Children face a terrible existential dilemma that arises from the way parents limit what the child will be allowed to become from all that he/she had the potential to become. Some households are quite severely restrictive, whereas, others permit considerable latitude of choice. From the conflict between the Natural Child's own autonomous nature and the restrictive injunctional programming received from the parents and recorded in the child's Primitive Parent (P₁) ego state, the Little Professor formulates decision(s), at some point, that certain attitudes, behaviors, and expectations are necessary to resolve this conflict. Steiner says that the child decides to become a "comfortable frog" instead of an "uncomfortable prince." ⁽¹⁾ The, "ongoing program, developed in early childhood, under parental influences, which [will direct] the individual's behavior in the most important aspects of [his/her] life,"⁽²⁾ is called the script. These are "artificial systems which limit spontaneous and creative human aspirations, just as games are artificial structures which limit spontaneous and creative intimacy."⁽²⁾

     The concepts of blame and fault are meaningless here. The injunctive messages from the parents may not have been intentional. They were conveyed unwittingly to the youngster as covert messages behind their words and actions. Likewise the child was probably not aware that his Little Professor spotted these implications while reviewing the recordings stored within P₁. The earlier in life that the decisions are made, the less complete the information was upon which they were based, and therefore, the more harmful the resulting script is likely to be.

     Scripts may be classified according to potential for harm as either banal or hamartic. Self-destructive scripts are referred to as hamartic and the households from which they arise as hamartagenic, from the term hamartia, used by Aristotle in reference to the tragic error of the hero of classic dramatic tragedy.⁽¹⁾   Specifically, it means the walking in blindness that results from looking to the wrong persons for direction, and which leads to eventual self-destruction. Throughout this book, my use of the term hamartic will mean self-destructive rather than simply tragic. It is my belief that each person that goes to his/her grave disillusioned that life was not as it should have been or unaware that they missed the point entirely, represents a human tragedy, even if the script was banal.

     I also deviate from other writers in the use of the terms winner and loser. It may seem harsh, but I view only autonomous, script-free persons as the true winners in life. There is no such thing as a "winner's script." All scriptbound persons are in some way losers of what life has to offer. Scripts may, however, be viewed in terms of the degree of success with which the individual accomplishes what she thought was important. Then the categories become: achiever, almost achiever, and underachiever scripts for life's losers.  Many so-called successful people are really quite wretched, miserable, and /or confused. On the other hand, material accomplishment is not truly requisite for having succeeded in life, though there is nothing inherently wrong with reasonable material accomplishment as long as it does not accrue at the expense of the rights, lives, and feelings of other forms of life or the ecosystem which belongs equally to us all and which must be preserved for future generations. 

     In trying to understand someone, it is necessary to understand the ego states of that person's parents as well as those of the individual. In hamartagenic households the Child ego state of the mother or the father is dominated by the witch/ogre (P₁), and has a most profound influence upon the offspring. In these cases, the youngster is subject to the frightening, domineering rule of a scared, confused, or irrational Child ego state. The following analogy is taken from Scripts People Live:⁽¹⁾

"It is very important to realize the basic defenseless of the youngster in the face of the bad witch's injunction (curse). Households where the child ego state [of the mother or father] operates as a pseudo parent can be compared, in extreme cases, with a concentration camp in which a pair of 150-pound prison guards physically [beatings] and psychologically [injunctive programming] terrorize a forty-pound child into submission. The severity of the injunctions found in hamartic scripts cannot be minimized."

     Steiner also divides scripts into three categories based upon the three general reasons that people seek professional help for emotional difficulties. These are depression, madness, and chemical dependency for which the script categories are called no love, no mind, and no joy, respectively.

     A chronic form of stroke hunger can arise from childhood injunctions against the procurement of strokes. Lovelessness scripting results from this sort of programming which tends to stifle the youngster's natural inclination and abilities toward obtaining strokes. A person suffering from chronic stroke hunger may feel unworthy of love in addition to being unsuccessful at loving relationships, leading to a generalized emotional depression of a severity commensurate with the malignancy of the injunctions, and, therefore, the depth of their effect upon the person's ability to give and receive love.

     The specter of madness haunts a considerable portion of the population, and the figure of 1% has been suggested for actual hospitalization for mental/emotional difficulties.⁽¹⁾ The medical approach, along with classical psychoanalysis, has not only not been very helpful; it may have promoted the condition in patients by the presupposition of incurability and the use of oppressive medication regimens over long periods of time. Madness, also known as schizophrenia, is not only not incurable, it is not a disease by the commonly accepted medical definition. The seeming inability to understand, relate, and successfully cope with consensual reality has its origins in early childhood programming against the use of the Adult ego state with injunctions attacking the child's confidence in its ability to think and to understand its environment. When a person's ideas and feelings are discounted (put down) often enough, that person begins to doubt all of his or her perceptions, and powerful feelings of mindlessness can lead to despair so great that the person just quits trying to cope and escapes into madness. This type of scripting, like all others, may be resolved in a TA group setting with a competent transactional analyst and a client willing to work at giving up the script by deprogramming of the injunctions and attributions from which it developed and relearning more effective ways of living and coping.

     Chemical dependency, with its many faces, strikes huge numbers of people in this country and around the world. It also springs from faulty socialization within the primary family group. Children are taught not to experience their feelings, both emotional and physical, at all levels of communication which they encounter. Parents enjoin them against emotional expression, or, along with media messages, teach them to medicate away unwanted sensation and not to indulge in pleasant ones. They face a constant barrage of messages which would have them not be in touch with the joy of total bodily experience and divert them from experiencing the pains and pleasures which come with life.

     Thus some of these people may become dissociated from their physical being, losing their "center," so to speak – their awareness of the messages the body sends to the mind concerning its needs. In this same way, as Dr. Steiner points out, "they may be racked by some sort of pain with which they have lost touch and don't really feel on a conscious level."⁽¹⁾  Life just seems vaguely unpleasant, hollow, or meaningless – something appears to be missing.

     Persons in this state tend to perceive their center as located in their heads, the control center from which the body is a necessary, but inconvenient, peripheral device for carrying out certain unavoidable processes. This alienation from the body, or mind/body split, can present itself, in more advanced stages as drug addiction, when early conditioning leads to the use of chemicals to escape feelings or to attempt to supply that which appears to be missing. These joyless people are, in many ways, divorced from their feelings, which seem confusing or frightening to them. A person with joylessness scripting, being an emotional cripple, does not know where to look for the source of happiness (within), and the futile search in external sources is a near-perfect setup for a pleasure-producing chemical crutch.

     The extreme forms of the no love, no mind, or no joy scripting patterns are suicidal depression, schizophrenic madness, and severe self-destructive addiction, respectively. The banal levels of these patterns of existence are a more familiar sight in everyday life. Manifestations may include such things as going from one unsuccessful relationship to another eventually to live miserable and alone, or becoming a hardened, unfeeling, coffee/tobacco/alcohol-using unhappy person. Banal levels of madness scripting may present as a person constantly in a state of crisis due to the difficulty in managing the various aspects of daily living.

     The types of injunctions, attributions, and drivers that were internalized in childhood in each of these three categories of scripting are quite specific for the type of script in which they occur and may be deprogrammed from the personality in an effective TA therapeutic environment. Most people are affected, to some degree, by each of these three types of scripting, though the extent of the effect may be slight or go unnoticed in the person's life experience. Where the effect is visible, one type usually tends to be manifested more prominently than others. People can work through and free themselves from any oppressive, early-childhood programming which affects their capacity for love, the complete actualization of their various selves, and/or their ability to understand their world and to author their destinies as they choose

     Scripts, especially hamartic ones, often present periods of seeming normalcy between episodes of script behavior. This is referred to as the counterscript and confers a cyclic or repetitive appearance to the person's behavior. Dr. Frederick Flach, in his Book Choices-Creative Response to Personal Change,⁽³⁾ describes this process as the mind's attempt to throw itself off balance or to induce a "falling apart" in hopes that the person's creative awareness will institute some necessary change during the ensuing process of reorganization. In TA terms, this amounts to the concerted effort of the healthy ego states to overthrow the tyranny of the bad witch and return control of the inner Child to the Prince and the Little Professor. Jeane Clarke, in her lovely work entitled Self-esteem: a Family Affair,⁽⁴⁾ speaks of "recycling" of early behavioral tasks or growth experiences in attempt to resolve inner difficulties and get needs met that were incompletely fulfilled at some earlier time. This echoes the belief that our basic life tendency is ever ready to go forward in growth, when oppression lifts.

     A person's life script may undergo a reorganization – a qualitative change in content and/or a quantitative shift in degree – at one or more times during life. This change, or palimpsest, often coincides with significant events which may alter the person's fundamental existential (OK'ness) position. Deaths, divorces, and prison terms, among other things, may trigger the palimpsest.

     In addition, temporary fluctuations in OK'ness occur on a periodic basis under the overall umbrella and driving force of the script. Taibi Kahler systematized these sequential minute-by-minute shifts in outlook with which a person is either:

With his introduction of the concept of the Miniscript Cycle.⁽⁵⁾ Kahler demonstrates that all persons, at any given instant, are experiencing one of eight possible attitudinal predispositions that may be seen as the vertices of two different tetrahedrons. All positions on one of these figures reinforce and further the script, hence it represents a cycle called the not-OK miniscript. In all positions on the other tetrahedron, the person is experiencing OK'ness and therefore demonstrating OK behavior and inviting OK'ness in others. Reasonably, this one is called the OK miniscript. A discussion of each follows.

Not-OK Miniscript

1.) A person moves into the driver position anytime they respond to an internal Parent message which places a condition upon OK'ness (eg. "I'm OK if I work hard," "I'm OK if I don't use drugs" . . . etc., anything which causes a person to forget that they are always OK, good, and worthy of love no matter what their behavior). Avoiding driver behavior allows a person to remain OK while inviting OK'ness in others. A person may either refuse to respond to his driver messages from his critical P₂ or move on to:

2.) The stopper position is reached when the person collects a payoff of the racket feeling they were trying to avoid in the driver position: guilty, inadequate, stupid, worthless, etc., because they did not live up to the "I'm OK if . . . " This is the feeling state derived from complying with an injunction such as: don't succeed, don't be close, etc. The person may, at this point, go back to driver, exit the program into OK'ness, or escalate to:

3.) The vengeful/arrogant position where she attempts to avoid painful feelings by blaming someone else (I'm OK - you're not). Her difficulties worsen here with the pay off of scripty feelings of anger, righteousness, or triumph. The same choices apply as in #2. Escalation is to:

4.) The futility position. When the person moves here, she collects her negative strokes by feeling unloved, hopeless, rejected, failed, crazy, etc. The attitudinal stance is "I’m not OK - neither is anyone else so what's the use of trying."

OK Miniscript (Autonomy and Spontaneity Triangle)

     Whereas, all positions in the not-OK miniscript are scripty and harmful to the individual, all positions in the OK miniscript represent autonomous, genuine, and spontaneous feelings and behavior. Any person, at any given instant, is occupying one of the eight positions in one of these tetrahedrons. When a person is experiencing OK'ness (I'm OK - you're OK), and, therefore, demonstrating OK behavior, he is occupying one of the four OK miniscript positions above and inviting OK'ness in others.

1.) In the allower position the person is responding to an internal message from the Controlling Parent ego state to the Compliant Adapted Child which allows him to meet a need in an OK way without a great deal of Adult thinking or even without the awareness of the Adult ego state. Examples:

2.) In the goer position, the message is from the Controlling Parent to the Adult or even Little Professor if a creative response is desired. The person experiences a feeling of "taking charge" and assuming responsibility for what he is doing such as:

3.) In the be'er position the person is affirming the Free Child (FC). He is responding to a message from the Nurturing Parent (NP) to the FC. He is experiencing FC wants, needs, and feelings directly, directs his communication to the FC of others, and experiences OK'ness more fully than in #1 or #2 above. At the same time, his experience is "here and now" and he accepts the permission from NP to fully realize what is occurring within and around him.

4.) In the wower, the person is completely centered in the Free Child, in the present, and fully open to himself and his experience. There is no message/response between ego states. This is infrequent with most people and equates to Abraham Maslow’s peak experience or Eric Berne's true intimacy. Generally experienced by two people with mutual sensations of closeness, well-being, and euphoria. This state is most often reached when two people share an intimate experience, when they are each simultaneously open and responsive to the FC in their partner.

     In the "OK'ness continuum" below, note the tremendous increase in OK'ness (and strokes) as more free child is experienced and expressed.