The intention of this blog is to bridge the psychotherapeutic theory of “scripts” with the shamanic concept of “curses”, giving the reader a psycho-shamanic® realisation that they are two sides of the same coin, empowering the reader with the awareness needed to break the spell of their own script/curses.

What is Script?

A script is a life plan handed down by our parents. It’s widely accepted in psychology and science that your early formative years impact how you are today. Between the age of 0-7 years old your brain operates from a Theta waveform, meaning we are completely mouldable like living in a type of hypnotic dream. And we begin to write our life script.

If you have ever found yourself thinking “here I am again” in a less-than-joyful context, often when feeling unlucky, discontented, or confused, perhaps even let down or abandoned? This sentiment often relates to what is known as our life script. We each craft our own life narrative, a personal myth, commencing from birth. By the age of 7, our script is essentially complete, encompassing all major elements. Throughout childhood and adolescence, our life script is refined, expanded, and adorned with additional characters and events. Like any tale, our life story unfolds with a beginning, middle, and end, featuring untrustworthy opponents, friendly allies, and fleeting acquaintances. Whether our story is comedic or tragic, compelling, or mundane, uplifting or shameful, as adults, the origins of our script operate outside of our conscious memory, having become ingrained in our unconscious autopilot. Without recognising our role as authors of our own story, we risk unwittingly living out the script we penned long ago. Some important points to remember about script are:

All traumatic thoughts are script beliefs and are routed in negative beliefs around either safety, control, responsibility and/or self defectedness, for example:

These negative script beliefs are also a form of shamanic cursing.

What are Curses?

In shamanism, a curse is traditionally defined as “any expressed intention or wish for adversity or misfortune to befall or attach to another being, object, or place”. These curses may be intentional or unintentional, and some can persist across generations, especially those deliberately crafted by independent practitioners who historically performed such rituals.

Shamans believe that in today’s world, individuals often unknowingly curse themselves and others, largely due to a lack of awareness regarding the potency of their thoughts and intentions. What psychology terms as “negative script beliefs,” shamans categorize as curses or thought forms, which come in three varieties: generational, past life, and present life (thought form). For this blog I am focussing on the latter.

Remember both curses and scrips operate on the level of the energetic and the mind. A curse needs 3 things:

The following example helps us look at this through the lens of psycho-shamanic therapy:

An angry mother wanted her 5-year-old child to know how difficult he had made her life (intention) and she often said aloud “I wish I’d never had you, you ruined my life”

The subject here was the little 5-year-old boy (target)

Initially the mother’s anger was the propellent (fuel) and over time this was internalised by the boy turning into internal sadness (more fuel). This is where the curse becomes self-perpetuating as the little boy develops a self-defected script belief of “I am unlovable.” He carries this now unconscious belief into adult life which manifests in countless failed relationships, reinforcing the script, making the present life curse stronger and stronger, with him thinking “here I am again”.

Here, I’m referring to the inadvertent curses we cast upon one another and ourselves, distinct from the deliberate curses a sorcerer might cast upon someone. When you hear something repeated 30 times, you start to believe it. Familiarity often outweighs rationality.

Consider this: we encounter around 300 marketing advertisements daily. How many of them could subtly reinforce curses? Messages like “you’re unattractive,” “you don’t belong,” “fear death,” or “don’t age.”

In the realm of medical prognoses, doctors’ words can inadvertently cast their own form of curses that are internalised and perpetuated by the subject, and very often do so:

We are born into a culture full of curses and self-limiting script beliefs, we internalise the culture, we live out the culture. We must step out of any culture that has these ‘self-limiting’ beliefs around healing or we are not going to heal and recover, simple.

From a psycho-shamanic viewpoint, we work on the level of the mind to help the client re-write their script and the level of the soul, or the energetic to unravel the energetic nature of the curse. Another example of how shamans and psychotherapists are not too different afterall.