Diving deep into your story 

Lifescripting has been challenging women at CCWF to become the directors of their own lives for 14 years 

By Nora Igova and Kristin Rossum

Teresa Patterson has been home since June 2024. Since then, she has successfully reunited with her family, works two jobs, bought a car, and soon will move into her own place for the first time in her life after spending 35 years in prison. She credits her journey home in good part to a unique therapeutic, positive psychology-based program offered at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) called LifeScripting. 

“LifeScripting helped put me on a path of healing,” Patterson said. “It taught me how to reframe difficult moments in my life by looking at them from a different perspective. And by doing that, I was able to find understanding and forgiveness.” 

Patterson utilized what she had learned through LifeScripting to prepare for and ultimately pass her suitability hearing before commissioners of the Board of Parole Hearings. She still uses it to maintain her freedom, both physical and inner. 

Patterson is one of many. More than 5,000 women have graduated from the program — including this article’s authors — in the 14 years that LifeScripting has been offered in California’s women’s facilities. According to the program’s sponsor organization, Women 4 Change, graduates boast a recidivism rate of less than 4%, compared to the 62% national average. Participants have gone on to achieve other significant accomplishments, too, like earning college degrees, opening small businesses, and the best one of all, finding their purpose in life. 

In a world of prison programming built largely for the needs of men — who make up roughly 90% percent of the prison population — LifeScripting is unique for being specifically for women. To understand why that’s the case, and why it works, it’s important to know something about its creator, Virginia Dunstone. 

Dunstone was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, and grew up in stressful home circumstances. She moved away from her hometown shortly after high school, with her diploma in one hand and a train ticket in the other. Dunstone married and quickly became a mother of five who welcomed all children into the family home and became a chief volunteer at church. 

Then, after a life-altering event she couldn’t get past, she embarked on a journey of personal discovery. Afterwards, Dunstone enrolled in college and valeted cars to support herself. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and then a master’s degree in counseling in the mid- 1980s, both from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

Dunstone was deeply influenced by the theories of Alfred Adler, a late 19th-century psychotherapist and the founder of Individual Psychology, who based his practice on the understanding that childhood beliefs have significant meaning in our adult lives. 

“Our core beliefs are formed by the age of six,” Dunstone said. 

People hold on to these beliefs solidly, well into adulthood — beliefs about safety, worth, and belonging. Behavior stems from our beliefs. Dunstone said she became obsessed with the idea of unlocking our belief system so we can use it as a source of power instead of pain. By understanding negative beliefs and reframing past experiences, “your past can talk to your present to impact your future,” as Dunstone often says. 

Dunstone honed her method in private practice in Nevada and later in Arizona. She eventually wrote a book about her learnings called “Why Do I Do What I Do” and became successful as a public speaker for women’s conferences and political campaigns. 

Women have always been at the center of Dunstone’s work. When asked why, Dunstone said, “Women are life-givers and nurturers; they’re tender-hearted. If you give a woman a recipe, she wants to share it with someone.” That’s true of life wisdom as well as food. After a pause, she added, “My heart is with the women.” 

Her interest in serving incarcerated women developed later in her career. Dunstone’s first experience with people in custody was volunteering with juvenile offenders, who she realized would be sent to mothers who didn’t know what to do with them, and that mothers needed the most help. “I realized if you change a mother and give her a toolbox, she will then pass it on to her children,” Dunstone said. 

Then, in 1992, a friend invited Dunstone to do a women’s conference at Arizona State Prison Complex Perryville. The response was overwhelming, with women telling her they had never looked at their lives that way before. It became clear that a LifeScripting curriculum inside a women’s prison was needed and wanted. 

The 80-hour program offered to incarcerated women is no different than the courses offered to women outside. As its website describes, the program educates participants on four key areas — self, family, relationships, and society — and gives women strategies to “make healthy personal choices and therefore alter their behavioral patterns.” 

By 2011, Dunstone was able to bring the program to California with the help of Women 4 Change, first to Valley State Prison for Women, when it still housed women, and then to CCWF. The program became so popular that the wait list swelled to over 500 people, Dunstone said. 

To increase access, Dunstone got permission from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to make videos of her instruction and train facilitators through an intense two-year course. Facilitators are interviewed by Dunstone, as well as the LifeScripting team, to ensure they meet the rigid standards required to join. 

Currently, there are 11 LifeScripting classes run by seven facilitators occurring simultaneously every four months at CCWF. This schedule includes three classes on Facilities B, C, and D, a class in the Skilled Nursing Facility, and a class in the Accountability Change Transformation program on Facility A, where new arrivals are received. 

Dunstone’s expertise and personal charisma are a big part of the program’s popularity. 

“Virginia taught me to master my heart, live my passions, view my parents and all others as teachers, manage my expectations, and to forgive myself and others,” LifeScripting graduate Jessalynn Graham said. 

The curriculum’s memorable teaching devices also resonate with women who went through the program at CCWF, like the now-free Patterson. 

“Lifescripting taught me about the iceberg effect,” Patterson said, referring to the iceberg analogy as a person where most of the person is under the waterline, and what is shown to the world is just the tip of the iceberg. “What you see on the surface is only the beginning. There is so much beneath the surface.” 

What stuck with former Death Row resident Socorro Caro is Dunstone’s use of the number 186 and what it signifies about the heart. When LifeScripting students say “186,” they are referring to the fact that positive thoughts and love travel at the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second. It is like a secret code among LifeScripting students. 

As a condemned prisoner on the Row, Caro didn’t have access to self-help programs like LifeScripting. Things are different now that she lives with the general population. And though her path isn’t as clear as Patterson’s, she’s grown as a result of the class. After taking LifeScripting, Caro said she now knows where her strength is. 

By empowering any and all women to rewrite the script of their lives and reframe their pasts, they become the directors of their own lives and take charge of their belief systems. Once someone understands why they do what they do, they have all the power in the world to change the patterns that no longer serve them. As Dunstone often says, “once you know, you can’t unknow.” 

To all those who have completed LifeScripting, and to those who have not, we send you 186.