Two other slogans common among therapists are also common among the general population: 'You can't tell people what to do,' and 'I can't help you, you have to help yourself.'  Both of these are outright falsehoods.  \r\n\r\nYou can tell people what to do, and many of them will do it and do it well.  And you can help people, and they don't have to help themselves.  They merely have to get up, after you have helped them, and go about their business.  But with slogans such as those, society (and I mean all societies) encourages people to stay in their scripts and carry them through to their often tragic endings.  A script merely means that someone told the person what to do a long time ago and he decided to do it.  This demonstrates that you can tell people what to do, and are in fact telling them all the time, especially if you have children.  So if you tell people to do something other than what their parents told them, they may decide to follow your advice or instructions.  And it is well known that you can help people get drunk, or kill themselves, or kill someone else; therefore, you can also help them stop drinking, or stop killing themselves, or stop killing other people.  It is certainly possible to give people permission to do certain things, or to stop doing certain things which they were ordered in childhood to keep doing.  Instead of encouraging people to live bravely in an old unhappy world, it is possible to have them live happily in a brave new world.

• humanity
• permission
• society
• therapy
• transactional analysis
• magick
• parents
• time
• will
• children
• scripts
• other