Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  The capacity to love is dependent on possessing the two interrelated faculties of nurturance and intuition. Intuition is essentially the capacity of human beings to know others, especially to be able to read their emotional states. Only a person who is sufficiently tuned in to other people’s emotional states and can sense them without there being a need for elaborate explanations can be in a position of applying the nurturing which is appropriate. The capacity to be nurturing is dependent on the capacity of knowing what others feel. Reclaiming one cannot happen without the reclamation of the other.

  Men’s Trust Circle

  Eight men stand in a circle. Jack steps into the center, closes his eyes, and moves toward the periphery. He is stiff, smiles bravely until he bumps into one of the men in the periphery, then flinches. He turns around and starts another tentative walk through the circle. When he reaches the center, Fred says:

  “You look scared.… Are you?” Jack answers quickly, “No!”

  Silence follows. Jack asks, “Am I scared? I feel something strange.”

  “You look scared,” says John.

  “I guess I am.”

  “What of?”

  “I am afraid someone is going to trip me. I know it’s silly.”

  Ed says: “Nobody would trip you here. I promise you. Don’t worry.”

  Jack keeps walking, bumps into Ed. Ed gives him a hug. “Don’t worry, brother.…”

  The Trust Circle is a good exercise for men. Jack learns to recognize his fear, shame, distrust, and to express it. Ed, John, Fred learn to read Jack’s mind; they learn to intuit how he feels and to be supportive and nurturing. Nurturing helps Jack trust the others with his feelings and safety.

  The process whereby we teach intuition is called feelback and is quite similar to the process of bio-feedback in which a person is capable of getting in touch with and controlling involuntary, unconscious bodily states through a feedback mechanism which monitors these states. In this case, instead of having a device which provides the feedback, one has the other person who either confirms or disconfirms whatever intuition happens to be. Obviously, this process requires that everyone in the context be open and willing to expose her or his feeling states to others so as to make feelback possible. Jack has to be willing to be honest; the others have to instill enough trust in him to make it safe to be honest.

  Men’s Great Curses: Responsibility and Guilt

  Not only are men unskilled in reading people, but they also respond with guilt when in the presence of other people’s emotional states, especially women’s. This guilt is based on a very strongly scripted tendency to feel responsibility for other people, to Rescue them rather than let them take care of themselves.

  Example: A man and a woman meet at the park. Their innermost wishes are quite similar to each other’s. They both want to hold hands, run in the grass, stroke each other’s hair, touch each other’s skin, and talk about themselves to each other. Were they acting freely, they would proceed to do so and continue until one or the other decided to stop, and then their relationship would either change or end. However, the usual course of events is quite different. From the man’s vantage point, the simple response of reaching for her hand while looking into her eyes and stroking her hair is immediately censored and replaced with a guilty response. The average male will feel guilt with respect to having such a carnal, animal desire. He tells himself he should want to know the woman better before he touches her; he should take her to the movies and out for dinner and give her something before she gives him access to the physical strokes that he wants. Or, his reaction to the spontaneous wish to touch and relate physically to the woman is that it is sexist and objectionable; that it turns the woman into a sexual object that he can only relate to physically. He therefore squelches his initial free sensual response and replaces it with a “more acceptable” response which allays his guilt. If she really likes him and expresses love, tenderness, expectation, or disappointment he often panics. Suddenly he is in a position of responsibility. He has to love her back or satisfy her in all her needs. If he doesn’t he feels guilty. Most probably he will adapt and wind up Guilty and Trapped.1

  Men’s reaction to guilt is a retreat from those feelings and emotions that cause the guilt into a passive intellectual pursuit which makes use of their most developed capacity, the capacity of Rationality. A man who has squelched his true feelings because of guilt is prone to engage in a head-trip about what he is supposed to want. He may feel that he is supposed to want to appreciate the woman’s mind instead of her body. Or perhaps he is supposed to want to marry her. Or he is supposed to be sensitive; he is supposed to “struggle” with his chauvinism. He proceeds to do so in his head by thinking about it, talking about it, and doing things which he sees as discharging his obligations so that he can escape guilt.

  The outcome of this process is usually disastrous. The natural, sensual reaction of both persons is denied even though it might have led to the very thing that they both want. The woman’s wishes are, usually, a deepening and enriching of the relationship in which not only her most superficially attractive aspects are appreciated, but also all of the succeeding layers of her personality which a continuing relationship will uncover. The man’s wishes are a relationship in which he can act freely without having to fear being trapped. Instead, the man does things which he is supposed to do, but which he doesn’t want to do, which create resentment and often generate a series of lies which escalate the guilt even further. As a consequence, the development of their relationship is interfered with and destroyed, and its future potential nipped in the bud. Resentment builds because the man is not doing what he wants to do, but doing what he doesn’t want to do, and feeling a responsibility to continue doing it, while the woman becomes disappointed and increasingly mystified. He continues to adapt; he continues to be out of touch with what he really wants, and feels more and more guilt about his true feelings. The end result is that after a certain period of time he suddenly breaks away from the relationship, fleeing what has become an unfulfilling and intolerable situation.

  These developments do not occur in a vacuum, however. Women have a complementary set of responses which encourage and maintain the male guilty response. In many cases women agree with men that their initial physical interest in them is one that is inappropriate and deserving of guilt. They often feel the need for guarantees that “he wants more than sex,” that “he will marry me,” or “take care of me.” Yet a growing number of women who have no such expectations find with exasperation that even though they would be willing and eager to hold hands and tumble through the grass and will even say so, men cling to their guilty responses and “don’t come across.”

  Guilt is a response taught human beings by their parents in the service of oppression. Guilt prevents children from striving for the things that they want but which their parents do not want them to have.

  When boys grow up into men they are expected to get married and create a family. Ours is a society that thrives on working men, exploited labor. It is important that men be neatly trapped into a relationship with a woman and their children in an isolated house or apartment. In that setting they can best work hard for their employers for eight full hours daily. After work it takes eight further hours to wind down so that they can sleep eight hours and then go on to work again. In order for a man to be optimally exploited in his labor he must live with a woman who, on his eight hours of off-work time, re-supplies him with energy. He spends all day making cars, and when he comes home, his wife plugs in, fills him up with strokes and nurturing, then they both sleep (preferably without using up any sexual energy), and he is a much more effective source of labor than a man who is single and alone. So men are instilled with the sense of an obligation to allow themselves to be trapped in a relationship with a woman in order to be exploited by their employers. Guilt is intensely felt by men who attempt to break out of this pattern by refusing to get married or have children.

  The liberation of
men from sexism usually follows a certain pattern. Guilt is the first overt manifestation in men of their resolve to fight their chauvinism. Guilt is usually followed by passivity, a sucking in of energy and power in an attempt to become less of an oppressive force. This passivity which men tend to assume as a stance when they begin to feel guilt over their chauvinism is an improvement over the active oppression of a “macho” man, but it is only the beginning of the process. Men in this passive phase completely neutralize their energy, turning it inward, and not knowing what to do with it. They become scared, defensive, cagey, unspontaneous; but do not necessarily give up their one-up position which now is bolstered by subtle (rather than crude) power plays to maintain the status quo. A man in this passive phase, which is often laced with a little boys’ game of “All or Nothing at All,” can become lusterless and ineffectual while he holds to a heavily intellectualized, head-trippy illusion that he has effectively coped with his chauvinism—when he has, in fact, only begun the long road to his liberation.

  Potency is often, but mistakenly, mixed up with machismo. This has caused many men to confuse their strength, energy and potency with machismo. Machismo is the use of physical energy in a manner that is oppressive to women and other human beings. But energy or power does not need to be oppressive, and when properly used it is a good human quality. Women want to have energy and power, too. Struggling men’s response to the attacks of women should not be withdrawal into passivity but learning to use their power without oppressing people with it.

  The phase in which men pull in their power, necessary as it is, needs to be followed by a rebirth of power free of power plays, crude or subtle, and free of stereotyped masculine roles: human power based on the full exercise of all of the human faculties—Nurturing, Rationality, Intuition, and Spontaneity. Cooperation is the antithesis to the abusive use of power; and in learning how to cooperate rather than compete men are able to once again enjoy the full expression of their energy and assertiveness, only this time without the burden of guilt.

  Liberated Relationships and Life Styles

  Men and women can live their lives separate and with each other as autonomous, cooperative, equal individuals. Women can pursue careers without becoming “Queen Bees” who shut out female competition, or they can be mothers of a crew living in a large house with many rooms and a big kitchen full of cupboards without turning into overweight “Mother Hubbards.”

  Men can be bachelors relating to several women in a warm, affectionate, ongoing, caring way without being “Playboys,” or they can be married and have many children whom they support without being a one-up tyrannical “Big Daddy.” Men can live to be ninety-nine years old and women can be beautiful as long as they live. Women can be atheletes and surgeons and men can be nurses and homemakers. Men can find their life’s love with other men and women with other women without having to hide in dark closets for fear of being discovered. People can live alone, with another loved one (see Wyckoff’s “Rules for Liberated Relationships”1), or with many in a cooperative commune; people can be homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Human needs can be fulfilled in many ways that avoid the banal alternatives which we are handed to choose from. Fulfillment may mean struggle—but the Good Life is worth fighting for.

  In this book I have promoted a number of human ideals which I consider valid alternatives to banal oppressive life styles, and I would now like to list them all at once:

  Equality (I’m O.K., you’re O.K.)

  Autonomy (choices rather than scripts)

  Truthfulness (rather than lies, secrets, and games)

  Cooperation (rather than competition and power plays)

  Love (a plenitude of strokes, rather than a controlled stroke economy)

  28

  After Scripts, What?

  Over the ages, every newborn cave-age child has smiled expectantly at its “civilized” parents. From generation to generation, humanity has a brand-new chance for self-fulfillment. Fulfillment may take some time, but our day will come. The newborn is enormously adaptable and is capable of surviving the chambers of horrors of its most sadistic fellow humans.

  Human potential is as infinite as human adaptability. Each generation of parents has the option to oppress its offspring with age-old curses, or to protect its children’s spontaneity, encourage their awareness, and respond to their intimate needs that they may reach their full potential. Pushing through to the surface, people’s basic nature is like a perennial virgin spring, ever ready to feed life with its sweet waters.

  Intimacy, awareness, and spontaneity are innately human and, even if crushed, will re-emerge again and again within each succeeding generation.

  Graciously, Mother Nature in this way guarantees ever renewed hope for humanity; without hope for the whole human race there can be no hope for individual members of it.

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