The Space Between Scripts

One of the very first things I learnt in psychology was the idea of unconditional positive regard. For Carl Rogers, this meant meeting another person with acceptance, empathy and non-judgement, not because the person is perfect, but because their humanity is larger than their mistakes, symptoms or social identity (Rogers, 1957). This idea became fundamental to my ethics. It taught me that a person should not be reduced to one behaviour, one story, one rumour, one weakness or one moment of emotional collapse.

Have I always been like this? Of course not. A person’s life script is layered, and mine is layered too. My own script has changed over time. I moved from being extremely religious and rigid in my outlook to someone who still believes, but holds belief with more fluidity, more humility and more openness towards people and life in general. If you met me five or ten years ago, you may have met a completely different person. Not because that person was false, but because experience had not yet done its work on me.

Human beings develop through experience. We are not fixed machines. We adapt, break, repair, revise and evolve. In that sense, self-development is not only personal growth; it is a kind of psychological optimisation. Freud understood that early experiences and unconscious patterns continue shaping adult life (Freud, 1915). Jung saw development as a movement towards individuation, where a person becomes more whole by integrating unconscious material rather than being ruled by it (Jung, 1966). Rogers saw growth as a movement towards congruence, where the inner self and outer life become more honest with each other (Rogers, 1961). These ideas gave me a language for something I had been living without fully understanding.

The core question I keep returning to is this: why is a man with a BSc and an MSc sitting behind a desk at night, working in a background role? I do not have one simple answer. Part of it may be survival. Part of it may be financial pressure. Part of it may be the way life unfolded after years of stress, family complexity and emotional exhaustion. But another part of me believes I ended up there because I was searching for a relationship that finally made sense to me. For much of my life, relationships had not fully fulfilled me. They often came with expectation, pressure, judgement, performance, loyalty tests or emotional confusion. Then I found something different in the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy introduced me to a way of relating that was not based on control or shame, but on presence, containment, empathy, reflection and truth. The therapeutic relationship became a model for a different kind of human encounter. It gave me a way to navigate emotions without being swallowed by them.

Before that, I often felt as though I was tiptoeing and tap-dancing my way through complex relationship architectures. These networks stretched across places like East London, Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester and other parts of the South Asian diaspora where family, marriage, mosque, village memory, reputation, caste, business, property and social status can become deeply entangled. These were not simple family relationships. They were systems of expectation. Many men of my generation  second- and third-generation Kashmiri, Pakistani and Indian men  quietly began to move away from these informal tribal systems. Some moved physically. Some emotionally withdrew. Some married outside the structure. Some remained inside but no longer believed in it. The expectations were too high, too contradictory, or simply not feasible within the society we were actually living in.

Feasibility matters. A system can only survive if it functions within its environment. Many informal tribal systems were formed in another habitat: village life, extended kinship, collective honour, social surveillance and arranged alliances. But when these systems were transplanted into a Western urban environment, something strange happened. The outer packaging changed, but the inner operating system often remained the same. What emerged was sometimes a Frankenstein version of the tribal system. On the surface, it could appear modern, educated, liberal, thoughtful and emotionally aware. People might use the language of concern, wellbeing, family, choice or respect. But underneath, the older structure of informal power remained intact. The wrapping paper became Western, but the ideology inside remained tribal: hierarchy, loyalty, reputation, obedience, control and punishment for stepping outside the line.

This created confusion. The goalposts changed because the surface message and the hidden structure did not match. On the surface, people might say they believed in freedom, education and personal choice. But when someone actually tried to exercise autonomy  by choosing a spouse, remaining in a marriage, moving away from the family home, setting boundaries or refusing pressure  the older system revealed itself.

Bowen’s family systems theory helps explain this. He argued that families are emotional systems, and that anxiety moves through the system when one person begins to differentiate or become more separate (Bowen, 1978). In a highly fused system, autonomy can be experienced as betrayal. The individual is not simply seen as becoming himself; he is seen as threatening the emotional balance of the whole group.

Minuchin also described how some families become enmeshed, with blurred boundaries between individuals (Minuchin, 1974). In such systems, a person’s marriage, work, children, money, religion and movements may stop belonging to him privately. They become public property inside the family network. The person’s choices are interpreted as loyalty or betrayal, obedience or rebellion, honour or shame.

This is why systems that are losing power can become more aggressive. When members start leaving, questioning or becoming independent, the system may try harder to pull them back. It may use guilt. It may use shame. It may use money. It may use family duty. It may use religion. It may use elders. It may use reputation. The more unsustainable the system becomes, the more desperate its attempts to survive may appear.

This does not only happen in tribal systems. It happens in ideologies, political movements, religious institutions, economic structures, workplaces and families. Every system tries to preserve itself. Capitalism does this. Socialism does this. Religious systems do this. Family systems do this. Tribal systems do this. When a system feels threatened, it often defends itself before it reflects on itself.

But human beings evolve. Societies evolve. Life scripts evolve. What worked in one generation may damage the next. What once felt like protection may later become control. What was once called honour may later be recognised as fear. What was once called duty may later be understood as self-erasure.

This is why the idea of a life script matters to me. Eric Berne described life scripts as unconscious life plans shaped early in development and reinforced through relationships and repeated patterns (Berne, 1961). We do not simply wake up one day as free individuals. We inherit scripts from family, religion, culture, class, trauma, school, work, marriage and community. We may leave one script only to enter another. We may leave a tribal system and become trapped in an economic one. We may leave religious rigidity and become trapped in status anxiety. We may leave family control and become controlled by work, shame or ambition.

The task is not simply to escape one system and worship another. The task is to become conscious.

This is where psychology helped me. It gave me a way to observe the scripts rather than simply live inside them. It helped me see that people are often not acting only from personal intention. They are carrying family histories, cultural injuries, resentments, loyalties, fears, religious anxieties and collective expectations. This does not excuse harm, but it helps explain why people can behave destructively while believing they are preserving something valuable.

Jung would perhaps describe some of this as the movement of the collective unconscious. In families and communities, archetypes can become activated: the elder, the judge, the mother, the exile, the scapegoat, the wounded healer, the rebel, the obedient son, the dishonoured woman, the patriarch, the outsider (Jung, 1968). These figures are not just personal roles. They carry mythic weight. People may act them out without knowing they are being moved by something older than themselves.

Freud would bring attention to repetition. Human beings often repeat unresolved conflicts, even when those repetitions cause suffering (Freud, 1920). A family system may repeat old wounds across generations: abandoned daughters, resentful sons, controlled marriages, shame, silence, rivalry, emotional exile and the punishment of anyone who refuses the script. The past returns, not always as memory, but as behaviour.

Rogers offers a different possibility. His work suggests that healing begins when the person is met as a whole human being, with empathy, genuineness and unconditional positive regard (Rogers, 1957). This is why the therapeutic relationship mattered so much to me. It was not based on who had power. It was not based on who controlled the narrative. It was not based on shame, loyalty tests or emotional blackmail. At its best, therapy creates a space where a person can be challenged without being destroyed and understood without being excused.

That is the kind of relating I now value.

I no longer want to live inside systems that demand self-erasure as the price of belonging. I no longer want to confuse obedience with love, silence with peace, or endurance with loyalty. I no longer want to be trapped inside inherited scripts that are no longer sustainable in the world I actually live in. There is an old symbolic story about Laozi, who, tired of the corruption and collapse around him, left the old territories and moved west. Before leaving, he is said to have left behind the Tao Te Ching, a text concerned with simplicity, humility, non-forcing and the natural way of things. Whether one reads this historically, spiritually or symbolically, the image matters: a man sees that the system around him has become too distorted, so he steps away into solitude and leaves behind wisdom rather than more noise.

Sometimes a man needs space. Not because he hates people, but because the system around him has become too loud, too controlling, too confused and too consuming. When a crumbling tribal system tries to pull everyone into its wormhole, using financial and social leverage to control loved ones until they turn against each other, solitude can become necessary. It becomes a place of recovery. It becomes a place where the psyche can breathe. For me, the last five years have felt like a period of solitude and initiation. I did not always understand it while I was inside it. At times, it looked like failure. It looked like night shifts, exhaustion, loss, shame, confusion and being stuck behind a desk. But perhaps something else was also happening. Perhaps I was being removed from one system long enough to see it clearly. Perhaps the night desk became a symbolic watchtower. Perhaps solitude became the place where I could finally hear my own inner life.

Maslow’s idea of self-actualisation also matters here. He described human development as a movement towards realising one’s potential, but only when more basic needs such as safety, belonging and esteem are sufficiently met (Maslow, 1943). This is important because self-actualisation is not a luxury word. It is not about ego or status. It is about becoming more fully alive, more integrated and more truthful.

My solitude has not been empty. It has been painful, but it has also been formative. It has been an ancestral call, a psychological descent, a Jungian confrontation with shadow, a Sufi-like inward turning, and perhaps even a shamanic kind of initiation. Not in the sense of becoming special, but in the sense of being forced to descend into pain, shame, memory and silence in order to return with deeper understanding. I do not romanticise suffering. Suffering can damage a person. It can humiliate, isolate and exhaust the soul. But if a person survives it consciously, suffering can also reveal the architecture of a life. It can show which systems were false, which relationships were conditional, which loyalties were built on fear, and which parts of the self were waiting to be reclaimed.

For me, the time of solitude feels close to an end. I am not returning as the same person who entered it. I am returning with more awareness, more boundaries, more humility and more responsibility. I still have duties. I still have a wife, children, work, study, health, faith and a future to rebuild. But I no longer want to return to those responsibilities as someone unconscious, obedient and split inside.

The purpose of these years may have been initiation. The purpose may have been to teach me that I cannot live only through inherited scripts. I cannot be fully human if I am always performing for systems that do not truly see me. I cannot keep giving myself away to structures that offer belonging only when I surrender my autonomy.

So what happened in these five years of solitude? The next article will shed light on this....