life position tagged posts

July 12, 2023,  Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

The life that you ultimately come to live, and all that you think, feel, say, and do in it, is for the most part lived out subconsciously through the psychological games you play, and which are especially evident in your relationships.

Eric Berne, the same person who developed script theory, proposed that we play these psychological games for one reason only: as a way to find confirmation or validation for our deeply held values and beliefs about ourselves and about others: our life script.

To clarify this further, let’s refer back to the life positions Victor, Vi...

June 16, 2022,  Life, Script  No comments

Visitors

If you are a Visitor, you will set goals for yourself, just as a Victor would. But unlike a Victor, you never quite accomplish them, and even if you do, not predictably.

For example, you might want to be a top executive at a Fortune 500 international corporation, but you lack the qualifications. You waver indecisively between going back to school part time or full time or neither, and cannot quite figure out what courses to take even if you did go back to school.

You seem to suffer from a perpetual mid-life crisis, but instead of doing something about it you become complacent and satisfy yourself with what you have, which is often second best or second rate.

As a Visitor (which, it must be noted, is not the same as a Victim), you actually make the best employee...

September 15, 2021,  Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

One important lesson to learn here is that because your script for life and the rules or guidelines it contains are subconsciously passed on to you, you are most likely to copy exactly what your parents do, even if what they say seems to contradict it.

Without a doubt, this is where “Do as I say, not as I do!” does not work.

While kids might not know what goes on behind closed doors consciously, they know exactly what is happening subconsciously. Even a child who has not yet been born is picking up messages from their environment which marks him for life. Events will then likely play out in their own lives as they grow and enter their own adult relationships.

What I am saying here is that you are scripted to choose your partner to be a certain kind of person...

December 23, 2019,  Counselling, Exercise, Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Love – A Never-Ending Story

While I ended this story with “She lived happily ever after,” in truth, the “ever after” has not come to be yet.

The story is really never ending. Every day offers my partner and me new lessons to learn about ourselves and each other and new challenges, which, as we open ourselves to each other in love, provides us with even greater possibilities for ourselves and our relationship into the future.

This is not to say that we never have arguments or disagreements, but because we love and care deeply for each other, we attempt to find a resolution in a way that demonstrates that love and care and which is good for both of us.

Nor does this mean that disagreements are always solved there and then...

July 10, 2019,  Games People Play, Life  No comments

Spontaneity

Eric Berne, Founder of Transactional Analysis as a model of therapy, defines spontaneity as the capacity to see multiple options from which we choose to act. We can freely choose how we think, feel, and behave in response to an event.

To be Spontaneous means to be free from the compulsion to have only the thoughts and feelings you were taught to have and to play the games you were taught to play (or learned to) to maintain your scripted life position.

Intimacy

Finally, Berne defines Intimacy as the “spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of the intuitively perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its naiveté living in the here and now.”

He adds:

Intimacy is essentially a function of the Natural Child; […] it tends to turn ou...

May 27, 2019,  Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

In The Games People Play, Eric Berne defined the process of becoming autonomous (self-determining) as the manifestation of the “release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.”

Let’s take a closer look at the first of Berne’s three capacities for Autonomous living.

Awareness

For Berne, Awareness is the capacity to observe the world through all five of our physical senses, plus intuition, which might otherwise be defined as coming to understand something unconsciously through the combination of all our senses.

However, it needs to be done in one’s own, unique way, and not in the way someone else once taught us.

Berne offers this example: A child hears a bird’s song, but he doesn’t know it comes from a bird...

May 1, 2018,  Counselling, Games People Play, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

Many years ago, people believed that a healthy relationship looked like this: two complementary halves making a whole. Now we understand that a relationship that looks like this is far from complementary and where generally one person in the couple dominates the other.

People need first to be whole within themselves in order to be happy with another person.

If we look at this issue from a Transactional Analysis perspective, according to that theory, we all have a mixture of personalities; we don’t just have one way of being. Instead, in different places with different people, we can actually relate quite differently as well. Berne described these different personality styles as “ego states...

November 28, 2017,  Counselling, Family, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

People often wonder whether Couples Counselling works when one partner isn’t present at the counselling session. Absolutely, yes, it works. If one of the partners change, then the other will respond to the changes. Of course, this does not guarantee positive change or that the relationship will work out, but it does start changing the situation from its current, unsatisfying state.

Breaking the zone of comfort is stepping away from a zone of a relationship that is going nowhere and achieving nothing. Staying in what seems to be the comfort zone, you may be surprised to hear, is hard to maintain as it is not comfortable at all. Holding the decisions taken to move away from what is familiar and comfortable can be even harder...

August 23, 2017,  Family, Life, Relationship, Relationship Tips, Script  No comments

The Main Categories of Counsellors

Many people are somewhat afraid and ashamed when it comes to help, especially on the topic of feelings, mentality and psyche.

Realizing there’s a problem and a need for it to be solved is the first step in solving it.

There are a few different categories when it comes to therapy in general. Counsellors fall into one of four main categories: behaviour therapy, cognitive therapy, counselling, or psychotherapy.

None of them is better than the other and each of them can lead to the effect that is being wanted, namely inner peace and happiness...

July 28, 2017,  Exercise, Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Limiting Feelings, Limiting Beliefs and Limiting Behaviours

There are various ways to relieve yourself from a script and a game your mind is used to playing. Many of these are therapeutic which includes many different techniques and practices. In the USA there are about 450 registered associations that offer different help for limiting beliefs, behaviours, and feelings. These three combine to create the scripts we live our lives by.

“Limiting” here means something that holds you back, restricting you from living a truly happy life. It refers to an old way of being that is no longer useful in your life. Feelings, beliefs, and behaviours based on negative past experiences can all be limiting if held onto.

In therapy, you get an opportunity to review those limitations and make changes so tha...