Our childhood experiences can be very significant in the
shaping of our lives. At that time we are most dependent, most vulnerable, and
most needful of love, acceptance and belonging. Our parents and significant
others are our role models, the course of most of our satisfactions. We
identify with these models, good or bad, not so much intellectually as
emotionally. These experiences, positive
and negative, have the cumulative effect of giving to us a script. We normally think of a script as an actor’s
written part which he learns, memorizes, and acts out on stage. It not only involves
his/her words and actions but also his/her attitude or frame of mind, indeed his/her
character. It becomes his/her part, his role.
All of us have scripts given to us which become our parts,
our roles. I emphasize again that these scripts are more emotional, more subtly
absorbed than they are intellectually or consciously chosen. They rise out of
our deep vulnerabilities, our deep dependency upon others, and our absolutely screaming
needs for acceptance and love, for belonging, for a sense of importance and worth,
for a feeling that we matter.
All of this does not mean we are necessarily controlled by
these scripts, but it does mean we are powerfully influenced by them. The
difference between being influenced by and being determined by is 180 degrees. Determinism,
whether it be genetic, psychic, or environmental, is false doctrine. In one
sense the underlying assumption and tone of this entire column is
self-determinism, that we can learn to write our own scripts, that we can
re-script ourselves, that we can identify with new models, have new
relationships with true scripts, true models – divine ones. Just consider the
word scripture itself. In the gospel context, is not one possible meaning “true
scripts’?
However in spite of the gospel, scripts written and
developed early in life, pounded in by powerful emotional experiences – even traumatic
ones – become deeply imbedded within our natures; and they may have influence
upon us for the rest of our lives unless equally powerful, even traumatic,
experiences divinely erase them and write new ones in the “fleshy tables of the
heart”. This is why those first 8 years
of life are so critical, so supremely important.
-Stephen Covey
