January 25, 2021,
Family, Life, Relationship, Script 
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Family and Cultural Scripts
When you were born into your family, you were presented with your script for life. The script is the programming you undergo that defines how your life will be lived out—it’s not much different from a computer program, really. It contains the set of instructions for how to be a girl or a boy, a son or a daughter, a woman or a man, a wife or a husband, a parent, or even a member of your family, workplace, or your community. The set of instructions contains the values, beliefs, and attitudes that will flavor everything you think, say, and do in your life until you replace it.
Your script’s values, beliefs, and attitudes symbolize your fundamental needs: your physical, safety, feeling, love and belonging, and spiritual needs, as described earlier.
So, just as an actor on stage works from a script, so do you. The only difference is that his is already written; yours was probably given to you in some unwritten form such as through your parent’s words or actions. Most of us do not even realize that we accept and live out our scripts without any conscious knowledge of what we are doing.
(While I generally use the term “script” to describe the way we live our entire lives, I also use it to describe any one moment in a life that leads to the ultimate fulfillment of the script by the end of that life.)
While your script is given to you by your parents, it is then supported by your family, your community, and even by your culture, thereby becoming even more fully entrenched within you.
Have you ever found yourself doing or saying something and thought, “Wow, that sounds just like Mom (or Dad, or someone else in the family)”? Or “That’s what Mom used to say (or do)”? Your scripted way of being creates this outcome.
This was demonstrated to me when, some years ago, I went back to the country of my heritage to meet family that I had not met before. My parents and elder siblings migrated from the Netherlands to Australia before I was born, so I had never met any of my Dutch relatives and on only one occasion did an aunt come to visit us as I was growing up.
So when I was introduced to these unknown relatives for the first time, I was struck by something that seemed to bind us in a way that was crazier than just having the same last name. (And, by the way, meeting someone with the same last name was for me striking enough. As I have such an unusual last name, I had never met anyone else with it in my country.) But now I was meeting people who not only had the same last name, they used their voices just like I did and used body gestures just like mine. I immediately felt an incredible connection with these people that was so much more than a name. I simply found it amazing. It felt like I could’ve been seeing a reflection of myself in a mirror.
This is the power of the script, a term originally coined by Eric Berne, a Psychiatrist from the 1950s and 1960s, to describe the subconscious and our preprogrammed responses to the world.
The script is what I and my cousins, so far away in another land, each learned from our parents—who acquired it from their parents, who had learned it from their parents before them; it provided instructions for how we should speak and gesture as well as what to value and believe in.
The power of this connection to other members of my family still amazes me.
To the wonder of you,
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