Yesterday was an amazing day.. Started off by me being ticked off to which I uncharacteristically responded and then through out the day events just went out of hand. Snowball that started rolling off the cliff in the morning by evening had become a boulder. And the boulder inevitably hit the ground and was smashed to pieces. That’s what had happened to me by evening- I was smashed to pieces inside me. After a very long time the old monster woke up and told me to get it over with. I thought I had laid this monster to rest but no it was simply hiding beneath me waiting to pounce on me at my weakest. Two things happened — one the monster woke and two the monster retreated.
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage”
In about 12 hours I had moved from denial to depression to anger and lastly to acceptance. When I came back from work yesterday I was already in the depression phase. I wasn’t thinking straight and all I did was take a straight razor and stood in the bathroom for what seemed to be eternity. I just stood there staring at myself and playing with the razor- gently moving it on my wrists and feeling sometimes the tingling sensation when it broke the skin. Something broke the spell perhaps it was my cowardice or just the realisation of how stupid I could be. I started crying and just stood crying with body shaking violently.
I googled and got numbers of couple of helpline. Now this is part funny and part sad. The first number which was prominently displayed wasn’t answered. And so also were the next three numbers. Fourth number connected but I was told that the number was operational from 1 pm to 7 pm and even though it was 6 pm it told me to call tomorrow. I tried one last number which connected and the call got transferred to a counsellor. Counsellor made sincere attempts to get me out of my sombre mood but all it did was made even more conscious how banal the conversation was. To be told that life is a gift and follow your heart sounds so superficial and artificial. Anyway I broke down a couple of times and then decided to get out of the house and the loneliness of it.
Didn’t feel like walking but I forced myself to. Got a call from a well wisher who told me to buckle up and face it, and who counselled me much better than any counsellor. By the end of the call I was feeling better, the clouds had lifted for a while. Having cried my heart out I was totally drained out -emotionally and physically and fell asleep with my sleep broken by an incoming call from a number I didn’t recognise.
In the morning I called back the number and was pleasantly surprised to learn that this was the same helpline number I had spoken to yesterday. It felt good that the counsellor was checking on me and this time I again got into a conversation with the new counsellor and for some reason I went back to the pitiful stage that I was in yesterday. The more I spoke the more agitated I became, more hysterical I became and then again broke down. But after all that I felt better. The conversation itself didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone was there to just listen to my rants and not judge me.
Anyway I have just narrated what happened and not the reason behind this. We all believe that there is a single moment that defines the acts we commit. More often than not thats not the case. It’s the little things that builds up and then smallest of things lights up the keg. And so it happened.
This story is just tangential to what I really want to speak about. What I want to speak about is the concept of life scripts. And the reason for that is that I want to understand where this thirst for self annihilation comes from. We each have told ourselves unconsciously or consciously a story of our lives in which either we are heroes or damsel in distress etc. A life script is another way of describing the meaning we attribute to the events that happen to us. Depending on our particular script, we interpret an event in a number of different ways. More often than not there is a pattern to our behaviour which can be traced back to this schema. Understanding our particular script can help us to see how it might be influencing our thoughts, and may help us to come up with more positive thoughts and actions.
I studied anthropology briefly and one of the concepts I came across was the concept of world view. What this means is how a particular society views the world around it. This I believe is a larger set under which one develops ones own life script. Added to this is this whole idea that there is no objective perception. Perspectives are moulded by experiences, biological aspects and individual aspects of our own life. And hence the same set of events can be perceived totally differently and with the strong conviction that one’s perspective is the right/correct one.
Coming back to life scripts. Life scripts are
“an unconscious pathway created in childhood, reinforced by our parents, and strengthened with evidence sought throughout life ensuring our beliefs are justified”
I was introduced to Eric Berne by my father who had egged me to read “Games People Play” and later “I am OK , You are OK”. When I first read them I don’t think I understood any of the Transactional Analysis and related stuff. It’s only with time that I am able to recall these elements and reflect upon them based on my experiences and feelings and get a rudimentary understanding of.
Though life scripts have their roots in childhood they are created over time and may also be significantly affected by individual events. Life scripts can often be encapsulated very simply in phrases like ‘I am a bad person’ or ‘I must take care of everybody’, sometimes life scripts are empowering and at other times they can be ineffective or even damaging. As I look back I can trace all the little things which led to creating of my life script.
Berne identified seven elements of script apparatus in order to understand how script works:
- Payoff or curse describes messages from our parents or parental figures on how we will end up.
- Injunctions or stoppers according to Berne are “the most important part of the script apparatus, and varies in intensity”, and defines it as “A prohibition or negative command from a parent”.
- Counterscript is communicated later in life in which Berne defines as: “A possible life plan based on parental precepts.”
- Modelling and copying behaviour seen and heard contributes to how we fulfil our script and according to Berne, programs or patterns are present before the age of six the majority of the time.
- Provocation or come-on encourages and confirms our script belief, coming from the demon in the Parent.
- The Demon is an internal unpredictable impulsive voice in which Berne compares to the concept of Freud’s ‘id’, although the reasoning why is unclear as he never went into detail to explain.
- Antiscript, Spell-breaker or Internal Release, is a form of self-destruction of script by the trigger of a pre-set real, or fantasy event made up in our minds, which frees the person from unhelpful script elements.
I can’t explain these to any great satisfaction and hence wouldn’t hazard doing so and have listed this for anyone who is interested to pick up Berne and read. This notion of life scripts led to development to a notion of four life positions, namely
- ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’- The ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’ person gets on with others and may be described as confident and contented within their work, home and life as a whole, mutually respecting others thoughts and opinions, even if they disagree with them.
- ‘I’m not OK, You’re OK’- Unhappy, inadequate and perhaps useless are words that may describe the ‘I’m not OK, you’re OK’ life position. Lack of self-belief, often putting themselves down by undervaluing their skills or contributions in life. This person is eager and willing to please others in order to gain approval but find difficult to acknowledge such recognition once gained.
- ‘I’m OK, You’re not OK’- The ‘I’m OK, You’re not OK’ person tends to be angry, showing hostility, viewing others as incompetent and not to be trusted from a superior position, belittling them with competitiveness. Without much conscience, they view faults within situations are due to others, and not themselves.
- ‘I’m not OK, You’re not OK’- With the I’m not OK, you’re not OK position, a sense of abandonment is felt which may lead to confusion and a sense of pointlessness, so a person simply stops trying to bother at all. Depression and withdrawal can conclude with mental institutionalisation.
Anyway coming back to the point- all this writing is a form of catharsis, each crisis or experience a reason to look inward and understand myself better. I haven’t touched upon perspectives and as you can well imagine our perspective is shaped by our world view, our life script and our in the moment feelings and emotions. Anyone who has seen the movie Rashomon would know this. In fact it led to formulation of the term Rashomon effect which is used to describe how a single event can be described in a variety of ways due to the unreliability of multiple witnesses. The witnesses’ unreliability and subjectivity are a result of situational, social and cultural differences.
To cut the long story short, the events of the last one day forced me to look inside my desire and want to slay the monster within. The point on perspectives was brought up by a message sent to me which made me realise how different people have different perspectives of the same event. But that doesn’t mean they are wrong about it. It simply means that we need to deal with different perspectives from a position of “I am OK and you are OK” rather than “ I am OK and you are not OK”. Would end with a longish passage from Rilke which speaks to the demon inside me
“….If a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud — shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?……….
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better …
…..Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you…..”
And lastly am I a Hero or a Villain of the story of which I am part of, well that question still needs to be answered. Perhaps this would be settled by whoever deems to write my obituary.
