Rewriting the Script
This is the first article exploring the third tool of the introspection tool kit.
What is it?
In the previous tool we talked about your own personal definition of “me” and how your foreman whispers it to you. One of the other key elements of your Ego are the scripts that get created for your story.
Scripts are behaviours patterns and belief systems which are trigged as a result of an emotional stimuli. When we start to follow one of these scripts, we become unconscious and are no longer, I.
It is like we disconnect from the reality of what is happening in the present moment and operate on autopilot simply following the script. Psychological walls go up blocking effective comprehension of, and connection to, the present moment; we expect the situation to play out, just like the script says. The problem is, that because we have slipped in to unconsciousness, we are not aware that this is happening.
Why Do we have Scripts?
Let’s be clear, humans have evolved Egos to help us in thrive and survive; the mechanism that the Ego uses to store scripts is actually sound and quite helpful, but the problem is that it is unbiassed. The purpose of storing scripts is to save us time and to enable us to repeat useful behaviour patterns.
We start to store and create scripts from the moment we are born, and a number of our foundational scripts, ones that we still use today, were created during childhood. Before we had been around long enough to work out how the world really worked and the true consequences of our behaviour.
As a result, a number of these scripts can become outdated and no longer work for us as adults.
Remember what happens to things that we agree with early in life? They get stored in our Ego and stuck deep down in the unconscious layers of the psyche. The foreman, being the master of the ego, still knows all about them though, and when the right emotional stimulus occurs, will trigger the script to be played out.
Just like I and Me, this is a tool of awareness. To be able to apply the principles of this tool, you first need to have understood and started to apply I and me. Only I, will be able to reflect and analyse what is going on, me, being a construct of the ego, will not be able to tell the difference between scripts and authentic behaviour. Scripts are the language of me.
How Scripts are Created
The mechanisms for script creation are hard wired in to us as humans. It is something that begins from the moment we are born and continues all our lives. It is a wonderful mechanism of the mind that helps us survive and thrive, but problems can happen in adulthood when we become constrained by old outdated scripts that were formed very early on in childhood. These are the scripts that get locked away deep in our unconscious mind.
This is how they form:
When there is a repeating pattern of emotions surfacing, and a consistent reoccurrence of how we feel, the behaviours and patterns of thought associated to the feelings get locked away as scripts.
These scripts are created in parallel to us building the foundations of our schema of understanding; these are our core beliefs that are accepted as the truthful definition of ourselves (me), other people (specifically what behaviour to expect from other people) and the world as a whole.
A relationship forms between our scripts and our beliefs such that one reinforces the other. Remember the conciliation prize for failure offered up by the foreman; this is exactly what that is. A scripted behaviour pattern that reinforces the belief we hold about ‘me’ to give us a small internal payoff in lieu of anything else.
When we are young, we have not been around very long, that means that within just a few reoccurrences of a feeling and behaviour, it can be stored as a script. Telling a child something for three months is a very long time for a five-year-old!
In the next article on the rewriting the script tool, we are going to explore the different types of script we hold, and what happens when a script is triggered.
Enjoy, for now.