Many messages from the early years are like a curse

Most kids don’t like themselves. Quietly, even the more talented look across the aisles in their homerooms at school and wish they were someone else, not realizing the secret frustrations of the person admired.

Much of that feeling is normal for adolescents. I never did believe that well-worn adage that your high school years were the best years of your life. True, we remember the good times and tend to forget the bad. But it’s hard growing up, and even more so in today’s environment.

What are especially sad, however, are the crippling effects these feelings have on some teenagers’ futures.

Not realizing the universal mood shifts of adolescence, they feel overpowered about doing anything to counter their negative feelings. Sometimes they even have the intellectual ability to know that their futures should not be controlled by mere feelings, but they still feel trapped and immobile.

A teacher experiences a sense of frustration watching a student become so overpowered. I can think of a girl who very much fits the above description.

She’s gifted intellectually, has a fine facility at expressing herself through the written word, and yet has a very poor self-image. She places too much stress on physical appearance and feels she’s overweight and not attractive, even though she’s not.

Affirming her gifts appears to have little effect. Her perception of what she is is just not real, and she continually underrates the obvious talents she possesses.

Negative feelings of this type are hangovers from the past. Dr. Tom Harris likes to refer to such effects as the life decision of the not-OK Child. And Claude Steiner popularized these controlling influences as the important concepts of how “scripted” some people’s lives can be.

Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward, co-authors of the best selling book, Born to Win, cogently define “scripting” as “a person’s ongoing program for his life drama which dictates where he is going with his life and how he is to get there. It is a drama he compulsively acts out, though his awareness of it may be vague.”

Some scripting is good. For example, the continuation of cultural and family traditions add flavor to our lives. Or, the motivation a young person receives from his parents to set his or her goals on a higher profession.

But many messages from the early years of life are like a curse.

And Steiner reminds us to bear in mind that such decisions are premature and made by the limited (in terms of experience) young mind; they are not plans decided upon by the gods.

Regrettably, some people live their whole lives as if these decisions are divine and final. And therein lays the tragedy of the gifted teenager who will never realize her potential as long as she feels “I can’t.”

Self analysis and the discovery of where these not-OK decisions originated is the beginning of breaking away from such scripting. Then, making a new decision not to be controlled by such archaic feelings offers the truly valuable possibility of achieving real potential.

Add a vibrant faith in a God who truly cares about each of us and to whom we can turn in prayer and the sacraments, and we have the making of real growth and being what we really can be.

James Aggrey’s The Parable of the Eagle aptly illustrates the theory of negative scripting and its need for rejection. He writes:

Once upon a time, while walking through the forest, a certain man found a young eagle. He took it home and put it in his barnyard where it soon learned to eat chicken feed and to behave as chickens behave.

One day, a naturalist who was passing by inquired of the owner why it was that an eagle, the king of all birds, should be confined to live in the barnyard with the chickens.

“Since I have given it chicken feed and trained it to be a chicken, it has never learned to fly,” replied the owner. “It behaves as chickens behave, so it is no longer an eagle.”

“Still,” insisted the naturalist, “it has the heart of an eagle and can surely be taught to fly.”

After talking it over, the two men agreed to find out whether this was possible. Gently the naturalist took the eagle in his arms and said, “You belong to the sky and not the earth, Stretch forth your wings and fly.”

The eagle however was confused; he did not know who he was, and seeing the chickens eating their food, he jumped down to be with them again.

Aggrey goes on to describe repeated failures to convince the eagle of who he was. Finally, on the third day: The eagle looked around, back toward the barnyard and up to the sky. Still he did not fly. Then the naturalist lifted him straight toward the sun and it happened that the eagle began to tremble, slowly stretching his wings. At last, with a triumphant cry, he soared away into the heavens.

It may be that the eagle still remembers the chickens with nostalgia; it may even be that he occasionally revisits the barnyard. But as far as anyone knows, he has never returned to lead the life of a chicken. He was an eagle though he had been kept and tamed as a chicken.

Just like the eagle, the teenage girl who has learned to think of herself as something she isn’t can re-decide in favor of her real potential. She can become a winner. Happy Fourth of July!