How Do Family Scenarios Work And Can You Get Out Of Them?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Family scenarios are patterns of behavior of family members that are repeated from generation to generation, which are formed and supported by family history. These are the ideas of a person, conscious or not, about how it should be, how it should be right in their family

They can cover a very wide range of views:

• Marital relations: "all men need only one thing", "all husbands are unfaithful", "the family must be saved in any case."
• Attachment of events to a certain age: when to marry / get married, have children, die, etc.: "in our family, all girls got married before 25"
• Professional activity “we are a dynasty of doctors”, generations of musicians, military men, etc. And, also, the level of income or professional aspirations.
• Child-parent relations: how to behave with children, parenting style. "We have always had very talented children."
• Money "in our family all worked hard and knew how to earn", "we will die of hunger, but we will not borrow).
• Status in society, relationships with others "she is not of our circle", "he is not your match."

Family scripts work especially well in those areas of a person's life where he is not very aware of his I. This is expressed in the following features:

1. A person does not know his true desires in the field of relationships, does not have a clear picture of how it should be in his family, which he himself creates, leaving the parent. There is an idea that “everything will be fine for him,” but due to what it is not very clear. Sometimes, the only guideline is the desire to "be different from the parents." But due to the fact that there is no desired image, the relationship develops according to the usual family scenario.

The young man spoke very negatively about his family, he did not like the relationship of his parents in it. Imagine his surprise when, after 3 years of marriage, he discovered that his relationship with his wife very much resembled that of his parents.

2. A person does not correlate his behavior with the results that he receives in the end. And does not take responsibility for building relationships. In this case, it is much easier to see the reason for the failure in the actions of the partner.

A woman comes for a consultation and complains that “there are no real men left”, there is no one to marry. During the consultation process, it turns out that she had a very strong mother, who took over everything in the family, in fact, was the head of the family. And the daughter copied the mother's behavior in the relationship, choosing softer men as partners. As a result, over time, she ceased to respect her men, believing that she "was deceived again and chose the wrong one."

3. The child, growing up, did not go through the process of psychological separation - separation from his parental family and still strongly identifies himself with his parents. Puts the interests and opinions of parents, or someone one of them, with whom the closest emotional contact, above their own, preferring not to identify their desires. Thus, the parent, as it were, lives a second life - for the child, and the child repeats the mom / dad scenario. After all, life's choices are the same.

The mother and grandmother of the girl with whom she lives together did not live long with their husbands, after the birth of the child. And then they raised their daughters alone. The girl is already over thirty, and relationships with men do not add up.

Reasons for scenarios

One of the reasons for the emergence of a family scenario, according to E. Berne, the founder of transactional analysis, is the child's unconscious choice of a way of survival and adaptation in this world, looking at the behavior of parents or under the impression of any role of fairy-tale characters supported by the parents.

For example, Berne argued that a girl, assimilating the script of her parents, growing up, plays one of two roles - mother or daughter.

If the parental family was dominated by a strong and energetic mother, who, moreover, gave her daughter maximum warmth and care, albeit sometimes in a strict form, then the girl, on her example, forms a maternal position in relation to her family. She strives to become her loved ones, a reliable and caring mother, who knows everything better than others, who is always ready to help, and sometimes to rein in.

If the primacy in all matters of the family belonged to the father, and the mother was in the family with the rights of a wordless Cinderella, then the girl, growing up, will most likely learn the daughter's role. She will keep a little girl in herself for the rest of her life, for whom it is easier to lean on someone's strong shoulder than to carry the burden of solving life's problems herself. Choosing a future husband for herself, she will subconsciously look for a strong and caring "father" in him, who will shield her from all the hardships of life.

A key criterion for family scenarios is their repeatability from generation to generation. Also, the script has a specific set of roles and a predictable ending. For example, my mother saved my father from alcoholism, as a result, she drank herself. And the daughter chooses for herself men with a criminal past and tries to re-educate them, periodically getting into various dangers because of them, from financial to physical.

It often happens that in the first generation, a certain set of actions and decisions had a logical rationale, but, being passed down from generation to generation, it lost its relevance, leaving only the order of steps, not supported by a real situation and real necessity.

Anecdote in the subject

Soon after the wedding, the husband noticed an interesting detail: before putting a piece of meat into the oven, the wife always cuts off small pieces from it, and on both sides. And only in a cropped form it bakes. The husband asked: why cut off two completely normal pieces of meat? The wife replied that it was their family recipe; this is how her mother and her mother's mother always cooked meat, and she was taught. When asked what taste it adds to the meat, the wife could not answer. She promised to ask her mother. Oddly enough, the mother told the same story: this is a family recipe, so her grandmother also cooked. The young wife did not get anything from her grandmother either. Then everyone was wondering: where did the recipe come from? Fortunately, my great-grandmother was still alive. They asked her. “Yes, this is not a recipe,” said the great-grandmother. - Just when I was young, our oven was small and the baking sheet was tiny. The whole meat did not fit, so we cut it off on both sides."

Anti-script phenomenon

It so happens that a child, having suffered in the parental family, and knowing for sure that he does not want to live like his parents, chooses the exact opposite line of behavior. For example: the father got married early and suffered as a couple, the son will not marry. The father drank, the son does not drink alcohol at all. The mother worked a lot and did not love herself at all, she sacrificed herself to the family, and the daughter chooses the role of a “fluttering bird”, living for her own pleasure. Choosing an anti-script, unfortunately, is not an exit from the script. Because often, the anti-scenario is chosen in order to "prove" to the parents that they were wrong, this is a manifestation of adolescent rebellion. It also forces a person to make decisions within a rigidly outlined framework, not giving him freedom of choice.

So, a grown-up child can rush between a script and an anti-script at different periods of his life, either rebelling against the messages of his parents, then again following them. This may be due to ambiguous messages from parents - directly opposite statements, one of which is given in a verbal way, and the other in a non-verbal way. For example, a mother tells her daughter that she should be a decent girl, while she herself has affairs with married men and leads a rather free lifestyle.

How to work with scripts

The method of working with scenarios at the first stage is to analyze family history and identify all coincidences and recurring situations. It is possible to use the genogram method - a graphic representation of information about a family in at least 3 generations.

At the second stage, a comprehensive analysis of the scenario itself is carried out. What he gives a person, from what protects, and what deprives. In the process of work, there is a recognition of one's own responsibility for one's life and the right to choose. After that, a conscious decision is made to what extent a person would like to implement this scenario in his life.

Next comes the work on de-identification of the person with the family scenario and the formation of their own beliefs, their own path, taking into account the decisions made at the previous stage.

Working with the family scenario is not quick, but it allows us to choose for ourselves what kind of life we want to live.