ABSTRACT

In doing structural analysis of the Parent ego state and script analysis it is easy to focus exclusively on the client's parents, and the in¯uence they had in the formation of the client's script, and to ignore the impact of cultural and religious Parent ego states. It is even easier to ignore these in¯uences when they are identical to our own. Yet our environmental, social and cultural context plays a signi®cant role in our script. Our cultural (and religious) introjects play an important part in our internal experience, and are mostly reinforced daily (certainly for those who are of the majority culture) in an implicit manner by dint of our being within a society and through our interactions with others. `The dominant culture's wishes, demands, behaviour, and love are introjected through parental, family and community relationships and become part of the client's sense of self and personality' (Shadbolt, 2004: 120±1). All therapists can appreciate the powerful impact that having a quietly disapproving, or even an outright condemnatory parent would have on the self-esteem of a developing person, and yet it is all too easy to overlook the experiential fact that similar processes take place intrapsychically on an implicit and unconscious level. These processes are in¯uenced by an introjected cultural Parent, and the interaction between this cultural Parent and our sense of self, our Child ego state. The feminist movement ®rst drew our attention to gender scripting and the related gender-stereotyped cultural Parent, and the powerful but hidden impact that patriarchy has in shaping the self-esteem, the way of thinking and the expectations and behaviour of both women and men. The intrapsychic interaction

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Shivanath and Hiremath (2003) extend the concept of cultural scripting and develop a script matrix that accounts for cultural scripting factors. In their model they develop three layers of scripting: the scripting that occurs within the family; the individual's religious and cultural script; and the wider (predominantly white and heterosexual) cultural scripting. Cultural scripting is indirect, and insidious. It is the implicit messages and values all around us, that are constantly present and which inform the workings and values of institutions such as society, government, religious institutions and, of course, the media. For an example of this, recently the fashion industry has been criticized for using very underweight models in an attempt to raise awareness of the subtle in¯uence such images have on young women regarding what is attractive, acceptable and desirable. This is taking place within a backdrop of media, which includes magazines which seem to focus on weight ¯uctuations among celebrities, and where weight gain is criticized and weight loss is envied. The socialization of the child also takes place in a wider social context, and in thinking about the individual we need to account for the powerful impact of peers, schooling, socialization and again the media they are exposed to. Peer relationships are enormously important to children and it is important to consider their contribution to the shaping of an individual's sense of self and self-esteem.