ABSTRACT
Life scripts are unconscious systems of psychological organization and self-regulation developed as a result of the cumulative failures in significant, dependent relationships. Scripts are unconsciously formed by infants, young children, and even adolescents and adults as a creative strategy for coping with disruptions in relationships that repeatedly fail to satisfy crucial developmental and relational needs. The infant’s and young child’s physiological survival reactions and affective/procedural experiences—the life script protocol and palimpsests that compose the primal dramas of childhood—form sub-symbolic internal working models of self-regulation and relational interaction. Life scripts involve a complex network of neural pathways formed as thoughts, affects, biochemical and physiological reactions, fantasy, relational patterns, and the important process of homeostatic self-regulation of the organism. The general psychology literature has described such unconscious relational systems as cognitive structures that represent an individual’s organization of the world into a unified system of beliefs, concepts, attitudes, and expectations that reflect some aspect of unconscious relational patterns or life scripts.
