Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  As you can see, this type of power playing is quite different from the first example, since it is likely to escalate and become a raging battle and it is not very likely that either of the two people will win in the end. But each comment becomes a temporary victory, a partial strategic move which puts the other person down temporarily until forces are regrouped. “Pitched Battles” are like skirmishes, they erupt suddenly and unexpectedly whenever the opportunity for venting anger and resentment reaches a critical level.

  These examples of how power occurs in a relationship can be contrasted with the way in which two people might ask for what they want from each other and get a satisfactory compromise without the use of power plays. In order for this to be possible, both people have to be able and willing to concisely express what they want and how they feel until they are satisfied.

  A power play free discussion of that sort might proceed as follows:

  “Honey, I just agreed with the boss that we are going on vacation from September 7 to September 21. I would like to go to the lake.”

  “I would like to go to the mountains.”

  “Would you feel very bad about going to the lake? I am looking forward to meeting a bunch of people and going to the lodge and having those good dinners.”

  “Well, I was thinking of going to the mountains because I’m really upset about the air pollution here, and I’m looking forward to some good air. You know how the lake is always full of gasoline fumes. Also, in my work I’m always surrounded by people, and I would really like to have some solitude. Then, too, I was hoping not to spend so much money so we can buy a car.”

  “I want to meet some people and have good meals, and you want some clean air and a new car. Why don’t we go to the seaside then, and I’ll have a chance to meet some people, and you can go to the beach alone if you don’t want to always be around people. There is clean air there, and we can try to save money by taking a housekeeping apartment. That way we can go out and still have good meals and maybe save for a car. I will miss the lodge though …”

  “Well, I like the idea, but I’m not so happy about keeping house while we are on the beach. I’d just as soon we kept the old car and stayed at the Seaside Hotel. How do you like that?”

  The use of power plays in a relationship represents a situation in which two people who are after something from each other are willing to replace what they want from each other by the feeling of being one-up, however temporarily.

  Power plays do not lead to satisfaction or equality. They always lead to increased or continuing one-up/one-down situations. The reward of winning through power is a sense of security achieved from having control over the situation. But control and power are not intrinsically satisfying; no quantities of power or control can ever fully satisfy the needs of any human being. Satisfaction comes from having enough of what we really need—food, shelter, space, strokes, love, and peace of mind. The way to those is not power plays but cooperation.

  Analysis of Power Plays

  Like games, power plays can be analyzed along a variety of lines. Let us take “You Can’t Do It If You Can’t Prove It.” A detailed analysis follows:

  Name: “Prove It”

  Power (Is it played from one-up, one-down, or equal power?): One-up Scarcity (What is being competed over? Is the scarcity real? If it is real, is it artificial or inevitable?):

  The argument is over who is righteous in his demands. Mr. and Ms. White can’t both be right. The scarcity of righteousness is artificial, since they are both right in what they want. When they agree that they are both right, they find a cooperative compromise.

  Strategy: This one-up power play is based on the fact that most people feel they have to be “logical” in their behavior. The demand for a logical justification for the one-down person’s claims is made. The one-down player gets hooked into accepting the demand and its challenge. Every justification is rejected. If the justification is illogical, this is pointed out. If it is logical, then it is skirted with fast talk and rhetorical tricks. It usually takes the one-down person hours if not days to see the fallacies in the one-up arguments, but by then it is too late.

  Moves:

  Mr. W: I want A.

  Ms. W: I want B.

  Mr. W: You can’t have B if you can’t prove why you should.

  Ms. W: Gives proof.

  Mr. W: Refutes proof.

  Ms. W: Capitulates.

  Technique: Pseudo-logical arguments, fast talk.

  Antithesis (How can the power play be stopped?):

  Mr. W: “Prove It”

  Ms. W: I don’t want to prove it. I don’t have to prove it. I want it because I want it and no one can judge whether what I want is right or not but me.

  SECTION 4

  THERAPY

  18

  Myths of Therapy

  Introduction

  There are three main kinds of scripting and each kind of script can be found in banal and tragic dimensions. These three kinds of scripts—Lovelessness, Mindlessness, and Joylessness (depression, madness, and drug abuse)—cover the range of emotional disturbances that present themselves to psychiatrists. I am proposing that these three categories of scripts adequately substitute for all of the categories appearing in the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic Manual1 under the heading of functional disorders, namely disorders which do not involve visible damage to the central nervous system.

  A person may be under the influence of any one or any combination of these three scripts. Lovelessness and its consequences, namely depression, are found either alone or in combination with Mindlessness (madness) or Joylessness (drug abuse). The Mindless and Joyless scripts tend to exclude each other so that people who have a great deal of Joyless scripting (often members of a powerful class, i.e., white men, well-to-do, etc.) tend not to have Mindless scripting, while people who have Mindless scripts (often members of an oppressed class, i.e., non-white, women, working-class, etc.) tend not to have Joyless scripting. However, everyone has traces of each script since everyone is subjected to the basic training in all three areas which are ubiquitous in our society.

  The three script categories suggest specific therapy approaches effective in dealing with the specific scripts. The only justification I find for the extensive analysis of scripts is in order to find or suggest ways to help people overcome them. The kind of script analysis, which has as its purpose primarily the identification and understanding of scripts, does not command a great deal of interest from me. Rather, it is my ultimate aim in writing this book to suggest methods whereby people can overcome their banal or tragic scripting and proceed to live their lives in a more autonomous fashion.

  A few myths about emotional disturbance and psychotherapy need to be dispelled in order to clear the way for script analysis methods. These myths, which are widely accepted by people and their psychotherapists, are behind the failure of a great deal of the psychotherapy being done nowadays.

  The Myth of the Value of One-to-One Individual Therapy

  One-to-one individual psychotherapy is widely believed to be the therapy of choice, especially in the case of people who are severely emotionally disturbed. It is based on the physician-patient model of medicine and on the minister-faithful model of religious soul-healing. Both of these approaches are prestigious traditional approaches to human suffering, and it is easy to understand why people have come to believe that one-to-one psychotherapy is the only approach which has sufficient depth to lastingly affect severe disturbances. Group psychotherapy, when it is accepted as a therapy at all, is thought to be more superficial and only appropriate with people who have minor disturbances; or if used with severely disturbed people it is used not as therapy but as a cheap method of weekly review and maintenance without expectation of real help.

  I believe this to be a myth. Competently conducted group psychotherapy is certainly as effective (I believe it to be more effective) as competent one-to-one psychotherapy. Except for the case of acute psychiatric emergenci
es when a person is temporarily so frightened or depressed that he is completely unable to relate to anyone, group psychotherapy does not only match the effectiveness of one-to-one psychotherapy, but in several aspects surpasses it.

  First, individual one-to-one psychotherapy is not an effective method of exploring how people relate to each other. Instead, it tends to encourage the analysis of what goes on within a person and therefore tends to reinforce the view that the origin of people’s troubles is to be found within them. To be sure, some individual therapists explore people’s relationships and the external causes of their unhappiness. The point is that individual therapy is not conducive to that type of socio-analytic focus. Rather, it is conducive to the internal, psycho-analytic focus—the analysis of the person rather than her relationships and external circumstances.

  Secondly, individual psychotherapy often becomes the most important relationship in the troubled person’s life. When this happens, the relationship becomes a model of the ideal relationship which the “patient” then seeks to find in her relationships outside of therapy. It is not uncommon to meet people who speak of their therapist with the feeling and attachment which are usually accorded to an intimate friend, lover, or relation. I find that kind of a situation very saddening, the more so the higher the fees which the person is paying to maintain the “relationship” with the therapist. The one-to-one relationship is, in fact, artificial in the extreme and not an adequate model for the I-Thou loving relationships which people need and seek. One need only ask how long it will last after money or insurance coverage runs out to see what I mean. True friendship cannot be based on this model.

  Lastly, individual therapy encourages the already strong tendencies in people to keep secret their difficulties or to entrust them only to special individuals, such as priests and doctors, in the privacy of their offices or confessionals. This colludes with the Pig Parent’s purpose to keep us ashamed and guilty about ourselves (I’m not O.K.) and to keep us suspicious and separate (They’re not O.K.) from others. It prevents us from seeing that we are not so wretchedly alone in our unhappiness, that others have similar problems to ours, and that there is no need to be ashamed because we can’t find or give love, think, or enjoy ourselves.

  Group psychotherapy, on the other hand, provides a situation where a person can experience and analyze his interactions with other people who are his equals. In effective group work the relationships that are highlighted are the relationships between the group members rather than the relationships between the group members and the leader; in transactional analysis, the leader is an adviser who tends to stay out of the interactions; he is not as needed or idolized as in a one-to-one situation.

  Open discussion with a group of eight other people encourages openness about one’s problems and discourages the sense of shame and guilt which people ordinarily have about their weaknesses and failures. Also, adequate therapy in a group is much cheaper than one-to-one psychotherapy, and is therefore more likely to be readily available to people who are not wealthy. In addition, the skills of a competent therapist are much more adequately used in a group where she can help many times as many people as she could help in individual psychotherapy in a given period of time.

  All of the above is not to say that I believe one-to-one relationships or therapeutic contacts are undesirable; the above statement refers to extended (months and years) and intense (once or more weekly) individual therapy.

  The Myth of the Uselessness of Common Sense

  Another myth in psychotherapy is that somehow, for some reason, common sense is not only not useful, but in fact that the dictates of common sense are completely useless if not counter-productive in the emotional affairs of people. It is often implied that people cannot trust their senses and intelligence when it comes to matters of the mind. In fact, it is often even implied that to use one’s common sense and intelligence will cause us to believe in the exact opposite of what’s true and to do exactly the opposite of what is useful. If a therapist asks a person what he believes to be the cause of his difficulties, and he responds, “I hate my job and I need to find a new place to live,” this common sense appraisal is apt to be subtly or bluntly discounted. Instead of considering the validity of his answer, it is not unlikely that the therapist will conclude instead that his troubles are caused by the fact that he has a passive-aggressive character disorder whose character defenses of displacement and projection prevent him from adequate reality testing.

  Again, in opposition with what common sense would indicate, many psychotherapists believe that it is an error to suggest certain desirable courses of action to their “patients.” This type of suggestion is labeled “manipulative.” It will be shown later in this chapter that a crucial move in script analysis is Permission: a recommendation and often an insistence that the person take a certain course of action. This type of therapeutic strategy is viewed with suspicion by most traditional therapists, who would be reluctant to use it because it is “manipulative” and for fear of what is called the paradoxical reaction.

  The paradoxical reaction refers to the reaction of a person who is asked to do something and does the opposite, as a result of being asked. Using alcoholism as an example, it is argued that it is not advisable to ask an alcoholic to stop drinking because it will provoke her into drinking even more. It is added that the alcoholic knows that he should stop drinking, and that it is unnecessary for the psychotherapist to ask him to do so.

  Transactionally speaking, a paradoxical reaction is a very circumscribed phenomenon which may occur in the above example when the therapist’s Parent either commands or begs the alcoholic’s Child to stop drinking. Alcoholics who have entered into a contractual relationship with transactional analysts, when advised of the necessity to stop drinking, have either stopped or not responded; but never in my experience has an alcoholic proceeded to drink more because of this kind of request. This may be because the transactionally sophisticated therapist avoids the roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, or Victim, which are the source of paradoxical reactions; instead, he simply states the necessity that the person do certain things to effectively overcome her or his scripting.

  Common sense indicates that therapists, being experts in human affairs, would have and give suggestions for their clients, and lay readers might be puzzled by this discussion. However, the myth of the desirability of non-directive, non-manipulative therapy persists among both laymen and professionals, and needs to be dispelled.

  It has long been suspected, and it is now generally accepted, that no therapist can hope to avoid imposing her system of values upon the people she works for.1 The issue of manipulation has now become simply a question of whether a therapist, consciously and overtly, is willing to expose people to his values or whether he prefers to do it without his own and his client’s awareness. To the transactional analyst, the therapeutic contract makes it clear that the person wants the therapist to use whatever techniques he feels will help his condition, and it is the contract that gives the transactional analyst permission to apply pressures based on her value system. On the other hand, people are justified in expecting the therapist to limit the application of his judgments to the confines established by the contract.

  One final point regarding manipulation needs to be made. Once the therapist frankly admits that he expects to have an effect on the people he works for and as techniques of behavior change increase in potency, it becomes extremely important that the therapist obtain a previous, clear-cut agreement or contract (see Chapter 22) delineating what the person wishes to change in her behavior. Practicing therapy without such an agreement or contract leaves the choice of changes to the therapist who will then be clearly overstepping the boundaries of people’s right of self-determination. No human being has the right, even if she is in the position of a therapist, to make decisions for another human being, and to do so is more aptly described as brainwashing than as therapy. A therapist must therefore take extreme care to limit his work to areas wh
ich are agreed to by contract.

  Closely allied to the issues of common sense and manipulation is the issue of “self-discovery.” For reasons never clearly specified, it is argued by some psychotherapists that whatever is discovered by the patient on his own is intrinsically more valuable than whatever he learns due to the therapist’s teachings. This argument probably stems from observations of the futility of a strictly Parental or exhortative therapeutic approach, but it has been extended to encompass any behavior which willfully teaches or transmits information. Again the argument of “self discovery,” like the argument against “manipulation,” defies common sense.

  An analogy to the “self-discovery” approach is that of a man who pushes his stalled car to a gas station and is greeted by a mechanic who, believing in self-discovery, insists that his client deduce for himself the causes and remedy of his car’s difficulty. Under the guidance of a good mechanic, the man will probably arrive at a correct diagnosis, and even be able to repair the car, but the value of self-discovery will hardly compensate him for the expenditure in time and fees that this approach implies.

  Common sense expectations in therapy are that the therapist teach, give her opinion, exert pressure, apply her value system, and in fact actively participate in doing anything and everything that will fulfill the contract. I believe this common sense expectation to be correct.

  One more way in which common sense is denigrated is in how people are expected to choose their therapists. Common sense indicates that length of training and experience is of importance, but also that the personality, warmth, and other attributes of the therapist are important. Common sense further indicates that people should use their judgment in choosing a therapist.

  Yet it isn’t considered sensible for a person to “interview” her prospective therapist. A person who wants therapy for sexual problems isn’t encouraged to ask questions such as: “What is your experience (or training) with sexual problems?” “Are you married?” “Do you enjoy sex?” “Do you think sex is important?” “Have you read Masters and Johnson’s work on sex?” and so on.