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LIFE SCRIPTS
(Webmaster's Note: The following
material is excerpted from the Introduction to Jut Meininger's second
book, How To Run Your Own Life, as well as from the Introduction
to Part III of his new book CLARITY.)
All of us build our lives pretty much the same
way. We pick up information about ourselves and the world around
us, and use this information to make decisions about all aspects of our
lives. We start doing this almost from birth. Many of our
most important decisions are based on what others say to us and on how
they treat us during the first four or five years of our lives. Of
course, the information we receive is limited to what a small child can
see and hear within his immediate environment, and the possibilities for
distortion are enormous. Yet in spite of its limitations and
inaccuracies, this information forms the basis for some of the most
important life decisions we ever make.
All of us do this, whether we become hardened
criminals, millionaire businesspeople, derelict alcoholics, or contented
housewives. There's no logic to the process; it just happens this
way. Yet, what we don't realize when we're laying the groundwork
for our own plan, or, in TA terms, our Life Script, is that we're small of stature, limited in experience,
dependent on others, and operating solely from the perspective of a
young, less-than-fully-developed person. Even so, the plan, or
script,
is meant to last a lifetime, and we normally include no built-in way to
update it.
Much of the information that we use to build
our life plan comes from our mothers and fathers. Their words and
actions have an especially large impact on us. Everything they say
and do provides us with a mental image we use to shape our personalities
and make major decisions about our entire lives. A child with the
best possible genetic equipment can be permanently turned off to life
through inaccurate information he receives from his parents.
("You're a dummy." "You're no good." "Nobody loves you."
"You can't make it.") And a child with even the most modest
possibilities can be made to blossom through love and encouragement.
("You can do it." "I love you." "Keep up the good work.")
The first four to five years are critical to a
youngster's development for several reasons. First, we all make
certain broad-based decisions during this time that we use as building
blocks for other decisions on down the road (our conclusions about
ourselves and our ability to deal with others are perhaps the most
important). Second, we experience many of those earlier decisions
not as decisions at all, but rather as absolutes - as unchangeable rules
of thumb about how the world really is! ("That's the way life is."
"That's the way I am." "That's the way are." "This is
what I can expect to get out of life.") Once we treat these
decisions as absolutes, they become very difficult for us to alter later
in life, even if we discover they're getting in our way. As
building blocks for future decisions, they often distort later
conclusions we make on other important issues such as what we'll strive
for, what we'll settle for, how hard we'll try, and how long we'll
persevere in life. (If I view the notion that I'm "no good" and
can't make it in life as something that's absolute, why should I waste
very much time and energy striving for things?)
Whatever the basis for these decisions (and
regardless of whether or not the information on which we base them is
accurate or inaccurate), we simply can't avoid making them. It's
part of the process of growing up. Soon, we're piling many more
decisions on top of them! All of these decisions, taken together,
form a comprehensive plan for operating our lives. As time passes,
they become second nature to us and we no longer think of them as
decisions. We see them, instead, as an easily accepted method of
operation that has always been with us. We take them for granted.
And although they comprise a well-laid plan for living the rest of our
lives, we soon lose touch with the fact that there is a plan in
operation - let alone one that we ourselves fully devised and set in
motion.
As you may have guessed, our life plan
determines whether we'll "succeed" or "fail" in life. People who
succeed in any life endeavor operate from a different type of
plan than that used by those who don't succeed. They employ a plan
that at least permits success, even if it doesn't always contain
specific career goals and even if the person has never clarified for
himself his general aspirations in life. Such people act
consistently as if they have a plan, and they constantly examine and
later their plan to keep pace with their conscious intentions.
Typically, those who don't succeed in life
operate from a different kind of plan - one that prevents
success. Often, they deny its existence (they act as if they don't
have a plan), and when confronted with the possibility that a plan might
exist, they respond with fear and immobilize themselves, or they respond
with anger and become defensive. (Or, sometimes, they respond by
becoming confused or mindless, or they respond by feeling empty or
depressed.) Thus, they prevent themselves from examining their plan and avoid any change they might have to be able to alter or change it.
Their plan may, in fact, selectively exclude such things as
wealth and happiness. They may have decided not to feel happy or
make money! (Perhaps because they "learned" that they couldn't do
it, or perhaps because it threatened the "big" people in their family
who were poor and unhappy themselves and resented others who weren't.)
Without access to their own plan, and without a method of examining and
changing it, they doom themselves to a lifetime of relative unhappiness
and poverty.
The Dilemma
For most of us the dilemma is that at one time
or another we operate from a life plan that no longer fits our conscious
intentions. We make decisions in our youth that no longer serve us
as adults. We grow up and find ourselves doing things or acting in
ways that produce results different from those we intended. Often,
we find it impossible to redirect our thought and actions in a
comprehensive fashion to achieve our new aspirations in life. For
most of us, this represents a totally unsolvable dilemma.
More often than not, our life plan is apparent
to us only in retrospect - although, even when we view it in retrospect,
we usually don't think of it as being a "plan." We look back and
we see what we've done, and we recognize a certain pattern in our
behavior that we've had trouble arresting, and we're puzzled by it.
But the plan itself is still very illusive. We see only its
shadow-image. We see the results of our behavior, but not the
decisions that caused the behavior. Even when we
occasionally guess the long-term implications of our plan and sense the
possibility of an outcome we may not like, we usually experience the
outcome as beyond our control. We don't recognize that ours
are the hands that have been at the controls from the very beginning!
Sometimes, we’re
clever at concealing our real decisions. We may say we want to
become happy, and appear to work at it, yet remain unhappy. We may
act as if we’re trying to get rich, and make some apparent effort
toward it, yet remain poor. Our plan may be to talk a good story, or to
develop the outward appearance of doing one thing, while, in fact, we’re
doing something else. For a while we may fool others as well as
ourselves. But eventually, our plan will become obvious as our life
slowly unfolds, for a person’s life is a reflection of his life
plan. It’s the medium he uses to put his decisions into effect.
The trick is to learn what these decisions are before they’re confirmed
by unwanted future events.
If you’ve decided
at some time in your life to make changes in how you go about things,
you may have already developed a sense of how your existing plan
conflicts with your current aspirations. You may have found that you’ve
surrounded yourself with people who influence you and who disapprove of
your changes. You may have noticed that their approval has been
especially important to you in the past, and that you have trouble
proceeding without that approval. You may have found that you’ve made a
large investment in your present way of doing things, and that your mind
is full of myths about the world around you, which you must sort through
to find the ones that really make sense.
You may also have
discovered that no sooner do you make a decision to feel happier and
become richer than you start finding ways to stop yourself – at fairly
predictable points and for fairly predictable reasons. You may notice
you’ve developed great internal resistance to certain types of change,
and that it’s often a struggle just to keep going. You may become
fearful, scared, anxious, or depressed. You may evidence an almost
irresistible urge to lapse back into old patterns and return to the old
ways. If you do, you’re not alone. This sort of resistance is
universal. It surfaces whenever someone decides to make a change in his
life that runs counter to his basic life plan. The resistance is the
signal that the plan itself is being tampered with.
Thus, for most of
us the dilemma is twofold. Not only is our plan difficult to isolate,
but it has its own built-in mechanism to prevent us from changing it.
Together, these two obstacles have prevented millions of us from gaining
power over our lives. Although formidable, these obstacles are no
longer insurmountable.
The Process
Which brings us to the
sixty-four dollar question. How can you, the reader,
isolate your own life plan, and recognize the decisions you've made that
you need to change? In addition: How can you overcome the internal
resistance we all normally experience when we try to change these early
decisions?
Well, one of the best
ways to learn which decisions you need to change is by simply observing
your current behavior. Since your present behavior is a reflection
of the decisions you've already made about how to operate your life, you
can get an extremely accurate idea of what your earlier decisions were
by carefully watching what you do, by seeing where your actions lead,
and by recognizing the attitudes and decisions these actions seem to
reflect.
And by far the best
method to use in observing your current behavior is the method described
in the section in Chapter One in CLARITY entitled "The Way Out Of
the Loop" - the method we call "tracking yourself."
Essentially, "tracking yourself" means using your Adult to track what
your Parent and Adapted Child say and do. As you learn to track yourself, you must learn
to track not only the way your own Parent and Adapted Child operate when
you deal with others, but the way they operate internally, when you deal
with yourself. (Like, when you question yourself, criticize
yourself, beat on yourself, doubt yourself, look for strokes in
dysfunctional ways, stop yourself from moving towards some goal you
really want to to achieve, and so on.)
One of the best ways you can overcome your
internal resistance to change is by recognizing that this resistance stems
from the interests your Parent and your Adapted Child have in keeping
you locked in a movie from your past that conflicts with your current
intentions. While this conflict is not always an easy one to resolve, it
is a straightforward conflict, and one that that lends itself to an
easily defined, straightforward statement of choice. Essentially,
this choice is: Do you want
to optimize the rest of your life, and to lead a self-actualized and
fulfilled life, or do you want to spend the rest of your life replaying
some old internal movies from your past? Or, stated differently: Which is more important
to you - re-living your past or living your future?
Skill in isolating
your early decisions, in reversing some of those decisions, in altering
others, and in canceling out still others, as well as skill in framing
your choices, and in overcoming your internal resistance, takes
practice, but it can be mastered by virtually anyone who wants to do so.
It takes no special education, background, or intelligence. All it
takes is desire.
To learn more about
your own life script and how to change it, check out Jut Meininger's
book CLARITY. Or, if you haven't done so already, join one
of our Clarity-Now working groups.
Time Structuring
TA Games
Life Scripts
Life Positions
Parent
Drivers
Injunctions
Self-Actualization
Your Free Tour
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