A psychotherapy patient arrived late, hurried into my office, and threw herself down in her seat. Tears had ruined her eye makeup and created black streams down her cheeks, although her facial expression was furious. As our eyes met, she declared with a force that slapped me across the face, “I hate drunks.” The patient was referring to her husband, whose alcohol dependence made life painful for her and their only child. A few seconds after I absorbed the impact of her fury and asked what had happened, nascent thoughts coalesced into a singular question in my mind: “If you hate drunks so much, why did you marry one?”
In fact, a familiar story was played out in her decision to marry this man – a kind, high-functioning survivor of childhood sexual abuse who, like the patient's father, drowned his emotional pain in alcohol. She genuinely loved her husband and wanted to heal him, a wish that as a child she had been able to fulfill, if only intermittently, in relation to her father. Yet she lacked emotional insight into the connection between her childhood relationship with her father and her marital choice. An unconscious script ran through her relationships with these two men, which can be represented as:
He is in pain; I am forlorn → I try to ease his pain → He feels better and engages with me → I feel connected to him
This structure illustrates a more automatic and unconscious level of narrative processing than the “conviction narratives” proposed by the authors. The seminal personality theorist Silvan Tomkins first proposed that people employ narrative processing to organize their life experiences with his “script” theory (Reference Tomkins and Keasey1979, Reference Tomkins, Aronoff, Rabin and Zucker1987, Reference Tomkins1991), which augured the rise of the narrative Zeitgeist across many fields of psychology (Demorest, Popovska, & Dabova, Reference Demorest, Popovska and Dabova2012; Howard, Reference Howard1991; McAdams, Reference McAdams2001; Nelson & Fivush, Reference Nelson and Fivush2004). To understand and cope with emotionally intense experiences, Tomkins proposed that people form “scripts” or affective schemas that represent how such experiences typically proceed and how to respond in order to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect. While scripts are constructed from specific emotional experiences, they become general rather than specific so as to function as a personal guide for anticipating and managing similar experiences in the future. As Demorest et al. (Reference Demorest, Popovska and Dabova2012) described, “The individual is both dramatist and actor, constructing the scripts through which he or she understands and lives life.”
In this sense of providing an emotional guide, scripts are similar to the authors' conviction narratives. However, the latter are more complex, higher-order representations that allow people to imagine multiple possible futures – not just one, and evaluate those futures in arriving at consciously considered choices and action plans. Moreover, scripts are overlearned through repeated reinforcement and thus operate automatically and largely unconsciously, making them resistant to change. While originally adaptive, scripts can therefore become maladaptive when subsequently activated by ostensibly similar experiences that they do not, in fact, apply to. As a child, my patient's script allowed her to negotiate her father's pain and alcoholism and sustain a close relationship with him. Similarly becoming her husband's emotional caretaker, however, left her feeling exploited, exhausted, and entirely unmet in her marriage.
If a goal of psychotherapy is “to make the unconscious conscious,” people need to become aware of the maladaptive scripts that they unwittingly live by, and develop them into reality-based conviction narratives. When my patient became aware of her script, she recognized that she had to take care of her father as a little girl in order to maintain a relationship with him. Similarly attending to her husband, and obviating her own needs in the process, however, need no longer be the price of intimacy. Indeed, continuing down this path would only destroy her marriage. So she decided on a different course. She would talk with her husband about how his drinking was impacting on their marriage and their son, and insist that he take responsibility for his illness by getting treatment and specialized social support. Only then could they relate to each other as marital partners and as parents, rather than as caretaker and patient. By developing fully considered narratives that accorded with the distinct emotional realities of her relationships with her father and husband, my patient was now free to imagine alternative futures and choose her own story, rather than repeat the painful story of her childhood.
The client's permission to write about her psychotherapy was obtained on tape more than 25 years ago, using general descriptors to make her and others unidentifiable.
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A psychotherapy patient arrived late, hurried into my office, and threw herself down in her seat. Tears had ruined her eye makeup and created black streams down her cheeks, although her facial expression was furious. As our eyes met, she declared with a force that slapped me across the face, “I hate drunks.” The patient was referring to her husband, whose alcohol dependence made life painful for her and their only child. A few seconds after I absorbed the impact of her fury and asked what had happened, nascent thoughts coalesced into a singular question in my mind: “If you hate drunks so much, why did you marry one?”
In fact, a familiar story was played out in her decision to marry this man – a kind, high-functioning survivor of childhood sexual abuse who, like the patient's father, drowned his emotional pain in alcohol. She genuinely loved her husband and wanted to heal him, a wish that as a child she had been able to fulfill, if only intermittently, in relation to her father. Yet she lacked emotional insight into the connection between her childhood relationship with her father and her marital choice. An unconscious script ran through her relationships with these two men, which can be represented as:
He is in pain; I am forlorn → I try to ease his pain → He feels better and engages with me → I feel connected to him
This structure illustrates a more automatic and unconscious level of narrative processing than the “conviction narratives” proposed by the authors. The seminal personality theorist Silvan Tomkins first proposed that people employ narrative processing to organize their life experiences with his “script” theory (Reference Tomkins and Keasey1979, Reference Tomkins, Aronoff, Rabin and Zucker1987, Reference Tomkins1991), which augured the rise of the narrative Zeitgeist across many fields of psychology (Demorest, Popovska, & Dabova, Reference Demorest, Popovska and Dabova2012; Howard, Reference Howard1991; McAdams, Reference McAdams2001; Nelson & Fivush, Reference Nelson and Fivush2004). To understand and cope with emotionally intense experiences, Tomkins proposed that people form “scripts” or affective schemas that represent how such experiences typically proceed and how to respond in order to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect. While scripts are constructed from specific emotional experiences, they become general rather than specific so as to function as a personal guide for anticipating and managing similar experiences in the future. As Demorest et al. (Reference Demorest, Popovska and Dabova2012) described, “The individual is both dramatist and actor, constructing the scripts through which he or she understands and lives life.”
In this sense of providing an emotional guide, scripts are similar to the authors' conviction narratives. However, the latter are more complex, higher-order representations that allow people to imagine multiple possible futures – not just one, and evaluate those futures in arriving at consciously considered choices and action plans. Moreover, scripts are overlearned through repeated reinforcement and thus operate automatically and largely unconsciously, making them resistant to change. While originally adaptive, scripts can therefore become maladaptive when subsequently activated by ostensibly similar experiences that they do not, in fact, apply to. As a child, my patient's script allowed her to negotiate her father's pain and alcoholism and sustain a close relationship with him. Similarly becoming her husband's emotional caretaker, however, left her feeling exploited, exhausted, and entirely unmet in her marriage.
If a goal of psychotherapy is “to make the unconscious conscious,” people need to become aware of the maladaptive scripts that they unwittingly live by, and develop them into reality-based conviction narratives. When my patient became aware of her script, she recognized that she had to take care of her father as a little girl in order to maintain a relationship with him. Similarly attending to her husband, and obviating her own needs in the process, however, need no longer be the price of intimacy. Indeed, continuing down this path would only destroy her marriage. So she decided on a different course. She would talk with her husband about how his drinking was impacting on their marriage and their son, and insist that he take responsibility for his illness by getting treatment and specialized social support. Only then could they relate to each other as marital partners and as parents, rather than as caretaker and patient. By developing fully considered narratives that accorded with the distinct emotional realities of her relationships with her father and husband, my patient was now free to imagine alternative futures and choose her own story, rather than repeat the painful story of her childhood.
The client's permission to write about her psychotherapy was obtained on tape more than 25 years ago, using general descriptors to make her and others unidentifiable.
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This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interest
None.