Long before you could reason, you were being programmed. Not maliciously — by parents who were themselves programmed, passing on the rules they absorbed. Don't feel. Be perfect. Try harder. Don't be a nuisance. In Transactional Analysis, these early messages are the raw material of your life script — the unconscious story you've been living out ever since. And they arrive in two distinct flavours: the prohibitions known as injunctions, and the demands known as drivers.

Understanding the difference is one of the most clarifying moves in all of TA. One set of messages tells you what you must not be. The other tells you what you must do to be acceptable. Together they form the scaffolding of the person you became — and, crucially, the person you can still choose to revise.

Two kinds of message

Eric Berne proposed that the script is written in early childhood and then lived out across a lifetime. His successors mapped how it gets written. The key insight: scripting happens through two channels at once, sent from different parts of the parent and landing in different parts of the child.

Injunctions come from the parent's own frightened, wounded Child — usually transmitted non-verbally, below the level of words. Drivers (or counterinjunctions) come from the parent's Parent — spoken aloud, repeated, often praised. These messages combine into a life script; if you want the larger structure, see our companion piece on the life script. Here we go deeper into the messages themselves.

Injunctions — the silent prohibitions

An injunction is a "Don't" message. It isn't usually said out loud — and that's exactly what makes it powerful. A parent overwhelmed by a new baby doesn't announce "I wish you'd never been born." But the tightening, the withdrawal, the exhausted sigh communicate something the infant's Child registers anyway: it's not safe for me to exist here. The message travels from the parent's distressed Child to the child's Child — emotion to emotion, no words required.

In the 1970s, Bob and Mary Goulding catalogued the twelve injunctions they saw most often in their clinical work. The list has become a TA classic:

Don't exist — the most severe: your presence is a burden, you'd be better off gone.
Don't be you (Don't be the sex you are) — the wrong gender, the wrong temperament; who you actually are isn't the child they wanted.
Don't be a child — play, neediness and spontaneity aren't allowed; grow up fast and behave.
Don't grow up (Don't leave me) — stay small, stay dependent; the parent needs you to need them.
Don't make it (Don't succeed) — success is dangerous or disloyal; you may sabotage at the finish line.
Don't do anything (Don't act) — taking action is unsafe; better to freeze than risk a wrong move.
Don't be important — don't take up space, don't lead, don't ask for the spotlight.
Don't belong — you're an outsider everywhere; closeness to a group never quite fits.
Don't be close (Don't trust) — intimacy is risky; keep people at arm's length to stay safe.
Don't be well (Don't be sane) — attention only came when you were ill or struggling, so distress becomes a strategy.
Don't think — your judgement isn't trusted; defer to others, don't work it out yourself.
Don't feel — emotions are unwelcome (or only certain ones are); numb out, or feel what the family permits instead of what's real.

Few people carry all twelve. Most recognise two or three that landed hard — and seeing them named in a list often produces a jolt of recognition that years of vague unease never did.

The injunction is the message — the decision is yours

Here's the part that's easy to miss, and it changes everything. An injunction is only an invitation. The child does something active with it: they make an early decision. The Gouldings drew this distinction sharply. The parent transmits a "Don't exist" message — but the child is the one who concludes, in their own small mind, "Then I'll be so good and quiet that no one will mind I'm here," or "I'll prove I deserve to exist by never resting."

This matters because two children given the same injunction can decide differently — and because what was decided can be re-decided. The Gouldings built an entire approach around this, redecision therapy, which works directly with the early childhood scene where the decision was first made and helps the grown-up Adult, in contact with that young Child, choose something new. You weren't simply damaged by what was done to you. You drew a conclusion to survive it — and conclusions can be revisited by the person who drew them.

Drivers — the spoken demands

If injunctions are the silent "Don'ts," drivers are the loud "Dos." They come from the parent's Parent — the values, slogans and instructions that were said aloud, often with approval attached. Taibi Kahler identified five, and they're strikingly universal:

Be Perfect — get everything exactly right; any flaw means you've failed.
Be Strong — show no weakness, no need, no wobble; carry it alone.
Try Hard — effort is the point; struggle proves your worth more than success would.
Please Others — keep everyone happy; your own needs come last, if at all.
Hurry Up — there's never enough time; rushing is the only acceptable speed.

Because drivers are praised — the perfect child, the strong one, the helper — they don't feel like wounds. They feel like virtues. That's the trap. A driver sells a piece of false hope: "If I just try hard enough — get it perfect enough, please them enough — I'll finally be okay." But the bargain never settles. The relief is always one more effort away, because being okay was never actually on offer. The driver keeps you running on a treadmill that promises an exit it can't deliver.

How injunctions and drivers interlock

The two systems aren't separate — they're a lock and key. The driver is the counterfeit cure the child reaches for to cope with the injunction. A child who received "Don't be a child" finds relief in "Be Strong": if I can't be playful and needy, at least I can be the capable one who never breaks down. A child carrying "Don't be important" leans on "Please Others": I'll matter by making myself useful to you. A "Don't exist" message often pairs with "Be Perfect" — I'll earn my place by being flawless.

The driver behaviour is what you reach for under stress, the front line of the script. Push past it — fail to be perfect, drop the strong front — and the old injunction is waiting underneath, with all its original dread. This is why drivers are so hard to put down: they aren't just habits, they're the lid on something the Child still finds frightening.

How they map onto ego states

TA's ego state model makes the mechanics concrete. The injunction lands in the Child — it's the young, emotional part of you that absorbed "Don't feel" and still flinches today. The driver lives in the Adapted Child: it's the part performing, on demand, for an internalised Parent that's still issuing the old commands. When you catch yourself rushing for no real reason, or polishing a task long past the point of usefulness, that's Adapted Child trying to satisfy a Parent voice that was installed decades ago.

The exit, as so often in TA, runs through the Adult — the ego state that can observe the whole arrangement without being swept into it, and ask: whose voice is this, and do I still agree?

Permissions — the antidote

The counter-force to an injunction is a permission: a message, given by a trusted other or eventually by your own Adult, that directly cancels the prohibition. You may exist. You may feel. You may be close. You may make it. In therapy these aren't slogans pinned over the wound; they're earned in relationship, tested against real experience until the Child can believe them. Permission is what makes redecision possible — you can't put down "Don't be you" until some part of you grants the opposite.

Why surfacing these messages matters

The reason injunctions and drivers run the show is precisely that they operate out of view. You don't experience "Don't be important" as a belief you could question — you experience it as the obvious fact that speaking up would be presumptuous. You don't experience "Be Perfect" as a demand — you experience it as the standard. Unexamined, the script feels like reality.

Naming the messages is what breaks the spell. The moment you can say "that's a Hurry Up driver" or "that's an old Don't-trust decision talking," you've created a gap between the message and yourself — and in that gap lives choice. You stop being the script and start being the author. That's the whole promise of self-awareness in TA: not to have had a perfect childhood, but to read the rules you were handed clearly enough to decide which ones you'll keep.

Injunctions & Drivers: The TA Messages Behind Your Script