Ask Dr. Miller: What is Re-scripting?

Someone asked me the other day what I meant when I used the term Re-scripting. I mean that if we step outside ourselves for a moment, we can see that we behave as if we’re following a script. Often this script is automatic—we react or respond to people in certain ways, we have certain attitudes about ourselves, we engage or don’t engage in certain activities. Often we find that the kinds of behaviors, in other words, the kind of script, that we would like to be following is different from the one that we are, in fact, following on a regular basis.

Re-scripting means becoming aware of a behavior pattern in your life, then developing a new, more adaptive behavior pattern, and finally, teaching this pattern to the deeper levels of your mind (the ones that would, otherwise, behave automatically in the old, maladaptive way).