More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Personality disorders are self-destructive, lifelong patterns that bring patients tremendous unhappiness. People with personality disorders have long-term problems with living, in addition to specific symptoms like depression and anxiety. They are often unhappy in their intimate relationships or chronically underachieve in their careers. Their overall quality of life is usually lower than they desire.
underlying schemas, or controlling beliefs.
There may be lack of insight about self-defeating behaviors.
Reinventing Your Life presents practical techniques for overcoming our most painful, lifelong problems.
The most difficult patients tended to have less severe symptoms; in general, they were less depressed and anxious. Many of their problems concerned intimacy: these patients had patterns of unsatisfactory relationships.
I found that by developing a list of lifetraps, I could break down patients’ problems into manageable parts.
Eventually the lifetrap becomes part of us. Long after we leave the home we grew up in, we continue to create situations in which we are mistreated, ignored, put down, or controlled and in which we fail to reach our most desired goals.
Lifetraps determine how we think, feel, act, and relate to others. They trigger strong feelings such as anger, sadness, and anxiety. Even when we appear to have everything—social status, an ideal marriage, the respect of people close to us, career success—we are often unable to savor life or believe in our accomplishments.
he was falling into his lifetrap again, finding fault with others to avoid feeling warmth.
The lifetrap approach involves continually confronting ourselves.
That we keep repeating the pain of our childhood is one of the core insights of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Freud called this the repetition compulsion.
The lifetrap approach shows you exactly what types of relationships are healthy for you to pursue, and what types to avoid, given your particular lifetraps.
Often, this is not easy. Like Patrick, you may have to make choices that are painful in the short run and even go against your gut feelings in order to escape a rut that you have been mired in throughout your life.
The lifetrap approach provides structured behavioral homework assignments and continual confrontation to help you maintain progress.
The basic premise of cognitive therapy is that the way we think about events in our lives (cognition) determines how we feel about them (emotions). People with emotional problems tend to distort reality.
However, we have found over the years that cognitive and behavioral methods, while invaluable, are not sufficient to change lifelong patterns. Thus we developed the Lifetrap approach, which combines cognitive and behavioral techniques with psychoanalytic and experiential techniques.
lifetrap therapy retains the practical focus of cognitive and behavioral therapies: it builds skills and makes changes.
The lifetrap is what we know. Although it is painful, it is comfortable and familiar. It is therefore very difficult to change. Furthermore, our lifetraps were usually developed when we were children as appropriate adaptations to the family we lived in. These patterns were realistic when we were children; the problem is that we continue to repeat them when they no longer serve a useful purpose.
In most cases the influence of family is strongest at birth and progressively declines as the child grows up.
Lifetraps develop when early childhood environments are destructive.
A parent was phobic and overprotected you. This parent was afraid to be alone and clung to you.
To develop a sense of connection, we need love, attention, empathy, respect, affection, understanding, and guidance. We need these things from both our family and our peers.
As a consequence, as an adult you feel unable to cope effectively on your own without the guidance, advice, and financial support of people who you feel are stronger and wiser than you.
When we escape, we strike a bargain with ourselves. We will not feel pain in the short run, but in the long run we will suffer the consequences of having avoided the issue year after year.
This change step involves attacking your lifetrap on an intellectual level. In order to do this, you must prove that it is not true, or at least that it can be changed. You must cast doubt on the validity of your lifetrap. As long as you believe that your lifetrap is valid, you will not be able to change it.
This is one of the most important rules: Always attempt manageable tasks.
Remind yourself that insight comes quickly, but change comes slowly.
Push yourself to think, feel, or act differently each day.
This is the crux of the difference between the Abandonment lifetrap and the Emotional Deprivation lifetrap. With Emotional Deprivation, the parent was always physically there, but the quality of the emotional relationship was consistently inadequate.
Unfortunately, for some children, their parents were both emotionally inadequate and unpredictable. In this environment, which is quite common, children will usually develop both the Emotional Deprivation and Abandonment lifetraps.
If you have a parent who, because of drug abuse or temper problems, was alternately loving and abusive, you may or may not have developed the Abandonment lifetrap. It depends on whether you experienced the abuse as a loss of emotional connection.
Choosing partners who are not really there for you ensures that you will continue to reenact your childhood abandonment.
Their accusations constantly suggest to their partners that they do not care, that they will eventually leave. Lindsay and Abby push the people they love away with one hand, while clinging desperately to them with the other.
Detachment is the Counterattack for Abandonment.
You have an underlying view of friendships as unstable.
Your experience of emotional deprivation is much more the sense that you are going to be lonely forever, that certain things are never going to be fulfilled for you, that you will never be heard, never be understood.
a neglected child
Perhaps you are in one of the healing or helping professions.
Finally, it is a sign of the Emotional Deprivation lifetrap to feel chronically disappointed in other people. People let you down.
If your conclusion as a result of all your relationships is that you cannot count on people to be there for you emotionally—that is a sign that you have the lifetrap.
With emotional deprivation, the child received a less than average amount of maternal nurturance.
The parents do not adequately guide the child or provide a sense of direction. There is no one solid for the child to rely upon.
Instead of viewing her child as a separate person with needs of her own, she viewed her child as an extension of herself.
Avoid cold partners who generate high chemistry.
As difficult as Social Exclusion is, Social Exclusion plus Defectiveness is much worse.
you fear being exposed as inadequate.
ADAM: It’s like I’m alone even when I’m in a crowd. In fact, I feel most alone when I’m in a crowd. THERAPIST: Your loneliness becomes more glaring.
Or there may have been mental illness in your family, such as alcoholism or schizophrenia.
Social Awkward, socially inappropriate, immature, unable to carry on conversations, weird, dull, uncool.
You stopped trying to make friends in order to avoid rejection.
