Check off lists
These ideas are so much better Shared!!
SCRIPTed Behavior
Yesterday we talked about how SCRIPTs (Social Control Reinforced In Practice and Talk/Text) can keep us from being our authentic selves. Today we’re going to look a specific type of SCRIPT, the Check-Off List.
There are lots of SCRIPTs that present themselves as Check-Off Lists. Holiday traditions provide many of these.
Here, I’ll provide the list, you guess the holiday.
- Chocolate
- Dinner (Extra points for “special” date)
- Wine
- Jewelry
- Oversized Stuffed Animal
- Flowers
- Done
If you do the list, you get credit. If you don’t, then you don’t. Even if someone says they don’t want you to do the list, you still feel compulsion to have to do the list, because your participation or lack of it is up for social approval with interpersonal consequences. Even if you really hate everything on the list, you have to deal with everyone else feeling compelled to participate, and to check in about how you’re participating.
Nothing in the list, except perhaps the time spent together over the dinner or date (not the dinner itself), is about the actual sharing of love. Some people dread it, some live for it.
- Decorations
- Special Movies/Media
- Special Songs
- Festive Foods
- Everything Baked
- Gifting
- Gift Wrapping
- Spending Time with Family
- Participation in Shared Mythologies
- Massive Purchasing
- Endless other checklist options depending on your social atmosphere…
What happens if you don’t participate?
What happens if you opt out of different parts? Even if you don’t share the same beliefs?
How much of your time in December is controlled by the checklist?
How much joy comes from performing a familiar checklist with others? How many memories and moments are made?
Here’s the thing, we perform checklists all of the time. They get us through the day. SCRIPTTs like many checklists, help us avoid conflict and get our needs met. Familiar SCRIPTTs reduce how many spoons your demands require of you. They’re pretty important.
Familiar SCRIPTTs also suppress our authentic in-the-moment selves. The performances become “good enough,” and authenticity waits for “someday.”
We all need SCRIPTTs and Checklists to be effective. The question becomes which SCRIPTTs are helping us, serving us, facilitating our lives and making them easier? Which scripts prevent us from acting in our authenticity?
Over time, these performances take over if we don’t take time to reassess, and take control of our SCRIPTTs. We start feeling as though we’ve lost ourselves, as though we’re going through the motions, because we are.
Assessing the checklists you’re performing is an excellent way of maintaining control over your interactions and the environment you participate in.
Happy Healing.
Survivor Literacy 
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