Kind self-talk & authoring your life script (pt.4)
What life script are you living by? A life script is the narrative we assign to our lives—crafted in childhood and deeply influencing how we see ourselves and others. Our life script includes emotional patterns, limiting beliefs, and assumptions that guide our choices. Highlighting our blind spots and victim mindsets can be painful and yet, it’s the first step towards authoring a more empowered path. [15.1.25.]
What you’ll learn
What a life script is: Understand the stories you tell yourself, how they shape your beliefs and actions, and the role of childhood conditioning in forming them.
How to challenge negative scripts: Recognize patterns like self-fulfilling prophecies, self-sabotage, and playing games, and explore ways to rewrite these limiting beliefs.
The role of kind self-talk: Discover how supportive inner dialogue and small, manageable steps can help you overcome obstacles, shift your mindset, and create empowering new narratives.
What’s a life script?
Journalling is a good way to start writing new stories you want to tell yourself
A life script is the stories that we tell ourselves.
Recently I’ve been using the classic, “I have no time to do anything.” This may just be self-talk or internal chatter but the accumulated messages, beliefs and attitudes we convince ourselves of each day make up our life script. Imagine the words that you tell yourself are adding up to your life story. What chapter of life are you on now? What would be the title of your chapter be today?
My current chapter would be called: “Motherhood: Mess, Magic and Frustration.” Perhaps Mess and Magic sound more positive but who can forget the spills, interruptions, and continual brain fog? Just today I thought I lost my phone and spent 45 minutes running outside like a mad woman to retrace my steps only to find it in a bag at home (yes, brain fog is real). Motherhood is full of these detours that lead to nowhere but I’m accepting I’m not a robot (even if sometimes I wish I was a productivity robot)!
Life script is a concept developed by Transactional analysis (founded by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the 1950s). Transactional Analysis (TA) posits that by learning our personality and communication styles, we can understand how we relate to others.
Are you a victim?
When I’m unproductive, I label myself as lazy and catastrophize: “If I don’t get much done, I’ll never achieve anything and fall behind in life.” Negative self-talk like this feeds limiting life scripts—stories we tell ourselves that shape our beliefs and actions.
It’s hard to admit, “I’m acting like a victim right now.” Victimhood feels passive, helpless, and full of blame, guilt, and pessimism. While being human means feeling like a victim at times, becoming aware of our self-talk and reactions allows us to choose new responses.
Changing these negative scripts is tough because they’re rooted in childhood conditioning. Exploring the emotional patterns in your life reveals recurring destructive themes that may feel impossible to escape. The first step is recognising these patterns. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How am I at the same place AGAIN?" you know that unconscious patterns are ruling your life. It’s often when life gets too painful that we hold our hands in the air and admit, “I’m ready to change.”
Victimised life scripts include:
(1) Self-fulfilling prophecy: When we expect something to happen and let our beliefs and expectations affect our actions. We then fulfil our future expectations, making it happen just as we had imagined.
Example: “I’m not good talking to people” > “I’m nervous talking to this person”
(2) Self-sabotage: A pattern of actions or thoughts that prevents someone from achieving their goals. It can be conscious or unconscious and can affect personal and professional success, as well as relationships.
Example: “I can’t trust others” > “ I break up with someone as soon as they want to get close?”
(3) Playing games: In the book The Games People Play, Eric Berne states that “Games” are repeated, unconscious patterns of interaction where people follow hidden motives. These games often serve underlying purposes like gaining attention or avoiding responsibility (based on roles we learnt in childhood).
Example: Blaming someone for not achieving your goal: “If it weren’t for you I'‘d …” The payoff is by blaming someone else, the person avoids responsibility for their situation and the risk of failure if they try to change it.
Re-write your life script with kind self-talk
In the winter seasons of life, maintaining a positive mindset can feel impossible. That’s when I ask myself, “What small, simple step can I take to move forward?”
Big goals may be out of reach, but even a small action can lighten the load. Obstacles are inevitable—what keeps us striving and showing up?
Confidence comes from staying true to ourselves and acting with integrity (doing what we say we’re going to do in a patient and imperfect way). If we didn’t receive the love or support we needed growing up, the voices in our heads can be discouraging (“You can’t do it” etc). And yet, as adults, it’s up to us to rewrite our inner messages, planting seeds for growth and possibility.
Kind self-talk is the voice that supports us at our lowest, asking, “What would make this easier?” or “What do you need right now?” It’s not about excuses but about encouragement—helping us go around obstacles when the inner critic shouts, “You’re lazy.” It lets us acknowledge hard feelings and still nudges us forward, like a gentle coach.
Kind self-talk questions:
Therapy and kind self-talk for a more empowered life script
Therapy can help us see how we relive the feelings of our childhood by manipulating others to play out roles we assign them. If we’ve felt ashamed, small, or hurt in the past, we sometimes recreate an issue again and again because it’s familiar to us. Often unconscious patterns, parental messages and beliefs shape our scripts.
Kind self-talk helps us challenge negative thinking, and choose more helpful scripts. Even if our life script feels deeply ingrained, we can rewrite it. While unconscious patterns and false beliefs may try to hold us back, change happens in small incremental steps.
It starts with kindness doing now what will make life easier later. Therapy expands our self-awareness while kind self-talk can add lightness to our perfectionistic expectations: “I didn’t finish my to-do list today, but that’s okay. I’ll do what I can now and start refreshed tomorrow.”