Is your Life Script giving you the life you want?

Do you ever say to yourself, ‘Ah, here we go again!’, when something that started out promising falls asunder? Do you notice yourself descend into negative thinking along the lines of ‘Sure, what’s the point, it never works out for me anyway’?Did you know that often when you find your personal history repeating itself, its origins come from your ‘Life Script’ which you created in childhood? Let me elaborate.

A Life Script is an unconscious life plan that we create based on our interactions with our primary caregivers – be that our parents, teachers, or other influential people in our childhood world. It is reinforced by our parents, and strengthened with evidence sought throughout life ensuring our beliefs are justified (Berne, 1961). We unconsciously seek out people, situations and relationships that affirm these narratives. We are not necessarily aware of these scripts, but nevertheless it can impose destructive and unnecessary limitations on our life choices as adults and prevent us from following a course of action we might otherwise attempt, one which might bring great happiness.

these messages can become embedded in our thinking and we carry these stories about ourselves into adulthood and they become part of who we believe we are.         

Life Scripts come from a theory called Transactional Analysis which was developed by Eric Berne (Berne, 1961). These scripts tend to come from 4 different sources through our childhood, and these sources are as follows:

1. Modelling:

This is where we see how those around us act and behave and we emulate those behaviours, believing that is how we ought to behave. So, if a child grows up with a father or mother who is shy and subordinate to others, they can develop a sense of normality around these behaviours and follow suit.

2. Attributions:

These can be more direct messages received by a child about who they are, things like, ‘you’re so clever’ or with a negative connotation, ‘you’re too clumsy to play sport’. Either way, positive or negative, these messages can become embedded in our thinking and we carry these stories about ourselves into adulthood and they become part of who we believe we are.

3. Suggestions:

While the intention behind these suggestions can be good, ‘Practice makes perfect’, and meant as encouragement, they can become a means of seeking perfection that inhibits satisfaction with achieving things that are falling short of perfection. This, in turn, can affect how we face new challenges in our lives.

4. Injunctions:

These constitute demands from caregivers not to do something and are generally rooted in their own fears and desires but impact us as a set of rules for how to live our lives based on other people’s experiences. An example might be “big boys don’t cry” or “nice girls don’t get angry”. These injunctions vary in intensity but can have a profound affect on us, making us wary of people or fearful of situations or even our own feelings.

So, our life script is something that has been created unconsciously through the sources outlined above. Generally, we have no idea that we have created this script, but recognising that we have, and identifying the aspects of it that are debilitating to us, can enable us to understand that we were not born with this narrative, and that if parts of the script are not working for us, that we can ‘rewrite’ this script to serve us better.It is important to realise that what we tell ourselves is what we believe. Especially, if subconsciously we have been telling ourselves about these things from childhood. Things like: I have to be perfect...I’ve left it too late…I’d never be able to do that. Self-limiting beliefs like these can be challenged and a new script can be created.

Write your new life script as if you were already living the life you want.        

What steps can be taken to rewrite your script?

1. Examine your core beliefs.

Take time to think about where those beliefs came from. Allow yourself to consider are they truly yours or are they from outside influences? There doesn’t need to be any judgement here, just recognition and awareness.Actually identifying the root of our belief system can be an extraordinarily liberating experience and can enable us to begin the process of creating the life we really want, cutting the chords of the beliefs that have held us back up to now.

2. Consider what you are passionate about.

A great step can be discovering where your passion lies. Begin by making a list of things that inspire joy in your life and then start to think about how different you would feel if you were engaging with these things on a daily basis.When your life is driven by a passion, striving to achieve things can feel effortless and the closer you get to your goal, the more driven you can become.

3. Ask yourself – what you would do if nothing stood in your way.

Instead of focusing on all the things that stand in your way of achieving a dream/goal, start to imagine your life if there were no blockages and think about how you would set a plan in motion to set you off in the right direction. Do you need to retrain? Or perhaps further your existing qualifications? Expand your social circle? Learn a language?

4. Set goals – both short and long term ones.

When we first think about transforming our lives, we can be hit by overwhelm. Of course, we want to have our eye on our overall objective, but we also need to be realistic and think about the interim steps needed to hit that objective.There can be a great sense of achievement derived from hitting smaller goals that take us closer to the grand master plan. You would be unlikely to set off on a road trip without having mapped out some sort of a route – you may from time to time deviate from the original plan, but the general direction will remain the same. Think of your new life script as a map and start by focusing on the direction you want it to take.

5. Visualise the end result.

Write your new life script as if you were already living the life you want. Visualisation can be a very powerful thing. Bring as much detail to your vision as you can. Pull in all your senses to this exercise. The more you can visualise yourself living the life that you want, the more likely you will be to achieve it.

Consider this, the narrative you have in your Life Script to date is not one you were born with, it was one that was created. Now that you see this, it is your turn to write the script for the life you want.

So go on – Re-write YOUR script!

References

Berne, E. (1961)?Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. New York. Grove Press.