Life-coaching: Family Scenario

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

From the author: The concept of "social scenario" is also useful in such practices as life-coaching. But only in this case it is not only about identifying and not only about getting rid of a person from this obsessive scheme of reproducing life's dramas - rather, about teaching a person to live, relying on the skills of rational management of his life. We can say that a person learns the skills of creating his own scenario for his life.

The concept of "social scenario", introduced into everyday life by Eric Berne, is a very convenient tool for conducting psychotherapy within the framework of different approaches and psychological schools.

It turns out to be very useful in such practice as life-coaching. But only in this case it is not only about identifying and not only about getting rid of a person from this obsessive scheme of reproducing life's dramas - rather, about teaching a person to live, relying on the skills of rational management of his life. We can say that a person learns the skills of creating his own scenario for his life.

How the "family scenario" differs from the "social scenario"

Sometimes it is helpful to make a meaningful separation of family and social scenarios.

"Family scenario" - these are the behavioral programs that a person receives in the family from their parents. They most often affect the spheres of a person's love relationships, situations of choosing partners, as well as attempts to build their own family.

The family scenario is not necessarily formed in the form of direct reproduction of the family relations of the parents. Very often people begin to build relationships with others, not copying the habits of their parents, but as if being under the influence of those “family curses”, dramatic predictions and predictions with which parents intimidate them in childhood.

For example:

"If you don't do housework and wash the dishes, no one will marry you." As a result, the girl very much does not like to wash dishes and do household chores - and she does not develop relationships with young people. As luck would have it, she selects for herself exactly those partners who have a habit of living under the care of their mothers, who in every possible way relieved their children of the need to provide themselves with home comfort on their own.

A social scenario can be formed on the basis of plots and topics that are not directly related to the situation in the family. It can be singled out by a child from the rich selection of plots that our culture provides in the form of fairy tales, cartoons, or even stories that are told to children at night. For some reason, the child is impressed by a story or a fairy tale, it gets into his soul, he is identified with some of its heroes - and thus this plot turns into a scenario according to which the whole life of a person is built.

So the favorite fairy tales of one young man were "By the Pike's Command" and "The Little Humpbacked Horse", as a result, he waited all his life for some "magic helper" to appear in his fate, and such assistants appeared from time to time. First, in the form of a neighbor's boy, who was 5 years older than him and had the gift of coming up with very interesting and exciting activities. Then in the form of a school teacher, who for some reason fell in love with a boy from a dysfunctional family and helped him a lot both in his studies and in strengthening his faith in himself.

After school, he “lay on the stove” for several years, somehow passing the sessions at the university and literally - lying all his free evenings on a bed in a hostel, dreaming about what is unknown. All this happened until a girl several years older than him fell in love with him, who involved him in her parties, brought him to the right people, helped get a very promising job, where he was taken, despite the fact that he did not there was no experience. The merits of this person include the fact that, having received such gifts of fate, he was able to master a complex and highly paid profession.

I gave as an example a "positive scenario" that helped a person from a dysfunctional family break out into a world of relatively successful people. But most often we meet with "negative stories". When a person, for reasons incomprehensible at first glance, manages to make the worst choice of all possible in all important situations.

In some cases, the social scenario is, as it were, chosen from a set of typical ways of organizing life in the social environment in which a person grew up.

So one girl, throughout her childhood, saw that all the women around were getting married, giving birth to children and then torn between work, caring for children and cooking food for their husbands returning drunk from work (there was no father in her family at all).

Growing up, having received a good education and having made a successful career, she with frightening constancy found herself men prone to alcoholism, unable to earn money seriously, and at the same time demanding that ready food be on the table by their return home, and the woman obediently listened to their moral teachings and showed due respect for them.

Life coaching is the process of getting rid of a negative scenario

Life coaching begins with the identification of negative scenarios of a person, as well as other socio-psychological mechanisms that, in addition to the will of a person, control his life and program his fate:

• Bad games
• "Basic personality conflicts",
• inadequate "psychological defenses",
• low self-esteem, etc.

This stage of the work of a life coaching specialist is not much different from the work of an ordinary psychologist and psychotherapist. The only significant difference is the desire to use the analysis of all these situations from childhood and the relatively recent past of a person to teach him how to use various "tools": psychological concepts and concepts that can be used to develop the skills of interpersonal and social reflection.

For a life coaching specialist, it is important that the person who has completed the course of working with him not only gets rid of those problems and complexes that he suffered or that prevented him from living and working in peace. In this practice, it is important that a person gets into use a special "intellectual optics" that allows him to notice the ways of self-organization of other people. But it is even more important to train a person to identify life strategies, as well as ways of self-organization in successful people in order to be able to learn from them.

Positive manifestations of social scripts

It is worth noting that social and family scenarios bring people not only suffering and lack of freedom - in many cases they make our life much easier. There are many happy family scenarios, thanks to which, from generation to generation, people reproduce a happy family life and provide children with the opportunity for self-realization.

A person living within the framework of a "positive scenario" is freed from long mental rushes and searches for oneself, to which those who do not have such a happy fate are doomed. The social scenario allows you to save time and effort of people, mental energy is not scattered into the reflection of erroneous paths and the search for alternative ways of development, people have the opportunity to spend it on achieving some external objective goals.

Replacing a social scenario with a life strategy that can be corrected

However, in those situations when the "malicious programs" embedded in the human psyche force him to move along not the most pleasant life trajectories, when he unwittingly realizes a life scenario, from which more than one generation of his ancestors has already suffered, it makes sense to spend time and effort on identifying these "malicious programs" and the development of some other ways of organizing their lives.

In some cases, you can simply correct an already existing social scenario, replacing its individual acts with more positive scenes, giving the hero the opportunity to make more meaningful choices. But more often than not, such a "cosmetic repair" is impossible, and a person has to take full responsibility for his own destiny. In these cases, life coaching is no longer talking about scenarios, but about a life strategy.

The concept of "life strategy" requires a separate article for its full clarification, so here we will give only a brief explanation of it. A life strategy is a conscious rational construction of one's life trajectory, taking into account the means and resources available to a person at the moment, as well as taking into account his "sleeping abilities". On the other hand, building a strategy for your life involves developing plans for the formation of those abilities and skills that we do not have at the moment.

Thus, we can say that in life coaching the concept of "social scenario" is used both in a relatively traditional sense and in a slightly different meaning, which it acquires when immersed in the context of the practice of teaching a person the skills of playing strategic games with his life.

In life coaching, the concept of "social scenario" is used in conjunction with concepts such as "individual life trajectory", "basic personality conflict" and "life strategies".

The life strategy entails the use of concepts such as "sleeping abilities", "human internal resources", etc.

Operating with such concepts gives a life coaching specialist the opportunity to positively change the life of a person who finds himself in a semantic impasse or has lost faith that something can change for the better.