Module 08. Glossary
Terms of the module
- Counter-permissions (12)
- “Everything’s fine, BUT”
- Inner Controller (4 compulsions)
- Intrigue (5 techniques)
- Layers of assumptions (6 layers)
- Life programs based on unstable self-esteem (6)
- Passivity (3 kinds)
- Rescuer hooks (17)
- Responsibility for your choice, not for other people’s feelings
- Rules of effectiveness (30)
- Rules of how the mind works (5)
- Script processes (6)
- Stable and unstable self-esteem
- Techniques for inner calm (30)
- The shell (passing on the script)
- Utilizing resistance
Counter-permissions (12)
Inner permissions with which a person answers the prohibitions of the Inner Controller. Awareness destroys the script: not “the world is like this” but “this is how I perceive the world” — which means I can change it. Every person has the right to be happy, and I am no exception. My happiness is my responsibility: no one is obliged to make me happy, and I am not obliged to rescue. I am not to blame for another person’s unhappiness, just as no one is to blame for mine. I accept my feelings, whatever they may be. I am allowed to make mistakes: a mistake is data for growth, not a verdict. I can choose my reaction: the circumstances are external, the choice is internal. My “I want” is no less important than my “I must.” Self-compassion matters more than self-criticism: gentleness toward yourself speeds up growth more than punishment does. I can ask for help. Time for rest is not up for negotiation. Letting go releases energy: by letting go of what I cannot control, I free up strength for what I can. Berne called permission the most powerful therapeutic act, but required two conditions for it: protection — the person must feel that, having broken the old prohibition, they will not perish — and the potency of the one giving the permission; the ninth permission is confirmed by Kristin Neff’s research: people who are kind to themselves after a mistake correct it faster than those who punish themselves, because they don’t spend their strength on shame.
They work not as a one-off slogan but as a practice: notice the prohibition — and gently give yourself the permission back, the way you get a muscle working again after a spasm. A development of self-permission (module 2) and “I allow myself” (module 6); in the life review (module 10) the same permissions are written down from the position of the Adult.
“Everything’s fine, BUT”
A speech construction of discounting: the word “but” acts as an eraser of meaning that wipes out everything said before it. “On the whole I’m satisfied with your work, but I expected much more” — the focus of both the listener and the speaker goes to the critical part. In cognitive therapy this distortion is called exactly that — discounting the positive: the good is filed under “doesn’t count,” and a person who got nine things out of ten right spends the whole evening thinking about the tenth; Milton Erickson taught his students to replace “but” with “and” in their speech, because after “and” both halves of the sentence stay alive. The strategy is deliberately steering the focus of attention: having heard “satisfied,” catch hold of it and lengthen the positive arrows: “tell me, what exactly are you satisfied with? What specifically did you like?”
Only after working through the positive do you move on to development: “now that we’ve clarified the strengths, let’s think about what can be improved.” By default you want to pay attention to the minuses and ignore the pluses — the psyche is built so that a threat is more noticeable than a reward — and the technique retrains this habit in the other person and in yourself. It applies cushioning (module 1) and “Strengthen the strong” (module 5) to a specific speech trap.
Inner Controller (4 compulsions)
The internalized voice of the significant adults of childhood, with their “must” and “mustn’t” — the Critical Parent (module 1) with irrational demands, which goes on acting in adult life at the cost of well-being and authenticity. Freud called this agency the superego and noticed a paradox: it can be stricter than the real parents, because it absorbs not only their demands but also the child’s rage at them; Karen Horney described its everyday face as the tyranny of the shoulds — “I must” without a single “I want.” The Controller compels you: to want to be accommodating to others so that everyone likes you — “I am loved when I’m accommodating”; to be unable to bear guilt — “my sheet must be perfectly white, and so must my relationships with everyone”; to suppress anger — “being angry is bad, I must always be content and grateful”; to rescue others, turning them into victims in advance. The second of the compulsions rests on a special kind of guilt: Léon Grinberg distinguished persecutory guilt, which paralyzes and demands only punishment, from depressive guilt, which leads to repair — the Controller knows only the first.
In a small dose it disciplines; in excess it turns life into an endless exam that cannot be passed; you recognize it by the fact that after any success what sounds inside is not “good” but “could have been better.” It is weakened not by fighting — fighting makes it stronger — but by counter-permissions: a calm “I’m allowed.” It is the core of the script pressure that is passed on through the shell.
Intrigue (5 techniques)
Techniques for arousing curiosity in a talk, a lesson, a presentation and a sale. The special point: “do you want to know what is special here, the nuance that people usually miss?” The sudden thought: “you just said that, and an interesting thought occurred to me.” Permission to say “no”: “let me tell you how I see it, and then you decide for yourself.” Teasers — short phrases and questions that hint at something non-obvious. Metaphors and conceptual hooks — vivid, memorable names for ideas. Curiosity is built like a gap: George Loewenstein showed that it flares up when a person discovers a gap between what they know and what they would like to know, and dies down when the gap is either closed or too large; the first two techniques create exactly such a gap. Melanie Klein considered the urge to know one of the child’s primary drives, and a good storyteller appeals precisely to it — to the part of the listener that at three years old kept asking “why.”
Intrigue here serves the listener’s benefit, not cheap management of attention: attention is held where it would otherwise scatter, and the promised discovery must actually happen — otherwise the technique turns into clickbait and works only once. It develops taking the lead (module 1), only aimed at interest; in the sales funnel (module 7) it is the engagement stage, and in a talk it is arousing interest through mystery (module 10).
Layers of assumptions (6 layers)
Any statement — especially a question or a complaint — carries many hidden layers: assumptions, beliefs, emotions, intentions. The ability to “unpack” these layers lets you understand the other person or yourself deeply and address the root of the problem rather than its surface expression. Here it is fitting to call the course’s main model by its name: throughout the course we work with one and the same thinking cycle, and in its most compressed form it fits into four links — BMRA: Beliefs → Manifestations → Reinforcement → Action. Beliefs about yourself, about others and about the world show up in bodily responses, behavior and way of life; the manifestations are reinforced by memories and expectations, which close the loop and make the belief self-fulfilling; the cycle is crowned by action — and the action once again confirms the original belief. The “ten components of thinking” from module 3 are the same BMRA, only unfolded in close-up, down to the individual details; the “Layers of assumptions” are the reverse move: take a single phrase and unfold it back into these components, so as to hear everything that stands behind it. The six layers: factual data — what in the wording can be considered a fact; the speaker’s beliefs — about themselves, others, the world; the difficulties experienced — problems and frustrations; intentions — goals and needs; emotional state — the feelings named and those that stand behind them; worldview — the values and interests revealed by the very fact of such a question. Psychoanalysis calls this skill listening with the third ear: the analyst hears not only the words but also the person who says them — and the question “what did he ask?” gives way to the question “who is asking about this, and why?”
The question “why do my clients irritate me?” unpacks like this. Facts: the speaker has clients, is engaged in an activity and experiences an emotion they call irritation. Beliefs: it is the clients who are the cause of the irritation (external locus of control); I shouldn’t feel irritation toward clients (possibly perfectionism); clients should behave differently. Difficulties: managing one’s own emotional reactions, the gap between expectations and reality, possibly boundaries and communication. Intentions: to find out the cause (a need for understanding), to reduce the irritation (for comfort), to understand one’s own mechanisms (for self-knowledge), possibly to change the clients’ behavior (for control). Emotions: besides irritation — tiredness, powerlessness, guilt over “wrong” feelings, resentment, impatience. Worldview: for the speaker it is normal to care about psychology, self-reflection and relationships; the quality of their work with clients and their own well-being matter to them. Irritation is what is stated, and beneath it an external locus of control turns up — “clients are the cause of my irritation” — and the unpacking itself gently brings the person back to themselves: from “why do THEY irritate me” to “how do I react, and why.” This is a return to the author’s position, “I am the cause,” and a climb to the floor of causes — the “four floors” (module 2); the same view as in mental hygiene (module 6), turned not on other people’s words but on one’s own.
Life programs based on unstable self-esteem (6)
Compensatory strategies by which a person tries to “earn” the right to be OK; each has one formula: “yes, I know I’m a nobody, but if I… — then I’ll be all right.” Please others; help others; be perfect; be strong — ignore your own wishes and needs; try as hard as you can; hurry and rush. Five of the six were discovered by Taibi Kahler, who called them drivers: short parental commands — be perfect, be strong, try hard, please others, hurry up — which the child accepted as the condition for love and which the adult carries out a hundred times a day without noticing; the course adds a sixth, the rescuer one, because in Russian family culture “help others” comes up no less often than the rest. A driver can be recognized within seconds: “be strong” — by a swallowed “this is hard for me,” “hurry up” — by speech in which the end of a sentence overtakes its beginning.
In childhood these programs saved you; now they wear you out, and worst of all, they work: the idealist is praised, the strong one is left alone, and reinforcement holds a program in place better than any prohibition. Once you know your leading program, you can catch it the moment it starts and choose differently: “be strong” — allow yourself to ask for help; “please others” — say an honest “no.” Programs are the content of the script, script processes are its form; the basis of both is unstable self-esteem.
Passivity (3 kinds)
How people avoid solving their problems. Doing nothing — freezing, ignoring the problem, displaying helplessness. Overadaptation — actively doing what the person thinks others expect of them, instead of solving their own problem. Agitation — aimless, chaotic activity, fuss, nervousness, emotional outbursts, even to the point of helplessness or violence; the energy is blown off as steam instead of going into moving toward the goal. The classification was created by the Schiff school in transactional analysis, and its main discovery is that passivity can be very active: the overadapted employee who redoes everyone’s work, and the one who fusses all day and gets nothing done, are exactly as passive as the person lying on the couch. The Schiffs called the common root discounting: a person fails to notice either the problem itself, or its significance, or the possibility of change, or their own ability to bring it about — and the level at which the discounting starts determines the question that will be needed.
All three look different, but lead to the same thing: the problem stays unsolved, and there is no need to think and act purposefully. Recognizing your own form of passivity brings you back to action: “right now I’m not solving, I’m fussing — what really needs to be done?” A development of the four doors that block change (module 1); related to coping styles (module 9).
Rescuer hooks (17)
Passive-aggressive manipulations disguised as care. Common signs: taking the one-up position — from Parent to Child; instilling helplessness; instilling dependence on the speaker; the position “I’m OK — You’re not OK”; pressing vulnerability buttons; double messages; the ear’s wish to hear sweet words; the skill of waiting for the command to be carried out; the pattern of vagueness. Seventeen examples: “you’re just unlucky”; the rescuer who imposes help from above; condescension; “good intentions”; inner conflict; “making a diagnosis”; “that’s not it — that’s not it either”; the guilty one; a negative intention toward yourself; “you have to understand this”; distrust of feelings; “everything you do is self-deception”; “why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”; “why don’t you trust yourself?”; “where is your pride?”; “you’ll thank me later” and “you’ll be sorry later”; “how could you sink so low?” Berne described this game under the name “I’m Only Trying to Help You”: the rescuer offers a solution, it doesn’t work, and both sides get what they came for — he confirms that people are ungrateful, the victim confirms that they are helpless; Racamier showed that depriving another person of faith in their own strength “for their own good” is the purest example of narcissistic perversion, because it leaves the victim not even the right to take offense.
They are insidious because they look like kindness, and resisting them feels awkward; the result is learned helplessness and dependence, and a reliable sign is that after the “help” you feel smaller than before it. To recognize them is to take back the right to independence without guilt. The shadow side of the Rescuer role from the Karpman Drama Triangle (module 1) and a continuation of the 38 tactics (module 4).
Responsibility for your choice, not for other people’s feelings
A principle the course works through with unfinished sentences: “when I make a choice to please someone else or to avoid their negative reaction, I…”; “if my choice makes someone sad, angry or hurt, I…”; “taking responsibility for my choice, and not for other people’s feelings, means to me…”; “each person is responsible for their own feelings and reactions — for me this means that…”. Fritz Perls put the same principle as the Gestalt prayer: I do not live to meet your expectations, and you do not live to meet mine; Winnicott added that a healthy attitude toward another person is concern, not guilt: an adult can regret someone else’s pain and take it into account without cancelling their own choice — and this is what sets them apart from a child who believes that mom’s mood is their doing.
I acknowledge that my choice can affect other people’s feelings, but responsibility for their feelings is not mine. Making decisions from your own values and needs, and not out of fear of someone else’s reaction, means freeing yourself from needless guilt, anxiety and the burden of responsibility for what doesn’t belong to you; a person who is responsible for everyone’s feelings ends up unable to choose even a restaurant. It is the flip side of stealing responsibility (module 2) and the basis of boundaries (module 4).
Rules of effectiveness (30)
Thirty rules for managing yourself, your time and your work — “less fuss and pain, more results”: an island of silence; planning the day the evening before; accountability to a partner; the body as a resource; the formula of conscious action before a task; turning waiting time into useful time; delegation; synergy of activities; moving against the current instead of blindly following trends; automation; outer and inner order; integrity of word and deed; evening reflection; working in focused blocks; saying no with confidence; a long-term perspective; an iterative approach to big tasks; managing “loose ends”; mindful eating; admitting mistakes and making amends; giving up “dead” goals; finishing small things immediately; avoiding a state of limbo; clarifying implied agreements; creating a supportive environment; reducing excessive importance; the responsibility of the author of your own life; permission not to be liked by everyone; the power of small steps; mental hygiene — identify the sources of psychological abuse and keep them at a distance. Many of the rules are backed by proven science: “loose ends” and finishing small things immediately are David Allen’s open loops, which, by the Zeigarnik effect, hold attention until they are closed; focused blocks are what Cal Newport called deep work; the author’s responsibility and reducing importance are the Stoic discipline of Epictetus: deal with what is in my power, and don’t burn myself out on what is outside it.
Each rule is turned into an action rather than left as a good intention; they are easiest to put into practice one at a time, and most often the thirteenth gives the most — two evening questions, because they alone set all the others in motion. It rests on agreements (module 1), and the line comes to completion in the power of small steps (module 10).
Rules of how the mind works (5)
Five principles of how thoughts and states are organized. Every idea or thought causes a physical reaction: a thought gives rise to an emotion. What the mind expects is likely to happen: structuring expectations works. Imagination is stronger than knowledge: without the facts, a person creates out of emotion what isn’t there. An idea can be pushed out only by another idea: you can’t make yourself not think about an elephant — you can only think about something else. Every command a person accepts lowers their resistance to accepting the next ones. The rules came from the practice of hypnosis and suggestion: the third was formulated by Émile Coué — when will and imagination are in conflict, imagination wins; the fourth was confirmed by Daniel Wegner with his experiment on the white bear people were asked not to think about, and Freud explained it more deeply: the unconscious doesn’t know the word “not,” and the ban “don’t think” delivers only “think” there. The fifth rule is the mechanics of any manipulation and any discipline at once: small agreements pave the way for big ones.
When it is clear why a technique works, you use it more precisely: the techniques for inner calm are built precisely on these rules, and the third and fifth explain how myth-making (module 3) and vulnerability buttons (module 6) work. Hence the practical consequence: it is useless to fight an anxious thought; it can only be replaced. A direct deepening of the ABC model (module 1).
Script processes (6)
Six forms in which the script unfolds over time, each with a mythological image. “UNTIL…” — “until I become the boss, I can’t rest”: performing the labors of Hercules, putting joy off. “AFTER” — “everything is fine now, but later it will be bad”: the sword of Damocles hanging overhead. “NEVER” — “I will never say what I want, I keep overcoming myself”: suffering forever, like Tantalus. “ALWAYS” — “everything is always bad, why does this happen to me”: endlessly weaving Arachne’s web. “ALMOST” — “I almost made it, I fell just a little short”: rolling the stone of Sisyphus. “OPEN-ENDED” — keeping all doors open, everything up in the air and in implied agreements. The six processes and their Greek images belong to Berne, who noticed that a person lives out their script not only on the scale of a lifetime, but also on the scale of a single week and a single conversation: with “until,” cleaning comes before rest, and with “after,” rest is spoiled by the thought of Monday; Taibi Kahler later linked the processes to drivers and showed that each one can be recognized by speech within a few minutes.
You recognize your own process by the characteristic pattern of your life, and once you recognize it, it is easier to get out of the rut: to allow yourself joy not “after,” but now; to bring “almost” all the way to the end; to close open doors with expressed agreements. Processes are the form in which the script flows; life programs are its content.
Stable and unstable self-esteem
Self-esteem is not just an opinion of yourself but a fundamental sense of your own worth and competence, which shapes your thoughts, feelings and actions. Stable self-esteem is an unconditional “I’m OK”: accepting your worth regardless of achievements and circumstances; reality is met from inner calm and from relying on yourself. Unstable self-esteem is a conditional “I’m not OK, but I’m temporarily OK if…”: praise lifts you to a peak, criticism throws you into an abyss, and life is spent on an emotional swing. Michael Kernis’s research confirmed that what matters is not how high self-esteem is but how steady it is: high but fragile self-esteem is more aggressive and more anxious than modest but solid self-esteem, because it has to be defended every day; Heinz Kohut explained where solid self-esteem comes from: from enough admiring looks in childhood, which become an inner “I exist, and that is good.”
At the root of unstable self-esteem is a core belief, “I’m not OK,” which a person compensates for with achievements, approval or comparison with others; it is fertile ground for irrational beliefs and life programs, and you can recognize it by the reaction to criticism: stable self-esteem asks “What is true here?”, unstable asks “Why is he doing this to me?” The life script (module 2) is exactly the program that determines how we will seek recognition, structure time and confirm our beliefs; here it is taken apart down to its core.
Techniques for inner calm (30)
A person under stress is like a fly that beats desperately against the glass instead of flying back, seeing the open window and flying out. The course’s techniques are ways of “flying back”: of psychological distance and of stepping out of the automatic reaction so as to see another way; Wittgenstein saw the task of philosophy as showing the fly the way out of the bottle, and that is the task of any psychotherapy, while in research distancing — looking at yourself as if from the outside — turns out to be one of the most reliable ways to lower the intensity of an emotion without suppressing it. Among the three dozen: shift the focus from the minus to the plus — “what good is happening in my life, and what am I grateful for?”; look at the situation with curiosity — “well, what an interesting little problem I have in front of me”; thank the past, the present and the future; write yourself a letter of support in advance: “dear Name, I know that you…”; answer a stuck thought with “so what?”; switch the body — push-ups, a shower, a workout; answer a prohibition on thinking with “I’m allowed”; recall a positive moment and breathe that emotion; leave the “losers’ club”; “I’m doing what I love, and I’m resting”; “I have the courage to say no”; “I feel gratitude, and that is enough for me”; put things in order and let go of what is unnecessary; “it’s high time for me”; ask the emotion what it wants to say; “I am not my thoughts, I am not my emotions”; “I allow tomorrow to be unknown”; “I forgive myself for everything”; replace the intention to “get” with the intention to “give”; make a list of what is important to invite into your life; in a loss — accept the fact and go on living. Many of the techniques have a scientific pedigree: gratitude is one of the few practices whose effect on mood is reproduced in research again and again; “I am not my thoughts” is what acceptance and commitment therapy calls defusion; the letter to yourself is an exercise from the practice of self-compassion.
A practical arsenal for every day, grown out of the work with psychobiological reserves and the four floors (module 2); it runs on the rules of how the mind works, and that is why one technique is not enough — what is needed is replacing the thought, not prohibiting it; it is useful to choose three of your own and keep them at the ready, the way a fly would keep in memory where the window is.
The shell (passing on the script)
The system of parental “musts” becomes an internalized Inner Parent — a controlling shell that rules through two levers: the striving for joy and the avoidance of guilt and shame. Winnicott described the false self precisely as a casing: it grew to protect the true self from an unsafe environment, and it goes on protecting it long after the danger is gone, without letting it out; Selma Fraiberg called the mechanism of transmission ghosts in the nursery — parents replay their own childhood with the child until they remember what it was like for them back then. Parents, themselves under the pressure of their own shell, pass it on to their children through familiar techniques: comparison with others (“follow your brother’s example”); addressing not the person but the role (“a loving son would help”); isolation (“I won’t talk to you for a week”); shoulds; emotional pressure (“do you want to upset me?”); dependence on other people’s opinion (“what will people say?”); promises that are never kept; threats (“do you want to be the death of me?”); blackmail; inflated expectations (“you’ll be a straight-A student”); “if-ipulations” (“if you love me, then…”); shifting their own responsibility (“you’re spoiling my mood with your grades”).
All these messages convey the parental position “I’m not OK as a parent, but I will be if you are such-and-such,” and the child absorbs the reply: “I’m not OK, but I will be if I am such-and-such.” This is not malice but a replay of what the parents learned in their own families — ghosts are passed on without being looked at. The shell protects and at the same time keeps you from growing; it is removed gently — through counter-permissions and life review (module 10). A close relative of the filters of perception (module 1).
Utilizing resistance
Two techniques for dealing with disagreement: not breaking it by force, but using its energy. Pre-empting means getting ahead of resistance by voicing it first: “I understand that what I’m about to say may raise questions or a not very positive reaction; nevertheless, our intention is to find the best solution and continue working together; allow us to first set out how we see the situation, and then we’ll discuss the details together. How do you feel about that?” Utilizing means acknowledging what has already arisen: “I understand how this looks from the outside: you expected to get result B for action A, and now C is needed as well; and precisely because we value you as a partner, we want to decide together how to proceed. What ideas do you have?” Milton Erickson considered resistance a form of cooperation — the person shows how you can work with them — and the first technique is also confirmed in social psychology as inoculation: an objection named in advance and in a weakened form loses its force, and lawyers have long known that it is better to tell the court bad news about their client themselves than to hear it from the prosecution. Psychoanalysis adds the main thing: resistance always points to what truly matters to the person, and so it is not an obstacle to the conversation but its map.
The main idea: resistance is energy, and it can be directed; agreement that was pushed through comes back as sabotage, acknowledged disagreement comes back as ideas. The techniques are needed when you have to deliver less-than-pleasant news or work with objections. A development of cushioning (module 1) and pre-empting transference (module 3); next to it are the “Formula for change” (module 7) and the fourteen reasons for resistance (module 5).