Below you will find a short summary and link to each of the following videos:
Why Recognizing Your Life Script is So Important: 1
Uncovering Your Life Script: 2
Games, the Drama Triangle, and Your Life Script: 3
Uncovering Your Life Position: 4
How Parental Injunctions and Counter Injunctions Create Your Life Script: 5
How Scripted “Acceptable” Feelings Create an Inauthentic Script; 6
Freeing Yourself from Your Life Script; 7
Why Recognizing Your Life Script is So Important: 1
A script is based on the memorized and rehearsed lines and directions that an actor exhibits to fulfill his role in a play or drama. Eric Berne, MD, the creator of Transactional Analysis, took this concept in the 1950’s and turned it into a powerful, important and very helpful way to understand why we keep making the same dysfunctional choices throughout our lives, choosing addictions over freedom, irrational beliefs over knowledge, wisdom, and common sense, and crazy-making drama over peace of mind. Your script is your life plan, developed for the most part out of your awareness during your childhood in response to the expectations, priorities, rewards and punishments of your familial and cultural environments. It is your internalized framework for making sense of your world, built into the foundation of your identity from before you knew how to talk. Think of your script as your means of navigating your way through life by filtering out that information that does not validate or support it. Your script determines what you look for regarding success, partnership and happiness. Your script determines who you think you are and what it means to succeed and fail. You see, hear, and respond to life in ways that validate your script and ignore, repress, or deny the presence, reality, or importance of those things, ideas, feelings, and people that challenge or threaten the assumptions of your life script.
Uncovering Your Life Script: 2
The following life script questionnaire, taken from Transactional Analysis, is designed to help you understand both how you were programmed out of your awareness for years when you were a child and the choices that you made based on that programming.
Games, the Drama Triangle, and Your Life Script: 3
Your “life position” reflects how you most fundamentally feel about yourself, others, and the world. Are you a good person or are you doomed to failure? Are others basically trustworthy and helpful or are they dangerous, not to be trusted? Is the world a good place or a realm of suffering and torment? These are simplified by Transactional analysis as “I’m OK,” “I’m not OK.” “You are OK;” “You are not OK.” We will be explaining the important and far reaching implications of these four life positions in a subsequent video. But first, to understand what the implications are of the four life positions you need to first understand the concept of “Games.”
Uncovering Your Life Position: 4
Four basic life positions, their importance, and their relationship to IDL are explained.
How Parental Injunctions and Counter Injunctions Create Your Life Script: 5
Your parental injunctions reside in your thoughts as critical self-talk left over from things you interpreted from your parents or elders when you were a child. In a sense, the formative figures from your childhood are still living rent-free inside your head as “parental voices” that you think are your own conscience. While their well-intended instructions are meant to function as parental guidelines for you to use to navigate through your life, these injunctions inside your head generally act instead as curses that cause you to mindlessly act as you were taught, rather than to behave in your own best interest. Guided by these internalized injunctions, you continue to think, feel and approach the world as a dependent child even though you are an adult, all the while certain you are not operating as a dependent child but as a free, independent adult.
How Scripted “Acceptable” Feelings Create an Inauthentic Script: 6
In this video on your life scripting I want to share how superficial “good” feelings and repressed “bad” feelings created drama and rob life of intimacy.
Freeing Yourself from Your Life Script: 7
In this video we discuss why it is not enough to uncover and choose your own life script; you need to develop a life script that is in alignment with the priorities of your own unique life compass. This is why IDL interviewing of emerging potentials is invaluable and effective.
