Examining Your Life Script

When we are born, we are given lots of messages, or scripts, from our family about what we should be like. They aren't formally handed out, but they are rules, expectations, and limitations that are forecasting our future. Our choice is whether we live out our script, or if we decide to understand and illuminate the script and rewrite the parts that don't work for us. Some scripts are better than others.

We get scripts about what we should be career-wise, what is possible for us as a man or woman, whether we are expected to become a parent, what marriage is like, how we are to express ourselves and communicate with others, and much more. Life scripts are powerful. If we don't examine them, they can control our life in ways we are unaware of.

Eric Berne was the therapist who defined script analysis as a key part of Transactional Analysis (TA).
Berne identified life scripts as a life plan, reinforced by parents. He felt we choose a script in childhood as a way to make sense of the world. The script helps us navigate, is what we look for, and helps us define our reality.

Here are some questions you can reflect on to understand more about your life script:

1. What is your earliest memory?

2. What did your mother and father each praise in you? What did they each criticize you for?

3. How did you parents relate to each other? Were they affectionate with you? Distant?

4. How did you play as a child? What did you want to be when you grew up?

5. If you wore a shirt which had words written on it that reflects the you that is projected to others, what would it say on the front? What would it say on the back (the part of you that isn't shared with others)?

6. What role did you play in your family growing up? Were you the hero? The scapegoat? The joker?
The fragile one?

7. Did you experience loss growing up? Did it cause you to be more fear based?

8. What was possible for women in your family? For men?

9. What alliances were there in your family? Who was close to whom? How did family members connect?

10. What lessons did you learn from your mother? Father? Grandmother? Grandfather?

11. If you could make life changes, what would you like to be doing/experiencing  in 5 years?

12. How would you like to rewrite your script? What part of your family's script would you like to  reject?

Understanding your life script can help you get unstuck, and own more of your own power to create the life you really want to be living. It can help you be aware of the myriad of choices that are available to you.

Your life is precious. Understanding how the messages you digested while growing up have impacted and are impacting your life, career, and relationships is essential. Just like actors read their lines in a play, we hold fixed beliefs about our potential and our essential self. Many times these fixed beliefs are not helpful. Challenging your fixed beliefs about yourself is healthy and important in order to live your best life, and not live a life that is too small.

Why Are Passive Aggressive People So Exhausting?

If you're picking a team, and you need a team player, try to take a pass on anybody with a passive aggressive personality. They have a personality style, a consistent constellation of personality traits, which exhausts everyone in close range. This includes family members, partners, and co-workers. It's like trying to accomplish the goal with a rogue player who will not work together with you.

How do you identify a person with passive aggressive personality traits? They must have four of these seven characteristics or behaviors:

1. Passively resists fulfilling routine social or occupational tasks.
2. Complains consistently about being misunderstood and unappreciated by others.
3. Sullen, pouty, and argumentative.
4. Criticizes unreasonably and persistently. Scorns authority.
5. Expresses envy and resentment towards other people who are seen as happy, well-off, or successful.
6. Exaggerated and persistent complaints about self as misfortunate. Sees self as always a victim, taking no blame.
7. Alternates between hostile defiance and contrition.
   

All of these traits make me think of the Dr.Phil line,"How much fun are you to live with?" Answer: not very.

Passive aggressive (PA) people create mountains out of molehills. It's draining and exhausting to live or work with them, because they create tremendous drama. It is hard to make any simple request of them because they resent being asked and either stonewall you and "forget" to do the task, or rage at you. When you live or work with a PA person, you learn to do it all yourself because it's so fruitless to ask for help.

Eric Berne, a well-known psychoanalyst, wrote the classic book,"Games People Play" in the 1960s. It looked at the transactions and communication between people, and identified multiple games people play. One such game of Berne's often associated with people with the passive aggressive style is NIGYYSOAB, or Now I Got You, You Son Of A Bitch. It's a form of one- upsmanship where one person is always looking to fault-find with the other person they are in a relationship with. What a nasty game! Who would consciously want to play that?

In intimate relationships, passive aggressive types discount their partner's feelings. They divert and trivialize your reality and your concerns. They look for the negative in you, and in the children. They undermine you in subtle and not so subtle ways. They threaten you. They rage. They don't seem to know how to talk through disagreements in a direct, open, and non-confrontational way. They blame others. They fail to take personal responsibility. They procrastinate. They can't find anything good to say about anybody else.

Psychology researchers and writers believe that the passive aggressive personality has its roots in childhood. Parents may have been unavailable because of drugs, alcohol, illness, or work. One or both of the parents may have modeled handling anger this way. Somehow the passive aggressive person grew up unskilled about how to work through differences in core needs in a calm, open, and non-hostile manner. It is thought that these individuals are often conflicted about accepting authority, developing an interdependent, close relationship with an intimate other, and about sharing control. Sadly, they have trouble trusting. They have difficulty attaching. They create chaos and make excuses, while playing the victim. They don't know how to be positively assertive, or may choose not to. They might like being a bully relationally.

If you are hiring or dating someone who fits this pattern, you may want to limit your liabilities and end it. If you have someone like this that is a family member or already a coworker, prepare to take good care of yourself. Set limits. Write down agreements on tasks. Get to a therapist or coach who can help you build your skill set for not letting this passive aggressive person tear you into pieces. Require that they go with you to therapy to learn how to fight fairly, with openness and respect.

What if this is you? Stop the negative, critical flow of comments. Put yourself on a negativity diet. Begin to point out the good in others. This change alone will make you more pleasant to be around. Keep your commitments. Learn to be direct. Learn to assert positively without rage, threats, and bullying. Work on your fears of being known, intimate, and dependent on someone you love. These are challenges to become a better, healthier person. Why not start today? Only you can take inventory and realize you want to clean up this negative, draining personality style.