A life script, or a life position, is a repetition of the events and reactions of childhood.[71] Because there is no thinking in a script, discounts of reality are easy. People Play Stupid. The script provides automatic reactions to a complex life (“Be Kind”, for example). A script results in a loss of awareness through automatic responses. “This loss of awareness of needs, feelings, experiences, and memories is repression - a defensive active 'forgetting' or shutting down of some part or our thinking and feeling. People believe the lies they tell in this way. The script is a collection of your ego-states; these are the players of the self in the grand play, often below your individual awareness. It is the ‘working model’ or a ‘life script’ that enables the automatic behaviour pattern to continue unchecked.

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Children watch how parents love each other. An individual that is looking for a love partner to also be a parental figure, “In effect, each ends up acting like a parent one minute and a child the next.”[72] The mental health of the parents and the quality of their marriage often affect the child. A marital relationship may duplicate or be diametrically opposed to the relationship that the parents saw existing between their own parents. To be diametrically opposed is to rebel against the life script without really leaving the script.

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Children interpret their experience through someone else. In a system with domestic or corporeal abuse, rewards are for performing in ways that help the family/culture look good, reinforcing the denial. Children override their own senses with someone else’s information. Children who do not recognize their own feelings and live out their parents’ wishes, or the wishes of the crowd, are open to totalitarian suggestion.[73]

 

Parents influence their children based on how they were influenced by their own parents. When parents use harsh physical punishment to discipline their children, these children tend to do the same when they are parents themselves. Codependent relationships on the Drama Triangle are draining. Children immersed in codependence are wasting important energy for growth by positioning themselves on the Drama Triangle, with siblings, against parents, or vice versa. These children will have “blowouts” where they release the steam that builds from rackets and unresolved codependent relationships.