Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Work

  The Work transaction (Figure 14A) is most common among “rational” and “insight” therapists. It represents Adult-to-Adult communication in which 1) data is gathered—the person’s life history, patterns of unhappiness, childhood or recent events in her life, her dreams; 2) conclusions are drawn—interpretation of dreams, diagnosis of ego states, games and scripts, interpretation of resistances; and 3) recommendations are made which are Adult statements of logical consequences or predictions, such as “Well, given what you’ve told me, it would seem that you are no longer able to control your drinking,” or, “It seems that your love affair with Jack is very harmful for you; you probably won’t feel good until you stop seeing him.”

  Figure 13

  Work transactions represent the largest percentage of transactions occurring in a group and take a certain predictable course. Work tends to be carried out with one group member as the focus. Either by his own choosing or by being singled out by someone else, one group member will become the center of attention. This does not necessarily mean that he will be placed on the “hot seat” where he becomes the focus of all interaction but simply that he tends to be at the center of it. The first phase of this process is one of clarification. The person presents a problem or someone else suggests that a problem exists, and some exploration is needed to ascertain whether there is, in reality, something to work on. The problem suggested may be a “red herring” or “bone” thrown at the group instead of a more serious problem which is difficult or scary to bring up. Or the problem, suggested by another group member, may represent a projection or misperception. In any case, the process of clarification continues until the feeling develops that the group is working on a real problem in which some change can or should occur.

  Now the process shifts from clarification to challenge and someone will ask, overtly or covertly, “Now that you know the problem, what are you going to do about it?” The person ordinarily is at a loss for solutions or unwilling to use those which are suggested. A cherished old pattern of behavior is being reexamined, a parental injunction is being challenged, and the person’s Adapted Child is expected to balk. This is the impasse beyond which the person will not go unless pressure is applied, pressure which can only come from another person’s Child or Parent.1

  At this point, a purely Work-oriented therapist has to rely on one of the group members to supply the tissue transactions needed. The transactional analyst, however, has at his disposal the Permission transaction and will use it when appropriate. Now the process shifts from challenge to climax if the person accepts the Permission, or to anticlimax if he deflects it. If Permission is accepted, the group members will ordinarily have an experience of well-being and closure, and a silence will follow after which the process starts anew with another person as the focus of attention. If Permission occurs within the group itself, such as getting angry, crying, being honest, asking for strokes, or exposing the Pig Parent, the person may be quite shaken and Nurturing and Protection may be indicated.

  Sometimes, the person will be frightened enough to be unable to continue in her Adult ego state during the clarification or challenge. She might feel defensive, not O.K., guilty, ashamed, or angry. When this happens it is important to stop the Work process and Nurture and provide Protection. Some therapists prefer to use attack, a technique borrowed from Synanon, to “break through the defenses” of the person.

  I will comment on the uses of attack therapy later. Suffice it to say here I believe that when a person becomes defensive, Protection rather than continued Work or attack is the appropriate response.

  At times the impasse is not resolved by a climax or anticlimax but becomes a game of “Why Don’t You—Yes, But.” Here the therapist is faced with a question of strategy. Should she continue to press or should the group go on to someone else? In a hard-working group the therapist is always under time pressure and has the dual responsibility of not allowing time to be wasted and of pursuing matters to their completion. Skillful decisions along these lines distinguish the experienced therapist from the novice who will either pursue matters endlessly to no avail or drop them just as the impasse is ready to be broken. In any case, if the matter is dropped, the feeling in the group is anticlimactic and again a silence follows, after which a new person becomes the focus of attention. It should be noted here that in a cooperative group all the group members, and not just the therapist, are responsible for deciding whether to stay with something or go on to something else. In my groups, people sign up on the blackboard if they want to work and everyone is expected to make sure that time is used to the fullest and allocated fairly.

  GAME PLAYING

  It takes a skillful leader to maintain the work orientation of a group. When a group loses its work orientation it will fall into game playing. Game playing can take several forms. The group can play Rescue in a situation where one of the persons presents himself as a Victim and the rest of the group scramble madly in an attempt to Rescue. A group of this sort will be taken up by games such as “Why Don’t You—Yes, But,” “Do Me Something,” “If It Weren’t For Them (or Him) (Or Her).” The general outcome of such groups is that the Victim and Rescuers all end up in a state of heightened frustration and anger. Very often when a group has played a Rescue game the Rescuers will switch to Persecutors and attack the Victim. Now the games will be “Uproar,” “Kick Me,” “Now I’ve Got You, You Son Of A Bitch,” “Stupid,” and so on. Or the Victim becomes Persecutor and plays “Nobody Loves Me,” or, “See What You Made Me Do.” The roles of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor will switch around in the group with different people taking different roles so that everyone eventually plays every role in an endless merry-go-round.

  The role of Rescuer is the natural game role that group leaders tend to fall into. For every long minute that a leader plays Rescuer, he will eventually have to play an equally long minute as Persecutor. A group leader must be aware of the possibility that a group member may no longer be holding to the original contract, and when this is the case should stop the process until a new contract is arrived at. The tendency for group leaders to engage in Rescuing usually comes out of a sense of guilt or exaggerated responsibility for the group member. When a group leader maintains a position of “I’ll help you as long as you are willing to work on your problem as hard as I do,” she will avoid the dangers of the Rescue role. Needless to say, Persecuting any one person in a group is even less desirable than playing Rescue. I have concluded that therapy can be done without any necessity of yelling, screaming, attacking, goading, and other “therapeutic” maneuvers which are really sadistic versions of “I’m Only Trying to Help You” and are found to be unnecessary when a leader learns how to confront people in a human and loving way.

  Antithesis or Command

  This is an emergency transaction from Parent to Child which is used to arrest or interfere with certain transactional sequences which the therapist feels are dangerous (Figure 14B).

  For instance, if a teenage girl who has a history of unhappy sexual relationships and an older married man get into a flirtation in group, the therapist may wish to arbitrarily say, from his Parent to their Child, “Don’t get together by yourselves outside of group.” Or if one person verbally attacks or “pigs” another, the therapist, again Parent to Child, may want to demand that he stop. If an intoxicated patient in the group continually interrupts the proceedings, the therapist might need to say, “Shut up!” This transaction has to be available to a therapist dealing with people who have self-destructive scripts, since they are often on a dangerous or disruptive brink and require direct commands to stop. I have seen dramatic evidence of the effectiveness of the Antithesis transaction with self-destructive individuals. It has become routine to use a script Antithesis such as “Don’t kill yourself,” or “Don’t beat your children,” with suicidal or violent people who later reported hearing the therapist’s voice and injunction whenever tempted to kill themselves or beat their children. These
people often express their appreciation for the positive effect of the therapist’s injunction without which, they feel, they might have committed a suicidal or violent act.

  ATTACK

  The antithesis or command is to be distinguished from the attack transaction in which the therapist also uses her Parent in a critical and authoritarian way.

  There is a vast difference between command and attack. My opinion about the attack approach is that it is cruel, that it serves the oppressive purposes of the Pig Parent, and, above all, that it does not work.

  My feelings on this subject are strong. I have seen many casualties from groups where attack techniques were used. Some become frightened of groups and are enormously relieved when I tell them that I personally do not use or allow attack in my groups. Others have learned to “deal” with attack and have become hardened, defensive, uptight, and insensitive to feedback. I have heard of the misuse of attack therapy combined with transactional analysis in prison groups where attack becomes a nightmarish experience akin to a third-degree police interrogation. Attack therapy is especially noxious when the group members are captive, that is, not free to leave at any time.

  I know that some will argue that they know people who have been helped by attack therapy and that it can be used lovingly as a technique. Perhaps; but nevertheless I believe that attack has as little place in a therapy situation as a cattle prod, even if it is used (mostly) as a pointer, and I object to its use in connection with transactional analysis.

  Fun

  Fun is a transaction in which the Childs of the group’s members are able to experience joy together (Figure 14C). This transaction is hard to distinguish from its destructive counterpart, the gallows transaction, and is therefore avoided by some experienced therapists because they fear its possible dangers. Yet Child-to-Child fun seems to be a basic requirement of efficient therapy, and while a therapist may be able to help without having any fun, the work is likely to be more speedy if they are having fun together. Fun also has the advantage of making the therapist’s task more enjoyable, something which is of benefit since a zestful, happy therapist is likely to have fewer days out of work from sickness, and less interference by depression than a therapist who is not having fun in his work.

  Fun is most readily expressed through laughter. Because of this, a group member or a therapist who doesn’t laugh heartily at least once per meeting should consider seriously whether he is not being unnecessarily glum, and whether he is Rescuing the group.

  THE GALLOWS TRANSACTION

  The gallows transaction, as opposed to Fun, takes place when a person, in one way or another, cons the group members (and sometimes the therapist) into smiling at his script behavior. In hamartic individuals, self-destructive behavior is always associated with a smile. The person who explains the smile by saying, “I’m smiling because it’s funny,” “I’m smiling in order not to cry”, or, “I’m smiling because I am embarrassed,” is falling prey to sophistry. A smile is associated with pleasure or more precisely, just as it is in the infant, with well-being. The pleasure in this case is the result of the approval and smile of the Pig Parent rewarding the Child for his self-destructive behavior. The smile of the therapist of group members parallels and reinforces the smile of the Pig Parent who is pleased when the person obeys the injunction. For instance, White, a self-destructive alcoholic, may come to the group and say, “I had a terrible car accident last night, ha, ha.” The verbal content is Adult-to-Adult and the “ha, ha’s” are from Child-to-Child or from Child-to-Parent and from Parent-to-Child. The person’s smile is primarily addressed to the Pig Parent. The Child learns by conditioning and is stimulus-bound, so that the smile of the respondent serves to reinforce the Child’s self-destructive behavior. A therapist dealing with self-destructive individuals must determine which behavior is self-destructive or script-bound, and must never smile in response to it. When the gallows transaction is explained in a group and is thus prevented from occurring, the effect is startling, and often the person’s Child reacts as if the therapist is a party-crasher who made away with the goodies. Curtailing the gallows transaction does not mean that therapy should not be fun, but simply that self-destruction is no fun. Avoiding the gallows transaction allows the group to laugh at whatever is joyful rather than tragic in the person and discourages the self-destructive aspects of her behavior by denying the strokes she expects, and usually gets for it.

  Permission

  The first of the three P’s of transactional analysis (Permission, Protection, Potency)—Permission—is a transaction which is intimately tied to the theory of scripts (Figure 15A).

  The concept of Permission in script analysis was developed in my work with alcoholics.1 In puzzling about how to help, some therapists propose that alcoholics need permission to drink without guilt. The implication here is that the guilt about drinking keeps the alcoholic feeling not O.K. and provokes further drinking. Script analysis takes the superficially surprising view that an alcoholic needs permission not to drink, because he is under duress to do so. This concept is really not surprising if one remembers that an alcoholic is involved in a script, and that a script is the result of parental injunctions. As a consequence, theoretically the alcoholic is under orders to drink, and needs permission not to. The concept of Permission becomes clear in practice when applied, for example, to a young alcoholic who is surrounded by hard-drinking co-workers and who would feel a loss of self-esteem if he decided that drinking is harmful to him and should be discontinued. This person would clearly need permission to stop drinking and go against the covert and often even overt challenges of his co-workers and co-drinkers to continue drinking.

  Permission, then, is a transaction in which the therapist attempts to align the person with her original script-free, Natural Child ego. The permission transaction is a combination of a Parent-to-Child command, as described above—“Stop drinking”—and a rational, logical explanation, Adult-to-Adult, in which the rational or logical reason for the command is explained (“You will not be able to keep your job unless you stop drinking,” or, “Your husband is not going to stay with you unless you stop.”)

  Figure 14

  Permission requires the involvement of the person’s Adult, and if his Adult is not convinced that the therapist’s Adult statement is valid, Permission simply becomes a Command that may be resisted. It is possible that decontamination of the person’s Adult will be needed. For instance, the person who is about to lose her job because she drinks may ignore the statement “You will not be able to keep your job unless you stop drinking,” because she believes that she will not be able to keep her job unless she can drink socially. Thus, if the Adult-to-Adult message is not received and accepted, Permission will not work. The therapeutic task at this point would be to recognize the contamination involved, namely, that the person believes that she has to drink in order to keep her job.

  Every script injunction requires a separate Permission. As major injunctions are defeated, others become salient and need to be dealt with. For instance, an alcoholic who had very visibly improved her situation by remaining sober for a whole year never initiated social relationships herself, but rather relied for her social contacts on whatever activities her few friends initiated. When this was noticed it became evident that she needed Permission to ask for strokes from people. She was told, as part of her homework, to call someone and ask them to a movie. This proved to be a very difficult task for her, and she was not able to perform it for a few weeks. This difficulty became the focus of the therapy, the person’s impasse beyond which she had to move in order to proceed toward permanent improvement. The therapist’s insistence and interest in this specific action eventually had the desired effect and she finally overthrew the strong injunction against asking what she wanted from people, an achievement which later proved to be crucial to her well-being.

  It must be remembered that the parent giving Permission should be the grownup Parent (P2), and not the Parent in the Child (P1
in C2) (see Figure 2). The difference between the first-order Parent and the Parent in the Child has been elaborated in Chapter 13, but it should be further noted that the Parent in the Child plays the part of impotent Rescuer or Persecutor. The potency required to countermand parental injunctions is not available to the Parent in the Child but only to the first-order Parent. Every therapist should be aware of the difference between these two ego states in himself, since any transactions coming from the Parent in the Child (the Pig Parent acting as Rescuer or Persecutor) of the therapist are an indication of difficulty.

  Protection

  The concept of therapeutic protection was first postulated by Patricia Crossman and has become an indispensable part of script analysis.1 When a person under the influence of the therapist’s Permission takes a step which involves rejection of the parental injunction, he may find himself alone and terrified, having declined parental protection. The existential vacuum and fear that follow cannot be ignored by the therapist. If the therapist does not replace the Protection the person has lost from his parents, the person will probably return to his prior mode of behavior within which he feels safe, and allow the bad witch to “return.” This constitutes a re-embracement of the script and, psychologically speaking, it represents the person’s belief that the therapist is not as powerful as the bad witch and that he cannot be trusted when the chips are down.