5. Uncover Your Original Script

I titled the next busic playlist Uncover Your Original Script because, if my ego-mind’s beliefs were as powerful as it seemed, then I needed to learn more about those beliefs and how they might be driving my habitual behaviors and thwarting my attempts to live in the moment. To my delight, I found lots of songs about the desire to break free from old patterns.

My goal was to assess my original script’s beliefs and ascertain if any of those beliefs – beliefs that had been necessary to survive my childhood circumstances – were now hampering, rather than serving, the adult I had become. Was my original script causing hidden problems with its inability to see that “too much of a good thing is still too much”? What detrimental aspects were resulting from my failure to maintain the flexibility suggested by personality cross training?  I envisioned the process of uncovering my original script like that of unravelling a tangled skein of yarn. Here’s some of what I found at the end of the string.

My need to Prove my abilities had started because of my desire NOT to be seen as abnormal and defective. That belief had ultimately blossomed into a pattern of always striving to exceed all expectations. I came to see that this pattern had caused a severe case of “Support Deficit.” I hadn’t stepped into the workaholic range where family and friends didn’t exist, but I was still way too far towards always needing to prove my abilities.

I could see now that I lacked support, in good part, because I was desperately trying to look like I didn’t need support. This pattern made me appear highly capable, but it eventually resulted in a deep-seated belief that support was unavailable – at least to me. The proving seed in my original messages had grown from the belief that no one should ever help you, into such beliefs as no one can help you and perhaps even, you don’t deserve help. In this way, I was actually replicating the childhood pattern of constantly needing to prove what I could do… without support.

What I found at the end of my Support Deficit string was a foundational belief that:

• Vulnerability is bad and should be denied.

My physical vulnerability, which had grown into my need to prove my abilities, was based on the belief that all weaknesses should be hidden. Likewise, my emotional vulnerability, which had grown into my need to hide my more sensitive feelings, was based on the belief that feelings of vulnerability were to be ignored and the pretense of strength to be staunchly maintained.

But there was a major problem with my original script’s attempt to deny my vulnerabilities. The problem was that clearly I was vulnerable. If vulnerability was bad, it meant that I was implicitly bad. And that belief was surely going to keep me proving my abilities forever, in order to show that I wasn’t as “bad” as I appeared.

Likewise, my belief in the need to Please others had resulted from my desire NOT to be rejected and alone, as I had been throughout childhood. That need to please was grounded in the belief that I could, should, and must control the perceptions of others. That desire to control others perceptions is implicit in the use of the word they in both of the mottos I heard as a child:

• If you show what you can do, they’ll eventually come around and see your abilities instead of your disabilities.
• If you show that the teasing bothers you, they’ll just tease you more.

The logical outgrowth of the pleasing seed was that I now cared way too much about other’s perceptions of me. I was suffering from what has come to be called “Approval Addiction.”

Because of this addiction, my primary perceptive orientation was how I appeared to others. It was as if I had been stricken with the social media disease, in which maintaining a positive image is critical, way before social media had even existed. The pleasing seed had grown into the belief that I needed to control the perceptions of others in order to be safe. And then in my pleasing behaviors, I was constantly demonstrating this belief to be true.

The foundational belief that I found at the end of my Approval Addiction string was the belief that:

• Lack of control is dangerous and should be avoided.

Once again, there was an inherent problem with my need to control the perceptions other people had of me and of what I could or couldn’t do. That belief is grounded in the faulty correlation between our outcomes and our self-worth. The truth is I could try my hardest and give my best effort and still in certain circumstances never achieve the desired outcome. The chips can always fall the other way. Lots of external factors would always remain out of my control.

And if control of my outcomes was imaginary, then control of other people’s perceptions of me was even more delusional. People would come with their own needs and wants, and those weren’t in my power to adjust. The belief that I needed to somehow control their reactions to me in order to feel safe was destined to keep me attempting to control the uncontrollable forever.

Clearly, as humans, we don’t ever have total control of either our outcomes or others’ perceptions of us. To equate my Lack of Control with weakness was equally deluded as believing my Vulnerability indicated weakness.

That wasn’t all I came to see. Vulnerability and Lack of Control weren’t just necessarily a part of my life, they were an integral part of any life. Those qualities are merely aspects of being a finite and limited human being. They are the very things that make us human, like falling in love or attempting something new.

Love inevitably makes you vulnerable and without control when something happens to a loved one. Any new growth creates the vulnerable risk of potentially highlighting what you can’t do. And then there’s the ultimate combination of human vulnerability and lack of control – Death. It isn’t possible to live a life without accepting the inevitability of vulnerability and lack of control.

With this understanding, much of the pressure to prove and please began to dissipate, not overnight and certainly not completely. But slowly and surely, the hold my original script had on me began to lessen. And with that freedom, came limited initial access to the present moment. Little by little I was finding a way to step beyond, or perhaps around, the preset moments dictated by my original fear-based script. 

The songs in this Uncover Your Original Script busic supported my growth during the lengthy process of unraveling the tangled web of thoughts that comprised my belief system. I came to see that I wasn’t alone in having bought into beliefs that were no longer serving me. Others were attempting to break the chains of their belief systems, too. 

Most appropriately, the need for disengaging from my original script was brought home to me on Independence Day. Our dog huddled by my side shaking with fear at the loud cracks of fireworks. I so wanted to convince her that her fear of hunters was only in her DNA and not appropriate for her now. But gaining freedom from one’s original programming is never that easy. As Martha Beck said, “Seeing your own original script is like seeing the color of your own eyes.”