Avoiding being an actor in someone else’s story.

Have you ever found yourself in a relationship where you’re thinking ‘I’m not being myself?’
You might feel like that in a relationship at work, in a friendship or even in your own family. You might strive to try and find who your real self is, or be struggling to get your true self seen. However the chances are it isn’t your fault; you might have fallen into the role of an actor in someone else’s life play.

We all have a script for life that we create in childhood; often it’s called a life map. This ‘script’ is created by what we are taught about the world and it becomes the compass we navigate through life with. However life is always giving us new information and we must readjust the ‘script’ in order to keep it accurate.

So what happens if the script holds a belief that is deemed fundamental to our feeling of safety, something so profound that we would rather redraw the world than change this aspect of the life map?

For example, people with rigid beliefs about themselves and how others treat them, find safety and comfort in what they believe, even if that belief limits them. It is what they have experienced and they are sticking to it. So this relates to their personal script, the one they drew to navigate their personal story. In this case it creates a container for who we believe we are and how we show up in the world, and depending on how open and flexible we are will depend upon how rigid this container is.

One lady I worked with believed that she “always gets bullied”. Her mother was a bully; she was bullied at school, and she was coming to see me as she was being bullied at work. Our conversation was going well, and then as we were getting close to a breakthrough she stopped understanding what I was saying. Her personality changed and I started to get frustrated, I couldn’t understand what had happened. So I went back, and talked about something she had already agreed on before, however this time she switched her opinion and disagreed.

I suddenly realised that she had shifted into ‘child’ and I was acting like a ‘disappointed parent’, and if this hadn’t been in a professional relationship, I wonder if she would have turned the balance of the relationship into a victim and persecutor. This interaction helped her see that she was forcing people to become bullies in order to fulfil her life map / script.

In another similar example, a man I knew accused the world of being judgemental against him, but in conversation would constantly say things that would give the world a negative impression of himself. The things he said often weren’t true, and he admitted he would say them for effect; and the desired effect of judgement is what he got.

So now is the time to reassess those relationships, where you feel like you are not being yourself, or not being allowed to be true to yourself; and also to ask yourself authentically if you could be expecting others to fit into your own life script in some way.

Intuition is a great tool to check in with yourself and see if you are playing out an old part in your own life script and expecting people to be actors in your story. But also intuitive knowing can tell you when you’re playing a role in someone else’s story. This means you can stop this from happening and maybe show a brighter direction in someone else’s journey.