Scripts People Live

Children are trained to live in discomfort. Because they are not given an opportunity to choose what feels good for themselves and have to do things chosen for them by others, they are often in a state of mild or acute discomfort. Wearing uncomfortable clothes, sitting quietly, being scared or hurt without having permission to express unhappiness —all of these are painful situations which are a child’s lot. As a consequence, children learn (and this is especially true of boys) to bear pain without complaint.

The discount, then, is the way in which parents and others in the child’s world interfere with the youngster’s potential for knowing the world and the way in which the growing powers of understanding of the child are stunted.

It can be seen from this discussion that a person or group of persons who free themselves from the strictures of the stroke economy will regain control of the means for the satisfaction of a most important need; consequently, they tend to disengage themselves from the larger society

1. Don’t give strokes if you have them to give. This injunction is self-explanatory. It simply means that people are enjoined against freely giving of their loving feelings.
2. Don’t ask for strokes when you need them. Again, this injunction is self-explanatory, and probably the one that is most thoroughly taught to people.
3. Don’t accept strokes if you want them. This injunction is not as common as the two above. When present it prevents people from accepting the strokes that are given them even when they are wanted.
4. Don’t reject strokes when you don’t want them. Frequently people are given strokes which, for one reason or another, don’t feel good or are not wanted. As an example, women who are “media” beauties, namely those who by some unlucky stroke of chance match the imaginary standard which is promoted by Playboy, have the experience of being constantly stroked for their “beauty.” It is common for such women, especially after many years of receiving these strokes, to begin to resent them. Such women report that it is an unnerving and unpleasant experience to have everyone who relates to them relate primarily and often exclusively on the basis of their looks, which after all are only skin deep. Women who have these feelings rarely, if ever, have permission to reject those strokes. One of the effects of the women’s liberation movement is that it has given such women permission to say, in effect: “I don’t want to hear that I’m beautiful; I know that already. What else can you say about me?” This is an example of permission to reject strokes which are not wanted. Coupled with the permission to ask for the strokes that she wants, a woman might then add: “Why don’t you tell me that I’m smart or powerful?”
Men have a similar problem with strokes praising their strength, responsibility, intelligence, and capacity for hard work. The men’s liberation movement encourages men to reject such strokes and ask instead, “Am I a good man? Am I sensitive? Am I beautiful? Am I lovable?”
5. Don’t give yourself strokes. Self-stroking, or what is called in transactional analysis “bragging,” is enjoined against. Children are taught that “modesty is the best policy” and that self-praise and self-love are in some way sinful, shameful, and wrong

Marcuse feels that the concentration of sexual pleasure in the genitals has the purpose of removing pleasure from the rest of the body. In this manner, an oppressive establishment produces people—especially men—who are largely without feelings in their bodies and can be exploited as performing machines by others

A biological chain may be postulated leading from emotional and sensory deprivation through apathy to degenerative changes and death. In this sense stimulus hunger has the same relationship to survival of the human organism as food hunger

Strokes are necessary for human survival, and when people can’t obtain positive strokes, they will settle for negative strokes because they too, even though they feel bad, are life supportive. Capers and Holland1 point out that when peoples’ stroke sources fall below a certain point which he calls the Survival Quotient, they become more and more willing to accept negative strokes because they need strokes, any strokes, for survival

The basic training of life includes a systematic attack on three primary human potentials: the potential for intimacy, namely the capacity for giving and receiving human love; the potential for awareness, namely the capacity to understand the world and its people; and the potential for spontaneity, which is the capacity of free and joyful expression of the Natural Child

when attempting to diagnose someone’s injunctions and attributions, it might be helpful to remember that the working hypothesis for a man is “mother tells you what to do and father shows you how”; and for a woman, “father tells you what to do and mother shows you how.” The manner in which the parent of the same sex demonstrates how attributions and injunctions can be followed is called the program

people are trained, from early in life, to disregard their bodily sensations and messages, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Unpleasant bodily sensations are medicated away whenever possible or passively tolerated whenever there is no medication which could affect them. Pleasant bodily sensations are not indulged in, and constant pressure is exerted to prevent children from being in touch with the exhilaration, the joy of a full bodily experience, and to distract them from their bodily feelings, pleasures and pains. The result is that many people are disconnected from their bodily sensations, their bodies are split off from their centers, they have lost agency over their physical selves, and are joyless.