Counterscript: It appears that her life is wonderfully happy when she is head-over-heels in love with her Prince Charming. It looks great for about six months and then slowly begins to tarnish when he gets interested in a new beautiful woman.
Injunctions and Attributions:
Your beauty is only skin deep
Don’t be close to people
Don’t be you
Decision: People seem to respond to her only as a pretty face and not as a person, so she decides since she seems to be incapable of being treated and respected as an effective social agent to sell herself as a sex object in order to get some of what she wants.
Mythical Heroine: She has a morbid fascination with the Marilyn Monroe legend, and admires prominent movie and television stars.
Somatic Component: Her body is very beautiful, but she has little feeling in it. Her body is often tight and hard because she’s tense, and she may at times have difficulty reaching orgasm. When she smiles only her mouth moves so as not to wrinkle up her eyes.
Games:
Rapo
If It Weren’t For You
Blemish (on herself)
Therapist’s Role in the Script: He becomes sexually aroused by her and propositions her so she can then discount anything he might have to say.
Antithesis: She starts demanding strokes for the qualities people like in her other than her beauty and she refuses to accept strokes just for her physical presence. She begins to like herself as she is, stops playing “Blemish” on herself, and begins to thoroughly enjoy her true inner and outer beauty. She starts to do things that are meaningful to her and works in a women’s group to learn how to cooperate to get what she wants.
She decides to use her Adult to build a cooperative relationship with a man who appreciates her as a person. She starts enjoying her power while creating her life the way she wants it to be and appreciates what she has to work with in herself.
Nurse
Life Course: She is a professional Rescuer who works in an institution that exploits her and pushes her to her physical limits. Initially, her motivation to help others comes from caring, but caring soon becomes oppressive to her. She is taught to skillfully intuit other people’s needs and take care of them. But then she wants her needs to be filled in a like manner; that is, she expects others to read her mind the way she reads theirs and take care of her the way she takes care of them. But it doesn’t happen; she doesn’t ask for what she wants so she doesn’t get it. What she does get much too often is a box of “candy strokes” from appreciative patients and their families. After too much Rescuing she becomes hurt and angry. She isn’t getting what she wants so turns to the role of Persecutor in the guise of so-called “professional detachment” which often takes the form of Anti-Rescue (see Chapter 11): “I’m not giving anything that isn’t asked for!”
She spends a lot of time complaining about how terrible the doctors and her supervisor are but doesn’t have time or energy to confront them, or can’t because of potential recriminations. She may also feel she has to adapt for bread and butter survival reasons, since she is the economic mainstay of her family, either because she’s Rescuing her husband (an alcoholic) or because she’s a single parent with children. When things don’t work out in her love relationships she thinks she should have done more (Rescue).
Ironically, she ends up having to spend a lot of time in the hospital when she’s older because of how she has been forced to exploit her body in the service of saving other people’s bodies. She may have injured her back saving a patient from a fall and consumed too many “uppers” to keep going during the day and too many “downers” and alcohol to cool out at night.
Counterscript: Soon after she has graduated from Nursing School and is on her first job, it appears that she has chosen a wonderful career and that everything is just the way she wants it. Her enthusiasm for her work gradually dwindles as she feels the pinch of giving out a lot of love and getting little in return. She gets very depressed while working on a cancer ward and has to start taking sleeping pills to sleep and avoid nightmares. If she’s white and/or middle-class, she may be dating a handsome young doctor, who turns out to be married or he marries her and later divorces her when he finishes his training.
Injunctions and Attributions:
Take care of others first
Don’t ask for what you want
Be a hard worker
Decision: When she is young she decides that being good means that you put the needs of others first, that to consider your own needs first is “selfish,” therefore not O.K.
Mythical Heroine: She has fantasies of being a long-suffering and ever-listening woman like Jane Addams or Florence Nightingale.
Somatic Components: She wrecks her feet by standing on them too much, gets varicose veins and injures her back lifting patients.
Games:
Why Don’t You—Yes, But
Ain’t It Awful
If It Weren’t For You
Therapist’s Role in the Script: He tells her that she should keep on doing her job, taking care of others and, of course, supporting doctors in their patriarchal role. He prescribes drugs for her so she can do it: “uppers” during the day, “downers” at night. He may even want to tell her about his troubles since she’s such an understanding and good listener.
Antithesis: The most important thing for her to do is to learn to ask for what she wants and put her own needs first. It’s also crucial that she make a decision to stop Rescuing and that she learn how to have Rescue-free Relationships. It may be necessary for her to quit her hospital job and start working part-time or doing private work so that she can have some time for herself. She has to learn how to take care of herself and respect her own needs and body. It will later be useful for her to organize with other nurses to push for reforms so that her work is not so exploitative, to get support not to Rescue, and to talk with patients about patients’ rights and responsibilities.
Fat Woman
Life Course: She spends most of her life hassling herself about and responding to what her scale says, and going on an endless series of diets trying to obtain O.K.ness through self-deprivation. She was generally taught poor eating habits as a child, encouraged to eat carbohydrates, and was given food as a reward for “good” behavior. She also was told to eat everything on her plate, since it would be a shame to waste food—“Think about the starving people in China” (not about your own full stomach).
She has trouble letting her anger out, and great difficulty saying “no” so she literally swallows everything. What she gets out of being overweight is that it does tend to make her feel solid and substantial. And because she has difficulty saying “no” or getting angry, her fat can also keep men away whom she wants to repel. Her fat also serves as a “wooden Leg”; a handy cop-out for not doing things or accomplishing what she wants in life. She longs for strokes about her appearance yet never gets them. The bulk of her spontaneity is centered around what and when she eats. She feels victimized by her own body, her lack of self-control, and other people’s opinion about her weight.
She is caught in a vicious cycle of rebellious food binges and cruel self-punishing diets. She is convinced that she is not O.K. because of her weight. Repeated failure in dieting proves to her that she has no self-control (i.e., she is a helpless victim to her addiction).
Because she is worried about her weight all her life and because her heart is broken from not getting the kind of loving she wanted, she ends up having heart trouble which is what the doctors threatened would happen anyway.
Counterscript: Things appear to be going well when she is on a diet, losing weight, and wearing a size twelve dress, but actually they’re not because she is constantly hungry, her life revolves around what the scale says, and she still has a lot of trouble getting angry and saying “no.” When her diet is over and she runs into some kind of difficulty she goes back to overeating, and gains back the weight she lost.
Injunctions and Attributions:
Don’t say “no”
Don’t get angry
Don’t love yourself
Decision: At age fifteen she decides that she has definitely got a weight problem and that she doesn’t have much self-control.
Mythical Heroine: She enjoys Rubens’ paintings and follows the adventures of Elizabeth Taylor and her weight problems.
Somatic Component: Her fat is her body armor. She has trouble being physically active and tends to have minor accidents like twisting her ankle.
Games:
Food-aholic
Wooden Leg
Ain’t It Awful
Therapist’s Role in the Script: He tells her that she has to learn to adapt more, that is, cope with her “problem,” and prescribes diet pills and painfully boring diets. He is physically repelled by her body, and subtly communicates this fact to her through his attitude.
Antithesis: The way out is for her to decide that her body is O.K. just the way it is and learn to love and take care of it (see “Fat Liberation” by Mayer Aldebaron1). She can be tuned in to and angry about the oppression that’s foisted on fat people. In loving her body she can learn to tune in to it, listen to it and, therefore, stop abusing it. She can learn healthier eating habits and eat what tastes and feels good to her body.
She also must learn how to say “no” and to get angry at people who oppress her, especially about her weight, and not swallow everything that is pushed on her. She might never be thin in media terms, but she will probably lose some weight and feel good from the inside out, rather than constantly hungry and guilty.
Centering work (Chapter 24) could be very good for her, to get her in touch with her body and its messages to her about what it needs and doesn’t need for nourishment and what she wants and doesn’t want from others.
It’s crucial that she give up her self-hate and stop swallowing her anger. Also, she must be sure not to give more strokes than she gets, since getting into a stroke deficit is one of the reasons she turns to overeating for comfort. She must also learn how to nurture herself and be able to relax without anesthetizing herself with food.
Teacher
Life Course: She decides to teach because it’s the only way she sees available to her to use the knowledge she has learned in her “major” subject interest at college and for financial reasons, not because it’s precisely what she wants to do in life. She then gets locked into keeping her job by the seductive security of tenure.
She carries out a two-fold function in society. She acts as a sophisticated baby-sitter for children. She also helps indoctrinate these children into society’s value system in preparation for the time when they will become workers. She teaches them to compete, to line up, to take orders, and to adapt. She is forced to follow rules which she, for the most part, dislikes and has to force them upon the children.
Her main problem is that because she spends her working days with children, she has very little opportunity to make contacts with her peers. If she’s married, she is isolated in a lonely monogamous relationship; if not, she has trouble meeting enough people to fulfill her needs. Child to Parent strokes from her students aren’t enough. She tends to be giving out more love than she’s getting back.
As she becomes resentful about not getting enough strokes, she may come to no longer enjoy teaching children, but rather grow to dislike them and assume the role of Persecutor (while favoring a select few “teacher’s pets”).
Counterscript: Things look good for her in this script in the fall of the year when school has just started and everybody is happy to see her, or in the spring when she is preparing to go to Europe and feeling optimistic about meeting some new people. But the reality of how she feels about her work is most apparent during the long, lonely winter when she often wishes she were free and when she makes herself feel badly by saying nasty things to herself (“Well, the old adage about those that can (men) do and those that can’t (women) teach sure applies to me!”).
Injunctions and Attributions:
Be independent
Don’t be you
Follow the rules
Decisions: When she is a young girl in grammar school, she decides that the only way for her to do what she wants, i.e., have a career and be independent, is by taking on a “woman’s job” like teaching.
Mythical Heroine: She adored Mrs. Chapman, her fourth-grade teacher, and her Aunt Ethel, whom she admired for her economic independence. She also loved reading about Plato and Socrates. Somatic Component: She tends to get frequent headaches, experiences much eye strain, and because she feels bad at school, she often gets depressed around her menstrual period.
Games:
If It Weren’t For You
Why Don’t You—Yes, But
They’ll Be Glad They Knew Me
Therapist’s Role in the Script: He tells her she must learn to cope. When she becomes menopausally depressed because she isn’t getting enough strokes, he tells her it’s her problem, that she should have done things differently with men, that is, she should have adapted better. He tells her to put more of herself into her work and stop complaining and feeling sorry for herself; after all, she does have job security and can go away every summer.
Antithesis: The way to break out of this is for her to stop giving more than she’s getting and to work toward a more equal and cooperative relationship with her students and fellow workers. She must decide to make her social life a high priority—just as important as economic security and/or material comfort. It may be best for her to regularly save up as much of her salary as she can and not to accept tenure nor teach for more than a couple of years in a row. It may be important for her to occasionally do some other kind of work that brings her into contact with adults.
She might use her creative power to organize an alternative anti-school for grownups as well as children based on principles of cooperation, learning subjects one wants to learn, teaching what one wants to teach, etc. Along with providing her with an opportunity to do meaningful work, it would additionally be an opportunity in which to work cooperatively with her peers.
Guerrilla Witch
Life Course: She is in touch with her power to affect people and uses it, but her power is mysterious and magical and slightly out of her control rather than rational and clear-sighted (structurally, it comes from her Little Professor and Child, with little awareness from her Adult). She fights back against men’s Adults and Critical Parents with her witchy, intuitive, covert power, but without an Adult strategy. Although she likes being a woman, she tends to compete with other women and generally acts as an individual rather than cooperating with them. She sees herself as being different from others, as having “special powers.” Ultimately, she fights from a one-down position and experiences herself as an underdog. She feels scared, thinks paranoid thoughts about others, and is thought by others to be high strung and “castrating.” When she’s angry, she gets some satisfaction from hitting up from below, especially at men, as hard as she can. She is comfortable in the role of Persecutor and has a lot of guts so she’s always ready for a good fight.
She spends much of her time reading about magic, mysticism, and astrology. When she doesn’t get what she wants from people she retaliates by giving them “bad vibes,” and by gossiping about them. When she’s angry, she creates problems between the person she’s angry at and others by giving them both subtle, gossipy messages about each other (see Chapter 4, Witchcraft), thus creating paranoia and stirring up trouble.
She ends up feeling vengeful toward everyone since she hasn’t been able to get what she wants in life. Her power has been strategically applied mostly to causing trouble, instead of building her life the way she wants it to be.
Counterscript: This script might give the appearance of working well for her when she is a secretary working in an office and has been successful in putting a spell (or so she thinks) on her boss whom she despises. He ends up feeling very uptight and shaky around her and eventually fires her becaus
e of all of her efforts to undermine his confidence and power. She comes to feel that her power is only destructive; it doesn’t really make things better for her or create a work situation in which she is equal and powerful.
Injunctions and Attributions:
Don’t trust
Don’t be close
You are special (different)
Decision: When she is young, she decides that she can’t talk her mother and father into getting things she wants. But she also learns that she can manipulate and maneuver them in subtle ways to get her way, and that the most effective maneuver is to get them to engage in a fight over her.
Mythical Heroine: She loves to read about gypsies and fairies. Her favorite TV show is Bewitched, about Samantha, a housewife who’s really a witch.
Somatic Component: Her body is thin and tense. She grows very long fingernails and tends to have trouble sleeping.
Games:
Let’s You And Them fight
Now I’ve Got You—You SOB
Uproar
Therapist’s Role in the Script: Because of her unorthodox behavior and ideas, he tells her that she is schizophrenic and prescribes thorazine. This makes her very angry, and he ends up refusing to work with her because he is afraid of her.
Antithesis: First it’s necessary for her to decide to give up her special outside, one-up, “I’m O.K., you’re not O.K.” role and decide to be part of the human race. It’s important for her to decide to cooperate with and appreciate other women as a means of gaining power. She can work with them on developing her Adult and being able to couple her intuitive and Child power with clear Adult strategies.
It is also crucial that she come to see that her needs and desires are similar to many other people’s and that it’s much more possible to get them fulfilled by working together with others in a trusting way. She also must deflate her paranoias about others by checking them out. Once she feels safe about other people, then she can work on being in touch with what she wants in a constructive way and asking for it.
Scripts People Live Page 22