Hello, and happy new year to you all. I realise have not posted on my blog for quite some time now. Other priorities presented themselves over the holiday period, and I realised that I needed to allow myself a bit of break. However, I have missed it, and so I am back again. Those of you that follow my musings (a huge thank you by the way), may recall that I had recently finished outlining the different drivers from transactional analysis (TA) theory. What I plan on doing over the next few weeks is to write about the opposite decision making factors, which work on our behaviour, from TA which are the injunctions.
As I was walking around a busy town centre over the holiday, I was struck by the huge amount of signs that there are; each of them giving us a different message. Some were advertising sales, some pointing out places of interest or services. Other were purely decorative or directing us to different parts of the location, or even inviting us to try things out. These signs were fascinating and informative, and stirred up excitement, clarification and sometimes joy. Of course I would like to try some cranberry flavoured cheese. An offer of ‘buy one, get one free on books’ is of interest to me. Yes I need to know where the car park is, as I am feeling a bit lost.
However, there were also a range of signs telling me what not to do. Don’t enter. For employees only. This attraction is closed. Don’t park here. No outside food to be consumed on these premises. Don’t forget pick up a leaflet. These signs did not give me the same warm and fuzzy feelings as the others. In fact, some of them caused me to worry and panic a little. Questions came into my mind like, have I parked in the right place? What happens if I don’t pick up a leaflet? Am I somewhere I shouldn’t be? Now obviously, most of these signs are there to keep me safe, for example, there might be something hazardous behind a “do not enter” sign. If I park in the wrong place, I am likely to get a fine. In TA terms, these signs have been written from the author’s positive parent ego state, with the hope that our positive adapted child will respond. In the same way, a parent will tell a child not to run across the road as they may get hit by a vehicle.
What I then did, was imagined what the town centre would look like if there were only the signs telling us what not to do (because my mind works that way). So only messages telling us where we can’t go, what we can’t do, what we mustn’t engage with were present. What kind of experience would I have had? I imagined I had got a bit lost and needed the car park, but the only signs I could see told me where not to park, where not to enter and not to forget to pay my ticket before I left. I felt lost and even more confused than I was at the start. When I conducted this thought experiment, I actually felt quite sad, and a little bit afraid. I took the image a bit further and pictured a group of lost people. Some were trying to help each other out, but not getting very far. Others were arguing with each other of the right way to go and venting their frustration, and some had given up and were sitting on the floor with their heads in their hands.
I realise that this is a rather farfetched and improbably scenario, and you are possibly wondering how someone could even think that just displaying these restricted messages was a good idea. Hypothetically, there might be a way it could happen. In a council meeting, they are discussing signage, and it just so happens that there have been a large number of costly legal cases in neighbouring councils of people who have been hurt, or have appealed fines against them. The council is terrified that this might happen to them. In fact, the experience of the people round the table is that they have been fined in the past. Also, the person actually designing the signs had an accident caused by going somewhere that was not labelled as dangerous. One might surmise that fear takes over and they propose that the only way to keep others safe is to label everything. In fact they go one step further and realise that having people walk however they want thought a shopping centre might result in collisions and so lines are painted down the middle of the walkways. One way systems are put in place down any side routes. Personnel are employed to ensure that no one runs or loiters where they shouldn’t. Shops are banned from advertising as it might encourage an uneven flow of people through the streets. Signs must be plain so that they don’t distract from the “do not enter” signs to prevent people going the wrong way.
Again, this is an extreme picture I am painting. I hope that it doesn’t sound like the most ideal place to shop or socialise in the world (if it does, then my following posts might be of use to you). The signs are not being written from a positive parent ego state in this example. They have been constructed by a parent who is afraid. In fact they are written by the parent’s child ego state. They are so scared that they are going to get in trouble, or are reminded of a time when they suffered, that they feel they have to restrict the behaviour of others. They then express this from their negative controlling and negative nurturing parent. The public are seen as naughty children that must behave, or as helpless individuals that are incapable of working things out for themselves.
This is what injunctions are in TA. They are rohibative messages that come from our parent’s child ego state. Whereas drivers are messages from our parent’s parent ego state, and are learnt, injunctions are most often felt, usually by our child ego state. They are expressed as “Don’ts”. There are twelve common ones proposed by Bob and Mary Goulding, although there have been additions and modifications suggested by other authors. The twelve are:
Don’t be / exist, Don’t be you, Don’t be a child, Don’t grow up, Don’t be important/ noticed, Don’t make it / succeed, Don’t (do anything), Don’t feel, Don’t think, Don’t belong / popular, Don’t be close, Don’t be well / sane.
It might not be too difficult to envisage what it might be like for a child to grow up where the majority of the messages they received (either explicitly or implicitly) were of this nature. Just like those poor lost people in my hypothetical town, they might become lost, confused, angry, sad or despairing. Just like that scared town council, their parental role-models may have been fearful, unsure or disconnected, and so these were the only messages that could be given. Gone are the permissions of childhood, telling us what we can do. The free child nurturing messages to play, love, try out, create, explore, connect, imagine, question, have fun and feel everything.
Injunctions are felt by the very core of the person receiving them and so can for their sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Constantly being told not to do something will lead most people to question why. In terms of injunctions, they are either not given an answer, and so the assumption is made that it must be due to a personal character flaw. So if you are told that no one wants to hear what you have to say (‘don’t be important’), but never why, you might assume it is because what you have to say has no worth, and consequently, your worth is diminished. Explicitly, you may even be given an answer to why you shouldn’t do it. I have actually heard a child be told, “Be quiet, no one wants to listen to you, because you are stupid”. That child is being explicitly informed that they are not important enough to be heard, and they are to blame. In terms of the analogy of the signs, not only are you just receiving prohibitive messages, but they are personalised to you. It is not just "don't enter", it is, "YOU, you can't enter becuase....". Reading these signs is bound to cause an emotional response. It is this deep-seated nature of injunctions which makes them so powerful and so damaging. The deep emotional connection means they are stored in our unconscious even more readily than the learnt drivers from our youth.
I will finish by briefly mentioning how injunctions are related to drivers. Mc Neel suggested that we can respond to our injunctions from a despairing or a defiant position. In the first, we give into them fully and embrace the feelings of despair that they can bring. For example, those that live by the message of ‘don’t belong’ will view themselves as outcasts and may shut themselves off from all contact with others; forever feeling impossibly different from everyone else. In the defiant position, a person may seek to over compensate and do the opposite of the message. For example, some that has always been told not to be a child, may act out in as many immature ways as possible. From this position, drivers may be adopted as an overcompensation. So someone with a ‘don’t succeed’ driver may adopt a ‘try hard’ driver. As we saw however, when we discussed drivers, they are only masking the injunction underneath, and so when the driver cannot be fulfilled, the injunction comes up to meet them. In this way, when a person driven to work hard is unable to (perhaps through illness) they can feel the emotions associated with an underlying ‘don’t succeeded’ injunction, and despair that they are always destined to fail, perhaps due to their own laziness.
As there are so many injunctions, what I plan to do in my following posts is to explore a pair of them at a time. I will discuss where they may have come from, and the effects that they can have. I will also explore possible driver behaviour which can be employed to mask them. I will also encourage and suggest ways in which they might be challenged using the permissions that were lacking when the messages were first perceived. After all, a town centre is so much more exciting and fulfilling when it has a range of signs.
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