We Write our Life Scripts by the Age of Six...Really?

Our Life Scripts

A Movie Script

Have you ever seen a movie? Does a movie run on a pre-decided script or the plot changes while the movie is being played out?

We all know that the plot of a movie runs according to a script written before.  

What if I tell you that each one of our lives is like a movie and the script of this movie was written by us by the time we were six years of age? The most important thing about it is that you are author of your script. This is true because that is what most schools of psychology vow to.

The Script in Real Life

In concrete terms, it means that our personality and behavior patterns are formed right when we were children, in all probability, even before we were six years of age. It practically means that we run our adult lives based on the decisions and beliefs we formed in our childhood.

This is shocking to believe, but this is true in real life. Let me give you some real-life examples:

• Ravi is a 30 year-old software engineer in a reputed company. However, people mistreat and insult him every time. If we ask him why he allows people to treat him that way, he says it's OK and the underlying belief is that he is not important when it comes to others. So he bears all the insult and mistreatment because it was written in his script that he will bear all mistreatment.   
• Rajni is a  student studying 10th standard. She hardly studies and fails in most of the subjects. If you ask her why she does not study, she says she will fail anyway in the exam, so why study? The underlying belief is that she is destined to be a loser, anyway.  This happens so often because she has written a script of a loser for herself.  

The people above are acting and behaving from a belief and behavior pattern that they developed when they were young.

Can we Change our Scripts?

The answer is yes. The fortunate thing about the whole process is that it happened without awareness when we were young and we can change that with awareness.

Transactional Analysis (TA)

TA (Transactional Analysis) is a psychotherapy model which predominantly subscribes to the concept of life scripts. TA says that as children, we write a script for our lives and we run the rest our lives according to the script. It says, we write the script to the extent of:

• Whether we will be winners or losers,
• Whether we will get love in life or not,
• The kind of job we will do, 
• The kind of person we will marry, 
• The kind of feelings we prefer, and 
• Even how we will die.  

How to Break our Script?

We can break our script by becoming aware of our own decisions and beliefs which are the underlying cause of our script and then understanding the circumstances under which we made those decisions about our life.

TA therapy provides the tools and techniques to break our script and write a new script for our lives so that we can live life to its fullest potential.

In the upcoming posts, we will discuss how a script is formed and how to break it.