program tagged posts

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...

May 2, 2022,  Life, Script  No comments

Victors, Visitors, and Victims are the three principal life positions we live out in response to our life scripts. The script is the driver, while the life position is how the script is presented to the world. Let’s take a closer look at each of these positions and the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that underpin them.

Victors

The Victors of the world are those who live out all the positive things from their scripts. They are the leaders of industry as well as the person on the street who does nice things for others for no reason other than from the goodness of his or her heart.

Victors may become world famous or just recognized within family and friendship circles as being genuinely caring of others while also taking care of themselves.

Muriel James and Dorothy Jonge...

March 28, 2022,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

Let’s say Aaron, a two year old out shopping with his dad, wanders off in the shopping center. Dad needs Aaron to learn that this is unsafe, so Aaron is told that he or she shouldn’t do it.

Very often, children like Aaron will not understand the information itself, but will grasp something from the parent’s tone of voice, and from the fact that he is made to sit down and listen, that something is wrong.

If Aaron is sufficiently alarmed by his dad’s response, he may get the idea of the message and not reoffend though this may be out of fear of a further reprimand. Alternatively, he may retaliate as a way of testing the limits of permitted behavior.

Whatever the response, i.e...

February 17, 2022,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

There are a couple of other considerations regarding script development that should not be overlooked.

First, I use the word “decision” broadly to describe decisions made both in or outside of conscious awareness, including those made by every child even when too young to put what they are deciding into words.

In fact, despite their preverbal nature, the decisions made during a child’s first years of life are the most persuasive and potentially the most long-lasting decisions of all. This also makes them the most resistant to change.

Nevertheless, all of these decisions can be reviewed and changed as life is lived, though resistance to change is powerful because we usually seek to reconfirm what we already hold to be true. The alternative for many is too uncomfortable...

January 17, 2022,  Family, Life, Script  No comments

From the moment of your conception, you were already making distinct self-interested and self-aware decisions for and about yourself as well as about others.

By the time you were eight years old, you were beginning to make major decisions not only for yourself and about yourself, but also about other people and the world you experienced—the things you saw, heard, touched, tasted and smelled, and about the emotional reactions you had to those experiences.

Depending on the particulars of your earlier life experiences and your reactions to them, the decisions you made included both positive and negative ones—from the sensible and practical to the absolutely absurd and unrealistic—because, as Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward explain in their 1978 book, Born to Win, “Children can...

December 30, 2021,  Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

You might even think that if only the other person could change or be more like they used to be when you first met, then everything would be OK. On the other hand, you might distract yourself by having an affair, or by doing any number of other things to fill in time and thereby remove yourself from the conflict. Many people use distractions instead of confronting what the conflict may mean for them and what they could learn or change about themselves that could improve the relationship between them and their partners.

Some of the things people do to distract themselves from reviewing their script beliefs and behaviors could include working more hours, spending more time at the gym, eating more, eating less, shopping more, gambling, drinking to excess, reading cheap novels or spend...

November 15, 2021,  Family, Life, Relationship, Script  No comments

Couples who come into my office are often surprised that the partners they fell in love with seem to have become quite different people. Sometimes, knowing the mistakes their parents made in their relationships, couples have openly vowed not to become those people. But guess what so often happens? They end up becoming those people after all. 

So often, the couples I meet notice that everything they ever vowed not to become, they have become, and they are surprised to find out how powerful their subconscious scripting is.

This is usually how it is for most of us until we become aware enough of our own patterns of being to review our scripts so we can make better-informed, conscious decisions about keeping the part of the script that is working well (the positive script) and about...

October 21, 2021,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

As I now understand it as an adult, one of my script beliefs came to be that my needs are not important. I felt that I was only as good as the cog in the wheel that drove the machine that was our family business.

The interesting thing to note here is that it was fairly likely that my parents never actually intended for me to acquire this belief, let alone having it be one that I would grow up with and take into my own adult relationships. My perception of my life as I was growing up created my script beliefs, regardless of my parents’ intentions.

And, of course, this belief did go with me into my adult relationships and into my fi...

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...

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...