ABSTRACT
Protocol is a kernel of non-verbal, somatic experience that may be touched or triggered in intimate relationships. Body-centred theorists were beginning to speak of three realms of mental-somatic organization—the cognitive, sensorimotor, and visceral—that needed to be integrated in somatically based psychotherapy. When somatic-relational experience is located at a protocol level, there is often no clear distinction between self and (m)other. Verbal permission, empathy, or support would have been rendered useless by the depth and pervasiveness of the "reality" of Emily’s somatic-relational protocol. The decisional aspect of script formation, that is, defensive psychological structures, was emphasized in E. Berne's later writing and is central to such script theorists as the M. Gouldings and C. Steiner. Script theory has become more restrictive than enlivening. Script analysis as it has evolved over the years is overly psychoanalytic in attitude and overly reductionistic in what it communicates to people about human development.
