my amazement I found that there was actually enough food to satisfy me quite fully. Yet my experience, because of my scarcity-oriented, competitive, and individualist training was one of anxiety and alarm about not being properly fed. As food went by me I took larger bites than I needed; I felt guilt about this; I schemed about ways in which I could make certain kinds of food return to me; I worried as food went around the circle as to whether it would reach me again. I ate more than I needed and was, in short, unable to enjoy the meal because I was so driven by fears of scarcity and feelings of competition.

  At the next meal, however, I allowed myself to trust that there was enough to go around, and I experienced the clear sensation of plenitude and satisfaction based on having enough on the basis of cooperation rather than on the basis of getting a big enough portion in a competitive situation.

  The above anecdote is to illustrate how we are mystified into being competitive and individualistic, believing that competitiveness and individualism bring us benefit when they actually harm us because at this point in human history there is enough to go around.

  Competitiveness is taught us from an early age by our parents and more particularly in school. Sports, grades, tests are all training exercises in competitive skills—mock scarcity situations that prepare us for the business world, for the assembly line, for the job market. Competitiveness is taught to boys in its most blatant form; girls are taught to compete in more subtle, psychological forms. Especially important in banal competitiveness training is the insensitive treatment by parents of the problems of competition between siblings. Rivalry between siblings encouraged by parents is often the first experience of competition and individualism to be repeated and reinforced in different contexts throughout life.

  Power Plays

  The basic interpersonal operation with which individualism and competition are brought into practice is the power play. A power play is a transaction whereby a person obtains from another person something that he wants against that other person’s will. (See Chapter 17 for a full description of power plays.)

  Power plays can be crude and involve actual physical coercion or they can be subtle ways in which people talk or manipulate each other out of things that they want.

  The most crude power play is simply one in which a person grabs fr
om another her loaf of bread and then harms her if she tries to get it back. The same effect, namely the taking away of bread, can be obtained by mental, psychological means, which are, however, equally power plays and which have the same outcome. In any case, power plays have the effect of taking away what is rightfully one person’s and putting it in another person’s hands. Relationships based on power plays immerse people in a miserable, unhappy series of skirmishes, battles, and major wars in which everyone loses.

  Power plays are a constant, daily occurrence in the lives of children and an integral part of their banal scripting for the one-up/one-down way of life.

  The stroke economy, discounts, body splits, Rescue, competitiveness, power plays, and sex roles (to be discussed next) are the basic banal curriculum which interferes with the full autonomous development of children. How to defeat these will be discussed in Section V on “The Good Life” later in this book.

  SECTION 3

  RELATION-SHIPS

  13

  Sex Role Scripting

  in Men and Women

  by Hogie Wyckoff

  The following two chapters are written by Hogie Wyckoff. They are included in this book because they are essential original contributions to the theory of banal scripts.

  As women and men we are socialized to develop certain parts of our personalities while suppressing the development of other parts. This programming promotes a predetermined, stilted, and repetitive way of acting in life which has earlier been referred to as banal scripting (see Chapter 7). These “garden variety,” banal, sex role scripts invade every fiber of our day-to-day lives.