Imagine that our society is a lake with three rivers feeding it. The three rivers are fear, collaboration, and liberation. The technical terms I will use to describe them are scripts, rescripts, and descripting.
Scripts
There are three rivers. The first river is scripts. These are habitual or formulaic responses that relate to fear. For instance, we may fear that “if we don’t do this – that will happen.” This “if this – then that” is a simple script, called a schema; but scripts can also be much more complicated. Here’s an example of a complex script in action:
Client: I’m trying to decide whether to buy a coffee maker that I found online.
Therapist: So do you want it or not?
Client: I’m worried that this coffee maker is the same one we already owned, that broke. If I buy it, then it will just break again.
Therapist: What about buying a different one?
Client: I could buy a different one, but then I’m just caving into my worry. If I cave in to my worry, then I’ll just worry more and more. So I decided just not to get a new coffee maker and wait until my worry goes away.
Aside from fear, scripts relate to:
Aversion: this is a Buddhist word implying anger, hatred, or hostility. Anger can be a reaction to stress and worry, trauma, and powerlessness.
Stress and worry: slower-burning types of fear – that is, fear of more distant events that are not happening right now.
Trauma: A past event that causes a fear reaction or a feeling of powerlessness. We may seek power or anger in order to prevent the feared event from happening ever again.
Power: This is related to fear in that (1) powerful people may use fear as a tool to coerce others, (2) people may cede some of their power in hopes that powerful people will fix feared problems for them, (3) people may seek power over others in order to prevent feared events. Some scripts can relate directly to power but only indirectly to fear. For example, we may believe scripts given to us by authorities without experiencing fear of those authorities.
Manipulation: This is a subtler form of power, but it relates to fears in the same way.
Clinging: Grasping something that we fear may leave us. We may seek power or manipulation in order to hold onto it.
Craving: Desiring something strongly. We may seek power in order to feed the craving, and we may fear being unable to achieve what we crave.
A common thread here is that the object of fear / stress / worry / craving / clinging is perceived as high-stakes: it is very important to avoid the feared event or achieve the object of craving. Thus, discussing or innovating unproven, novel solutions – solutions that might require practice, failure, and adjustment over time – might be unwise. The most common feared events are: (1) abandonment, (2) death, (3) loss of power.
Instead of innovation, we have scripts: traditional or formulaic patterns given to us by past generations or by powerful authorities.
Rescripts
The second river is rescripts. These are like scripts, but they come from collaboration rather than fear. They happen when we are able to negotiate our social bonds however we prefer. This pattern include:
Curiosity: when collaborating with others, we may want to share information with them about how to adjust our scripts.
Authenticity: when we collaborate, we can choose to be ourselves rather than having scripts imposed on us.
Connection: we can be connected to others only when we are not constantly afraid that they will abandon us.
Rationality and emotionality: in order to negotiate social bonds with others, it helps to be reasonable. At the same time, it also helps to be in touch with our emotions.
In these situations, people create their own norms or invent their own rules, often through free collaboration with other humans.
Descripting
The third river is descripting, which happens when we interrogate scripts (including, sometimes, rescripts) and question whether these patterns are really good for us and for others.
Descripting is about liberation: not just collaboration, but the process of freeing ourselves from scripts.
Descripting also requires courage, which provides freedom from fear.
Some writings about descripting include:
John Wallin’s Attachment in Psychotherapy (Attachment Theory)
Martin Buber’s I and Thou
Laozi’s The Tao Te Ching
Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Zen Buddhism)
Sarah Peyton’s Your Resonant Self Workbook
The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes and Job
Texts about descripting are often hard to read, because – if they are well-written – they have to avoid simply providing new scripts for us to follow. Yet scripts are precisely what humans often want. We are more inclined to read something when it says “how to solve your problem with this one weird trick” (a common phrase in online ads). We are less inclined to read something that says “why you should avoid clicking on ads about one weird trick.” (At least, I have never seen such an ad.)
Paradoxes
Some paradoxes of descripting:
- The scripts may say “don’t even think of letting go of us – if you do, you’ll forget to defend against the various dangers, and then you’ll really be in trouble.”
- The scripts may tell you that others will only come to your aid if you act afraid, so the scripts are (they say) the very thing that’s providing you with connection to others.
- Once you are aware that the scripts are not enough to meet your own and others’ needs, you may feel afraid – driving you back toward scripts.
- When you hit upon a novel action that seems to work, the scripts may say, “Ah, that action must be one of us. Make it into a script and do it again and again without thinking about it.”
Nexus State Theory 