@pollyanna: So are you saying that we are each the director of the scripts we are given. That the players have no influence on how that person / character is percieved ?
To a certain extent, yes; in social psychology there's a concept called the "fundamental attribution error," one form of which refers to the "salience" factor. When I see Joe Tentpeg yelling at his kids on the street corner (says the theory), I am more likely to attribute that observed behavior to JT's disposition -- "sheesh, what an a**hole THAT guy is!"
This is because we are humans and tend to focus on the thing that captures our attention -- other people. There may very well be situational factors for JT's behavior -- the kids just jumped out into traffic, for example -- that I'm not aware of, but instead of saying, "I wonder why that gentleman is upbraiding his offspring?" I say, "Sheesh, what an a**hole THAT guy is!"
So when Walkaway makes her/his evaluations (one would hypothesize) those evaluations are attributed to Left-Behind's disposition, rather than to situational factors that Walkaway is unaware of or not attending to and which might explain, ameliorate, or otherwise rationalize the behavior to which Walkaway is (silently) objecting.
For example: When WAW's parent passed beyond this earthly vale, and I was "emotionally unavailable," WAW assumed -- this by her own admission -- that Smiley's Person "didn't give a sh*t that I was hurting and just wanted me to shut up and move on."
The fact that, merely 4 weeks prior, I had been in a place where one could witness every manifestation of destruction that can be visited upon the human body and where at any given moment one might be shot, blown up, rocketed, mortared, car-bombed, or otherwise done-in, and that this "might" have desensitized me somewhat to death generally -- this did not enter into WAW's evaluation.
No, no -- it was a personal shortcoming (dispositional) and not an artifact of outside forces (situational).
So yes - in that instance I was confined to a role, a script, that WAW constructed and (importantly) of which I was unaware.
