Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Games:

  Courtroom

  Why Don’t You—Yes, But

  Do Me Something

  Therapist’s Role in the Script: The therapist endlessly analyzes the person’s psyche. Psychoanalytic technique is the perfect instrument to promote this man’s script. Everything is “understood” and nothing changes. He lies on the couch, his head buzzing, his body limp, and free associates managing only to further alienate himself from his body.

  Antithesis: He realizes with his Adult that he is on the wrong path and that his life is stale and going to waste. He decides to subject himself to an experiential form of therapy, such as an encounter group, Gestalt therapy, or bioenergetics. If his therapist prevents him from headtripping he gets in touch with and follows up his emotions. He gradually recognizes the fallacy of rationality, begins to use his intuition, his Nurturing Parent, and his Natural Child. He overcomes his fears of acting (rather than thinking and talking) and changes his behavior and modes of relating.

  Woman Hater

  Life Course: This man learns early in life, from observing his mother and from statements by his father, that women are not O.K. He probably is a bachelor, probably in the military or some other all-male activity. He takes out his energy in pursuits (hunting, sports) in which women have no place and are definitely inferiors. He thinks of women as being the weaker sex, incompetent, and is proud of the fact that he has no need for them. For sexual release he occasionally visits a prostitute or picks somebody up at a bar, but he has no respect for women and has no expectations for any permanent or long-lasting relationships with them. Because men who are not married do not get very far in this society, he is usually bitter and unhappy about his circumstances, lives in a shabby apartment with a sink full of dirty dishes, cigarette butts all over the floor, an unmade bed, and the shades drawn. He smokes and drinks hard, may become an alcoholic, but in any case his bitterness against women eventually spreads out to include children and all other joyful, creative, spontaneous creatures and activities in the world.

  Counterscript: He meets a woman he likes. He may even marry, become “domesticated,” and enjoy a brief period of feelings of love, nurturing, and warmth. But the injunctions against intimacy and spontaneity are so strong that he can’t reciprocate the feelings she gives him, and after a period of being in his Free Child he shuts down again and the relationship sours.

  Injunctions and Attributions:

  Don’t be close

  Don’t trust

  Don’t let go

  Mythical Hero: General Patton, Herbert Hoover, Dick Tracy, Lone Ranger.

  Games:

  Now I’ve Got You, You SOB (NIGYSOB)

  Blemish

  If It Weren’t For Them (Women)

  Therapist’s Role in the Script: This man is unlikely to go to a therapist and would never go to a female for help. If he shows up at a therapist’s office, it probably is under orders from a judge, boss, or officer. The therapist is likely to ignore his dislike for the whole process and fail to get a valid contract. In time, he would leave therapy, having accomplished nothing, and thinking of his therapist as effeminate or an egghead.

  Antithesis: An antithesis is difficult for this man. He may meet a woman who likes him and makes the right demands at the right time so that he opens up and starts enjoying life. Or he may find a loving relationship with another man. But he is hardened and set in his ways and will have trouble changing.

  16

  Relationships in Scripts

  Transactional Analysis is the study of relationships. A transaction-by-transaction analysis reveals rituals, games, and pastimes played. But relationships are more than a succession of transactions and pastimes. If we step back and look at the relationship as a whole we can see other aspects of it. We see, for instance, that some relationships are short-lived and some last long; that some are cooperative and some are loving; and that others are competitive and others hateful. We see that the people in the relationship are equals with equal rights and power or that they are unequal, some one-up and some one-down. We see that some profit all the persons involved; some profit some of the persons involved; and some profit none of the persons involved.

  In Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, Berne discusses the analysis of relationships which he used “principally in the study of marital relationships and impending liaisons of various kinds.” “In these situations,” Berne says, relationship analysis “may yield some useful and convincing predictions and postdictions.” Later, in Sex and Human Loving, he introduced an intricate classificatory scheme for relationships.

  Relationship analysis is an extremely fruitful and helpful discovery, one which is intimately connected with the analysis of banal and tragic scripts.

  Tragic and Banal Relationships

  Tragic relationships, like tragic scripts, are the exception rather than the rule. Between man and woman, Romeo and Juliet is probably the most common of the tragic relationship scripts. Here two people in love are prevented by their families from being with each other for reasons of race, religion, or politics. Another tragic relationship script is Othello, who believes the lies of lago about his beloved wife Desdemona and eventually kills her. Here a man violently rejects a woman he loves to appease others who hate her.

  Ulysses and Penelope is really a non-relationship script on the part of Ulysses unless one assumes that he really would rather have been home than busy in his travels. But for Penelope, waiting for her husband was probably a devastating experience. The relationships between traveling salesmen, professional soldiers, politicians, doctors, and their wives often have a similar course.

  The man who cheats and exploits a woman who continues to love him regardless or vice versa is again a one-sided tragedy, but not an uncommon one. In his book Sex in Human Loving Berne1 classifies marriages into A H I O S V X and Y types. All eight of these seem to me banal-relationship scripts:

  An A marriage starts off as a shotgun or makeshift one. The couple are far apart, but soon they find a single common bond, perhaps the new baby. This is represented by the crossbar of the A. As time goes on, they get closer and closer until they finally come together, and then they have a going concern. This is represented by the apex of the A.

  An A marriage starts off the same way, but the couple never gets any closer, and the marriage is held together by a single bond. Otherwise they each go where they were originally headed.

  An I marriage starts off and ends with the couple forged into a single unit.

  An O marriage goes round and round in a circle, never getting anywhere, and repeating the same patterns until it is terminated by death or separation.

  An S marriage wanders around seeking happiness, and eventually ends up slightly above and to the right of where it started, but it never gets any farther than that, leaving both parties disappointed and bewildered, and good candidates for psychotherapy, since there is enough there so that they don’t want a divorce.

  A V marriage starts off with a close couple, but they immediately begin to diverge, perhaps after the honeymoon is over or even after the first night.

  An X marriage starts off like an A. At one point there is a single period of bliss. They wait for it to happen again, but it never does, and soon they drift apart again, never to reunite.

  A Y marriage starts off well, but difficulties multiply and eventually each one finds his own separate interests and goes his own way.

  Between man and man the relationship of two brothers who first love and eventually kill each other is a familiar one. This relationship can include a third person who is the reason for the tragic outcome. Similarly, two women can have a similar relationship involving a man as a third person. But far more common are the everyday failures in the relationships between parents and their children, men and women, women and women, men and men. I am best acquainted with the relationships between women and men and will speak mostly of them, though the others are all worthy of study and remain to be investigated.


  The Three Enemies of Love

  In my opinion, the three most destructive forces militating against the achievement of satisfactory loving relationships between men and women are Sexism, the Rescue Game, and Power Plays.

  SEXISM

  Sexism is prejudice based on gender which often (though not always) includes an assumption of male supremacy. Even when prejudices about the sexes don’t give the man more power or privilege, they are harmful, as has been illustrated by Hogie Wyckoff in Chapter 13.

  In any case, I wish to restate clearly what has been said earlier in this book. Men and women are given attributions and injunctions which force them into sex roles which are harmful and oppressive to both sexes though they are more oppressive to women than to men. The scripts that are generated by these sex roles prevent men and women from achieving their full potential and from being able to attain intimacy or to work with each other.

  The myth of the differences between women and men finds a grain of justification in some of the actual differences between them such as their genitals, brute strength, body size, and possibly emotional makeup due to differing biochemical (hormonal) make-up. But these differenees are in no way justification for the damaging expectations placed on males and females by our sexist society.

  THE RESCUE GAME IN RELATIONSHIPS

  As we begin to form relationships with other people, separate from our parents’ arrangements, we find that we are almost irresistibly driven to assuming either a one-up or a one-down position. Every relationship seems destined to involve us either as one-down, more involved, more in need, more in love, insecure, and feeling generally needy, or else as one-up, less involved, less in need, less in love, secure, and not needy. Often people’s lives consist of an endless chain of such relationships. Some people have the experience of being usually one-up and others have the experience of being usually one-down.

  Being one-down in a relationship is often familiar to women, and being one-up is a more familiar experience for men. This is the result of the fact that most men are trained more thoroughly in the uses and abuses of power and are less likely to give themselves away to another person, whereas most women are trained to give of themselves and make themselves available, so that between a man and a woman there is usually a very unequal contest which too often ends with the woman in a one-down position. However, the tendency for one-up and one-down relationships operates between men and men and women and women, and the experience of equality between people is very seldom achieved and often not even sought.

  In the relationships between grownup individuals, the roles of Rescuer, Persecutor, and Victim are commonplace. These roles manifest themselves not only in crude ways, in which one person is clearly acting powerless and helpless while another undertakes to take care of him or to persecute him, but in much more subtle ways as follows:

  Any situation in which one person does something that she doesn’t want to do in relation to another constitutes a Rescue. Often the Victims don’t even know that they are being Rescued. For instance, it is a common occurrence between husband and wife that the wife, say, accompanies the husband to a football game or on a fishing trip which she doesn’t have any interest in. She may do this because he has asked her, and would be hurt and perhaps even sulk if she didn’t come along; but she may also be coming along even if he has not asked her to do so and when, it may turn out, he would prefer to go alone or with someone else. She may be afraid of being alone and prefers to Rescue than to be a Victim. In any case she is Rescuing him since she is doing something she does not want to do, and because she assumes he needs her and is unable to be satisfied by and for himself. People are constantly going places, doing things, participating in activities as Rescuers because they fear that the people whom they would have to “reject” would be hurt, upset, or in some way be unable to take care of themselves.

  Another way in which Rescues happen is when in any joint activity one person puts in more effort or more interest than the other. This is especially the case when a person who presents himself as needy or powerless (the Victim) ceases to put any effort into his situation as soon as another person who is the Rescuer begins to help. For instance, a woman may be having a great deal of difficulty on some particular afternoon taking care of her children, cooking dinner, and doing different household chores. Another woman, a neighbor, may come to the Rescue and as soon as she does, the Victim, instead of pitching in and providing at least one-half of the energy in the situation, falls back and allows the Rescuer to take over. Or, in another situation, where a man and a woman are on a camping vacation, the man, in the process of preparing a meal, may run into some difficulty and ask for help. As soon as his wife assumes the familiar role of the cook (Rescuer) he falls back and ceases to put any effort into the situation. Thus, any situation in which one person asks another for help and then proceeds to do less than 50% of the work constitutes a Rescue.

  Another way in which people Rescue each other is by not asking for what they want for themselves, again because they’re afraid of the other person’s reaction. Husbands and wives are often locked into mutual Rescues in which neither of them dares say what he really wants for fear of the other’s reaction. When these Rescues are explored and people are encouraged to talk straight and ask for everything they want 100% of the time,1 it is often found that large dissatisfactions are present in both of the persons which are not expressed and often not known by the other person. In my work with couples in relationships I have found that when these mutual Rescues are made clear, it is often possible for cooperative agreements to be made in which both of the partners can ask for what they want and get it, therefore eliminating all Rescues in the relationship.

  The main problem in achieving a No Rescue relationship is that people are so accustomed to compromising their own needs on behalf of others that they often need to relearn to recognize and express their real desires. In addition, asking for what one wants, even when one knows what one wants, is difficult too, and needs to be learned as well. Power Plays will be explored in the next chapter.

  17

  Power Plays

  Power

  To date, the power aspects of relationships have been ignored in transactional analysis as being of insufficient importance to be systematically mentioned. As a consequence, in a routine transactional analysis of a relationship, the relative power of the individuals involved is not considered a relevant factor.

  I should explain here what I mean by power. Power in physical terms means ability to exert force over a period of time. If I can drag you across the floor against your will, I have more physical power than you. This form of crude personal power, however, is not the only power to consider. I may be able to drag you physically across the floor, but you may have in your hire a bodyguard who will wipe me out if I as much as touch you. So you can intimidate me across the floor without even laying a hand on me. Or you may convince me to willingly walk across the floor, without any threat, based only on your attractiveness, personal magnetism, or convincing arguments, while I could not do the same to you.

  Thus, power is the capacity to cause people to do things, and it is unevenly distributed among people so that some have more and others have less.

  In drawing the script matrix, in which two parents and an offspring are portrayed, I unwittingly introduced the power factor into transactional analysis. Not only does the script matrix visually portray two people who are higher, that is, one-up to the offspring, but there are also built into the assumptions of the script matrix the assumption that parents are in a position of being able to force the offspring into doing things she or he would not otherwise do. With the script matrix, power considerations were first introduced into the analysis of transactions.

  The study of scripts extended into the study of banal scripts that affect men and women, and the understanding grew very quickly that men and women are scripted to perform along certain fixed role expectations, and that the role expectations include a definite powe
r relationship between them, namely, with the man one-up to the woman.

  The analysis of relationships between men and women led to the conclusion that power arrangements in relationships are crucial aspects of them, and that a therapist who is unaware of them or does not relate to them is simply not in touch with a most important factor.

  Psychotherapists are trained to ignore the relative power of the persons that they work for. Generally speaking, power or other political considerations are considered to be irrelevant to the practice of psychiatry. This unawareness of power in psychotherapists prevents them from becoming aware of the abuses of power that occur between human beings and of the unhappiness these abuses cause. Acknowledging abuses of power would quickly lead most therapists to the conclusion that as soul healers they must become advocates of those that are being oppressed rather than neutral observers who take no sides. As a consequence, because they would have to take sides with the powerless against the powerful, therapists are not too eager to become aware of such power factors.

  The understanding of power plays and the distribution of power has come to me through the study of the relationships between men and women. This is the case simply because as a therapist I do most of my work with people who are in one way or another dissatisfied with their heterosexual relationships. It is because of this that the ensuing statements are focused primarily on the power plays between men and women. This is not to imply that power plays do not exist in other situations, or that they are in some way of a different caliber or nature; it is just that at this particular time I understand the power plays between men and women best.