TA101

Script

Overview

For many transactional analysts the Life Script is absolutely core to understanding the individual. Berne was not the first to identify the idea of a script - Adler had already described the Life Plan, a close equivalent. Broadly defined as an unconscious plan, devised by the individual in early childhood, the script establishes a narrative for how the person makes sense of the world and then engages with it.

From around 3 years through to 6 year the child creates a sense of who they are - this corresponds with the Identity and Power stage in the Cycle of Development. It is a time rich with story and character during which the little person forms a series of decisions and beliefs about what happens to them and how they relate to others. Combined with this are ideas about gender, ethnicity, culture and life in general. Wrapped within the script are the antecedents of the games people play, the strokes they seek and avoid, the way they spend time and the tendencies to function from some ego states in preference to others.

The reason for script formation is that it provides the child with a way of short-cutting the task of getting strokes and surviving amongst the big people responsible for their survival. Berne maintained that everyone has to create a script to exist and, in much of the early writing, it was envisaged as limiting the individual. The focus of therapy in Berne's work was script cure - freedom from script.

Core Components

• Attributes
  In effect labels, eg. I'm the stupid one, the pretty one, the awkward one etc. Attributes are regarded as limiting features of the script, even where they appear positive - for example being regarded as the 'clever one' - as they can define the individual.
• Permissions
  These are the healthy features of the script in that they encourage or allow the individual to express their core self, eg. I can be healthy, I can express my feelings, I can think for myself etc. The nature of permission is that the message is experienced as optional, not as a command.
• Injunctions
  These 'don't' messages are the real poison in the script. In early TA writing twelve injunctions were identified although others have been added since then. Examples include: DON'T - exist, belong, be close, think, feel (angry, sad, joyful, scared), be yourself, be active, grow up, be a child, be successful, be important, be healthy, just don't!

Increasing Autonomy: Increasing Permissions

The Permission Wheel is a model developed initially by Jaoui and then adapted for educational use by Papaux (2013). It is a way of reflecting on the interplay of permission and injunction in relation to the three capacities of autonomy; awareness, spontaneity and intimacy.

We can consider the extent to which an individual experiences a full, or partial, sense of permission in relation to various aspects of being human. The further the individual can ‘travel’ out to the edge of the wheel, the more permission they experience. There may be circumstances, contexts, relationships which, when present, prohibit the extent of the individual accessing full permission. It is at this point that script is activated, injunctions are triggered and rackets, games and driver behaviours take over the individual’s processing.

Most of the permissions are self-explanatory, however, a handful can be less straightforward and require some explanation:

• To be your age
  This is linked to the two injunctions Don’t Grow Up and Don’t Be a Child. It means what it says – being whatever stage of development the individual is at. The difficulty can be when either the student doesn’t grow up and take responsibility for themselves, for example a child over-indulged. Or in contrast, a student takes too much on despite being a young person, for example in the case of a young carer.
• To have needs
  This can be challenging for students who have either been over-indulged or ignored in their development. Consequently they may have little sense of how much is enough or whether they can trust the world to provide for their needs. Behaviourally the student may be very demanding and/or have poor self-regulation around asking/demanding support.
• To be yourself
  This is linked to being confident in knowing that you are sufficient as you are. There is no need to pretend to be someone else in order to be accepted to others. This is especially challenging during adolescence as new identities are being explored in the context of a peer group.
• To make meaning
  This refers to the student’s belief that they can know things, understand them and connect ideas. Some students will say ‘I don’t know’, and use this as a way of avoiding making meaning. It’s a permission that is linked to Thinking and Succeeding

Influences on Script

The Story So Far

Importantly, ideas about script have changed significantly over the years. Initially Berne talked as if the script formed in early childhood and was 'fixed' and that only psychotherapy could bring about 'cure'. Early theorists understood script formation as a one-off episode, placing substantial emphasis on the impact of early childhood experience. Additionally, the first forays into script theory identified parents as almost exclusively responsible for generating the experience out of which the script is derived.

In the past twenty years or so other ideas have influenced how TA practitioners understand script. The Cycle of Development presents a cyclic model of growth implicitly pointing toward script formation as a recurring process. Trudi Newton has linked script formation with Kolb's experiential learning cycle giving even greater emphasis to the ever present script reinforcing/changing opportunities that extend across a lifetime.

Furthermore, the work of neurologists have thrown up more recent discoveries about how the neural pathways are thoroughly overhauled during adolescence which helps understand how teenagers spend so much time re-inventing who they are with important opportunities to either embed earlier script decisions or step out of them and begin anew.

Finally, Summers and Tudor write about a co-creative script process which brings to the foreground the potential of the individual to impact on the script creation process. In other words the 'messaging' is not one-way, ie. from the parental figures to the child. Instead they argue that both parties exert power/influence within the relationship (which is one way of explaining how it is that many children do not turn out as their parents would like!) A second crucial feature of their work is that they recognize that the script is influenced by a wide range of players of which parents are only one element. In early TA diagrams the script process was illustrated with references to only mother and father, with no reference to extended family members, wider community etc.

More recently in some of my own writing on script I have argued that certainly in the UK, the experience of schooling - and especially early education - has a marked impact on script beliefs and decisions. Ideas about how clever we are, the capacity and confidence to take our place and be seen, first experiences of shame and comparison with others are all embedded in the life of the classroom. The ramifications of these experiences in school can be tracked well into adulthood and for those who work in education becoming aware of these early imprints is a vital piece of personal development in becoming an effective practitioner.