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Hal Bynum writes about a grandson who came to Nashville
where his grandfather had raised a lot of hell. Soon the grandson
started raising the same kind of hell. A man who knew the grandfather
said, “I wish you’d look. That boy has done brought his grandpa’s
act back to Nashville.” How many of the scripts we act out do not come
from our own inner self but from others? How many of grandpa’s acts
are we re-enacting? How many of Mama’s and Daddy’s? How much of what
we say and do is the unfolding of our own authentic self? We can adopt the scripts of others for a lot of
reasons. One is fear of rejection. One is love moving us to want to be
like someone we deeply love. One is pure repetition. Ever see a parent
repeat the same script to a kid until he believed it?
Like one I remember hearing from a neighbor to her son: “You
will never amount to nothing. You’ll be just like your Uncle John and
lay around on the river drinking and cat-fishing.” Guess what? He became just like Uncle John. It
wasn’t that he feared her. It wasn’t that he loved her so much he
wanted to fulfill her prophecy. It was the pure power of repetition. Sometimes our problem is not living out someone
else’s script but rejecting it so strongly we adopt the opposite
script. Seldom is the opposite script any better. In either case,
someone else is dictating our behavior. They are controlling you by
making you swing to an opposite extreme. The boy who adopted his mother’s prophecy that
he would lay around on the river drinking and cat-fishing could just as
well have swung to the opposite extreme and become a preacher and hated
every minute of it. In either case the script is not his own. We don’t live from our authentic selves
because we haven’t taken the time to find our authentic selves. The
only way to get to know our selves is to continually ask of our
behavior, “Where did that come from?” The Quakers call it “querying.” There is no
better spiritual technique on the face of this earth. It can help you
find your real self and start writing your own scripts. Dalton’s website is at www.DaltonRoberts.com
His writings are gathered at www.ipsfeatures.com.
You can write him at DownhomeP@aol.com.
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