When we re-write our script...
As a counselling lecturer, group facilitator and esoteric earth adventurer, I find this subject fascinating.
I am not attempting to convince or teach anybody anything you don’t already know, deep down in your soul or maybe even right slap bang in your awareness. I am still exploring myself in all areas, too as I believe I will until I leave the planet (maybe beyond) and I “get it” that we are all doing our own thing in our own way. If it doesn’t resonate with you, it might not be your thing, or perhaps you have something to add? I am just grateful to have the opportunity to share a little magic among like minded people and understand that life is ever changing and we are developing new belief systems along our paths. If it’s not for you, that’s cool... Right, insecure intro over! Now, back to the magic I want to share.
Re-writing our script is something I discovered consciously for the first time when I studied transactional analysis. Re-writing our script means re-phrasing or reframing the past in academic and counselling circles. It’s about how we are viewing ourselves and our past adventures, it’s about how we are creating the very thing that we came here to help us grow and we might be pretty “pee’d” off about it too, but we keep repeating it over and over again. This might be relationship issues or money issues, or unworthiness issues etc. The list is endless we didn’t learn from it last time, so we get presented with it again. Psychodynamic counselling theory talks about this in terms of patterns of behaviour emerging from the subconscious and transactional analysis is about impacts of those subconscious experiences and how we act out roles based on the way we are viewing these experiences. These are usually rooted firmly in our early childhood when we were too simplistic and divergent thinking and sometimes too conditioned or traumatised to work out in “adult think” what really was happening and so came up with our own versions of how the past played out. This is usually specifically related to our need for survival and to fit in with our tribe. A small example of this was when I had an argument with my daughter many years ago and she had told me to leave over a painful experience for us both. My granddaughter was there when this happened and within the altercation some silly stuff came out: “you never change the toilet roll after you use the last bit” she said. I retorted that I always replace the toilet roll if I remember and had forgotten. I also informed her that I have changed the toilet roll in her house a million times before, to which she replied “How much bloody toilet roll do you use” Yea daft I know, most if not all of us get caught up in this stuff at times when we are hurting. But to get back to the point, when my granddaughter spoke to another one of my daughters soon after, she told her I had been chucked out for using all the toilet roll! Funny yes I know but a great example of how we interpret life when we are children she had remembered what was relevant to her. If we go back to review our past we will probably find it wasn’t exactly how it seemed...
Out of this came our subconscious patterns of behaviour. Alongside this came our sense of fear, our ability to survive what comes next for our learning process and our thinking patterns too, among lots of other things far too many to mention here.
We are busy as children trying to make sense of the world and so eagerly gather up all the information needed to explore ourselves and our environment. Now psychological theory for the most part sees this as damage if our experiences are traumatic or difficult. Something to recover from, some type of behaviour that we need to change and with some emphasis on acceptance of self or even getting “over” the past and healing which is good but kind of quite boxed in thinking sometimes. There are some much more spiritually relevant counselling theories nowadays and there are some great new ideas evolving in this wonderful cycle of change that we are experiencing. Yes, I know that some experiences cannot be classed as wonderful when they happen and some of them are downright difficult to recover from but I am talking here from the more esoteric or right brained creative and artistic discovery that is so undervalued in our lives today. I am talking about a spiritual perspective that see’s our experiences as necessary for our soul growth and so therefore there is no end to experiences/existence so therefore no need to be as distraught as we can become when awful things happen. Another idea is that we are eventually the creators of our own reality as we get stuck in patterns of fear or grief or maybe even resentment of the past. This is somewhat backed up by the theories and so, in my experience brings the two together.
There are some great ideas about re-writing our script. Remember we seem to create subconscious patterns and we act these out as “life scripts”. This means we keep repeating those relationship experiences and circumstances in life that resonate firmly with how we viewed the world and how we were treated and experienced life when we were young.
Remember as children how we were enthralled by the fairy stories, myths and great escapism stuff that comes with divergent thinking and creativity as a fresh explorer on this planet. Think about how you might have resonated with these archetypes and scripts that were played out. Are you still waiting for your prince? Are you still looking for a princess to rescue? Are you Cinderella perhaps? What roles are you in now? This is how powerful our creative right brain is, it creates our experiences.. Those ones that we hang on to, repeat or bewail... This is like a kind of programming and there is quite substantial evidence that this starts to happen in the womb.
I remember the experiences from my childhood when my whole family bullied me, I remember the school bullying when all the class turned against me I remember the rejection of not feeling loved by anybody and wishing I had just one family member who could see me for who I was and not for who they had assumed I was, connected to their own stuff... then I remember my cousins husband (I was still a child when he came into the family), who I spoke to at a recent family funeral... he was overjoyed when I told him of my progress from black sheep to highest academic achiever this family has produced. He told me he was proud of me, he hugged me so tight I could hardly breathe and he looked at me with such respect that it all just felt alright! He told me that he always believed in me and he had always liked me and he was just so glad that I had done it... and I had showed em!
Well you know, from that moment my view of my childhood became less harsh... somebody had seen me, somebody had listened to me and somebody had actually had the guts to stand up and say "well I think she’s ok actually, I just think you don't understand her"! This changed my whole perspective, I rewrote my story. I was a hero and he was my guardian, we were fellow conspirators against the dark forces, we were freedom fighters!
So we need to remember that for every seemingly futile part of our lives where we have been misunderstood or misunderstood ourselves, and that has caused us great damage or lessons to learn from, somewhere, just somewhere there was a little voice in the wilderness saying something different... It was true for me, and I kind of know deep down that actually that's true for all of us.
If we change our view of the past, our experiences are sure to follow if we can genuinely drop the anger or judgement, or maybe even false thinking that we base our expectation of others on.
Think about this in any way you like, behavioural, scientific or spiritual, it all comes down to the same thing. We are powerful creators of our own destiny and changing your thinking around something that is blocking you seems to link them all together in different ways. My favourite one is the affirmation connection to spirituality. There is so much more to this than I first thought and the affirmation route must include a lot of other types of development too, I believe, but for now the connection I love, is that; “written affirmations” are much more powerful than when spoken or thought. So tying this in with the fact that we can powerfully go back, rewrite our past, we can then write a new script for the future in whatever style we like. I have used this many times and enjoy doing it very much in times of great transition and here is one of my examples:
Who would have thought it eh?
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Mandy. She was really a very good little girl who always wanted to help and always wanted to be the best little girl she possibly could. She also worked very hard trying to get everyone to love each other and often had difficulty sleeping if she knew that two of her loved ones were fighting... She knew that really this was ok, for she had chosen to land on planet Earth to take part in the upcoming transformation that had already begun and had also chosen to be a teacher at a crucial transformation point. Having had teaching roles before on our great mother Earth, she knew that the best way to teach something was to first learn it through experience and so had decided to hide her soul’s wisdom from her conscious mind and had given herself access to her deeper connection to her life path through an inability to be able to understand the system that she was to grow up in. She had a very strong connection to her wisdom gained over the lifetimes she had spent there already and had an inherent ability to look inwardly for understanding and take responsibility for her experiences in relationships. This was a great and wonderful ability but alas because she was born into a system of power and control madness with humans conditioned to blame others and steal their power or feel powerless and have their power taken, this quickly became a weakness. But was meant to happen to ensure that she fell deeply into the experiences and forgot that this was actually strength. To make sure that this happened quickly she chose her mum and dad well, they were great players in the game of energy theft and conformity to their particular rules and dad was also going to be in hospital whilst mum programmed Mandy for her survival and development needs, so they were just perfect!
It wasn’t long before Mandy became very down on herself for not being able to please everyone, she usually kept a happy heart but there was a growing sense of fear and disgust at herself for not being able to understand the rules and a strong message from her dad that she was worthless and undeserving began to immerse her in her experiences, planned before she first entered the womb on 25th August 1958 the day of her conception and her dad’s one day out of hospital for quite a while...
She started noticing that she was getting in trouble quite a lot, she kept getting blamed for things she hadn’t done, they misinterpreted all of her words and actions and things became pretty heated. This had culminated in an experience of being bullied in school and that was the final straw, she suddenly realised that they were all bloody crazy. She had forgotten that they had agreed to immerse themselves totally in the amnesia required to follow a controlling system that was about to ‘eat’ itself and really believed in their roles and she got very mad at them indeed.
All of the power of the freedom fighter she was training to be suddenly started leaking out all over the place and then she started to get herself into a real lot of trouble, woops she needed to be controlled at this point for growth and her soul knew this, although she interpreted it as “can’t behave herself and being left on the shelf”, she was 17 after all and that was very old indeed at the time.
Mandy’s next move was a total triumph, she found her pre-arranged teacher who was role-playing the biggest baddest person in the land theme... perfect! He taught her well, she learned how to read body language, moods, signs and signals of discomfort, the rules of domestic abuse and finally an awareness of what she was thinking, feeling and acting like as second nature. He was a great teacher indeed and she learned how not to judge domestic abuse heroes as weak and how power and control makes people in the system act within a very acute experience... This gave her an excellent basis for her future role as counsellor/freedom fighter... Perfect! Just Perfect!
She still had much to learn like; not judging alcoholics and other drug users, tramps etc so she lost no time after graduating from her 20 year degree course in domestic abuse and power and control. She did a fast track substance abuse and homelessness course. This was a really intense training experience and she barely survived, but this was also a necessity for her planned reawakening to occur...
Then she woke up!
After that Mandy thoroughly enjoyed finding herself, following her path with growing ease as she gradually remembered who she was, whilst the universe opened up all kinds of pathways that eventually led to her ultimate goal.
We leave her now, sitting under a palm tree, on a beautifully sunny beach, long cool drink in hand whilst discussing with her newly reunited tribe, all of the adventures they had along the way, how amazingly grateful they were to all the wonderful souls who had agreed to act like total a**holes in the game to assist with this moment and how wonderful the peaceful planet was now...
I can hear Mandy’s voice in the distance as I float thoughtfully away from this happy scene...
“Who would have thought that would have happened eh”?
It works for me and if you try it and it works for you great, I hope you uncover all you have in you to become anything your heart truly desires.