We all choose a story for our lives – out lifescript. This script provides the magical solution for resolving basic issues that were unresolved in childhood: how to get unconditional love and acceptance. It is a ‘protection against disaster’ – but it just doesn’t work. You can accept a lifescript (“I’m always a failure”) or create one (“I overcame failure”)
Our lifescript gives meaning to our lives. But what happens follows a course based on 4 factors:
- Heredity – you can’t do what you’re physically not capable of
- External Events – trauma affects our reaction to life
- Script – what you choose your life to show
- Autonomous Decisions – being active or reactive
Looking at your story, you have the characters, you have the plot, you have the conflict, and then the resolution.
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
(Brooker, 2005)
Brooker describes 7 basic plots that underlie most novels, movies, and plays, and we often describe our lives based on one of these:
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Overcoming the Monster | Like Beowulf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jaws, and many of the James Bond films, where a hero must defeat a monster and restore order to a world that has been threatened by the monster’s presence. |
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Rags to Riches | These stories feature modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve a happy ending when their special talents or true beauty is revealed to the world at large. Includes any number of classics such as ‘Cinderella’, or David Copperfield. |
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The Quest | A hero, often accompanied by sidekicks, travels in search of a priceless treasure and fights against evil and overpowering odds and ends when he gets both the treasure and the girl. The Odyssey is a classic example of this kind of story. |
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Voyage and Return | Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, other stories of normal protagonists who are suddenly thrust into strange and alien worlds and must make their way back to normal life once more. |
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Comedy | Not always synonymous with humour. Instead, the plot of a comedy involves some kind of confusion that must be resolved before the hero and heroine can be united in love. Think of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and even War and Peace. |
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Tragedy | As a rule, the terrible consequences of human overreaching and egotism. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar, Anna Karenina…this category is usually self-evident. |
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Rebirth | The stories of Ebenezer Scrooge and Mary Lennox would fall into this basic plot type, which focuses on a threatening shadow that seems nearly victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth, and the restoration of a happier world. |
Each story typically has 3 acts; the set up, the confrontation, and the close or Third Act. There are three types of ‘third act’:
- Winning – always relative to the goals set at the start
- Losing – not accomplishing the declared purpose, and the degree of comfort it goes with.
- First degree where failures and losses are mild within the social setting.
- Second degree is serious enough to be unacceptable topics for social conversation.
- Third degree culminates in death, serious injury, or illness, or a legal crisis.
- Non-winning or a banal resolution to the story.
so where are you on the 3 act. Some people choose to be in the 3rd act all their life. Set the scene, tragedy, and stuck. but you can chose when the third act starts or finishes. If you take the film ‘Finding Nemo’ the end of the first act is losing his son, and the story is finding him again. But the third act could have been the loss of his son and his despair of never seeing him again. This is why the third act is important. What do you want the end point to be? Is having an affair the end, or is the third act, how you repaired your marriage?
We are often ‘scripty’ or ‘in a script’ when:
- The here-and-now situation is perceived as stressful. The greater the stress, the more likely to get in a script
- There is some resemblance between the here-and-now situation and a stressful situation in childhood. We rubber band back to the previous stressful situation. We might ‘put a face on someone’ to match a previous bad experience. This is called transference in Freudian theory.
When we are in the script, we consciously or sub-consciously make our lives match our script.
But you can chose to describe your story and your script…