Reinventing Your Life

by Jeffrey E. Young

recreate these patterns. The technical term for a lifetrap is a schema. The concept of a schema comes from cognitive psychology. Schemas are deeply entrenched beliefs about ourselves and the world, learned early in life. These schemas are central to our sense of self.

Many so-called experiential therapies, such as inner-child work, provide a valuable role in helping us feel the links between what we experience in our daily lives today and what we felt as children. But these approaches rarely go far enough. Participants often feel much better after therapy sessions or workshops, but they usually drift back to their old patterns quickly.

Lifetrap therapy is an outgrowth of an approach called cognitive therapy, developed by Dr. Aaron Beck in the 1960s. We have incorporated many aspects of this treatment into the lifetrap approach.

RECOGNIZING LIFETRAPS 1. They are lifelong patterns or themes. 2. They are self-destructive. 3. They struggle for survival.

lifetrap is a pattern or theme that starts in childhood and repeats throughout life.

we manage to recreate the conditions of our childhood that were most harmful to us.

A number of factors contribute to the development of lifetraps. The first is temperament. Temperament is inborn.

POSSIBLE DIMENSIONS OF TEMPERAMENT Shy ↔ Outgoing Passive ↔ Aggressive Emotionally Flat ↔ Emotionally Intense Anxious ↔ Fearless Sensitive ↔ Invulnerable

When we reenact a lifetrap, what we are reenacting is almost always a drama from our childhood family.

EXAMPLES OF DESTRUCTIVE EARLY ENVIRONMENTS 1. One of your parents was abusive, and the other was passive and helpless. 2. Your parents were emotionally distant and had high expectations for achievement. 3. Your parents fought all the time. You were caught in the middle. 4. One parent was sick or depressed and the other was absent. You became the caretaker. 5. You became enmeshed with a parent. You were expected to act as a substitute spouse. 6. A parent was phobic and overprotected you. This parent was afraid to be alone and clung to you. 7. Your parents criticized you. Nothing was ever good enough. 8. Your parents overindulged you. They did not set limits. 9. You were rejected by peers, or felt different.

Given the same environment, two children can react very differently. Both might be abused, but one becomes passive and the other fights back.

Our childhood does not have to be perfect for us to be reasonably well-adjusted adults. It just has to be, as D. W. Winnicott said, “good enough.” A child has certain core needs for basic safety, connection to others, autonomy, self-esteem, self-expression, and realistic limits. If these are met, then the child will usually thrive psychologically.

WHAT WE NEED TO THRIVE 1. Basic Safety 2. Connection to Others 3. Autonomy 4. Self-Esteem 5. Self-Expression 6. Realistic Limits

People who were abused or abandoned as children are the most damaged. There is nowhere they feel safe. They feel that at any moment something terrible might happen—someone they love might hurt them or leave them.

Self-expression is the freedom to express ourselves—our needs, feelings (including anger), and natural inclinations. It implies the belief that our needs count as much as other people’s needs. We are free to act spontaneously without inordinate inhibition. We feel free to pursue activities and interests that make us happy, not just those around us. We are allowed time to have fun and play, not just encouraged to work and compete nonstop.

THE ELEVEN LIFETRAPS I. Basic Safety 1. Abandonment 2. Mistrust & Abuse II. Connection to Others 3. Emotional Deprivation 4. Social Exclusion III. Autonomy 5. Dependence 6. Vulnerability IV. Self-Esteem 7. Defectiveness 8. Failure V. Self-Expression 9. Subjugation 10. Unrelenting Standards VI. Realistic Limits 11. Entitlement

Different people cope with lifetraps in different ways. This explains why children raised in the same environment can appear to be so different. For example, two children with abusive parents may respond to abuse very differently. One becomes a passive, frightened victim and remains that way throughout life.

Yet they cope with their feelings of defectiveness in entirely different ways. We call these three styles Surrender, Escape, and Counterattack.

We select partners and enter situations that reinforce our lifetrap. We keep the lifetrap going.

His view of situations is inaccurate: he feels people are attacking and humiliating him even when they are not. He has a strong bias to interpret events as proving he is defective, exaggerating the negative and minimizing the positive. He is illogical.

We grow up accustomed to certain roles and certain ways of being perceived. If we grow up in a family in which we are abused, neglected, yelled at, constantly criticized, or dominated, then that is the environment that feels most comfortable to us. Unhealthy as it may be, most people seek and create environments that feel familiar and similar to the ones where they grew up. The whole essence of surrendering is somehow managing to arrange your life so that you continue to repeat the patterns of your childhood.

Surrender includes all the self-destructive patterns we keep repeating over and over. It is all the ways we replicate our childhood lives. We are still that child, going through that same old pain. Surrender extends our childhood situation into our adult life.

Many people escape whole areas of life where they feel vulnerable or sensitive.

If you have the Social Exclusion lifetrap, you may avoid groups, parties, meetings, conventions.

If you have the Dependence lifetrap, you may avoid all situations that require you to be independent.

It is natural that Escape becomes one of the ways we cope with lifetraps. When a lifetrap is triggered, we are flooded with negative feelings—sadness, shame, anxiety, an...

With Escape we give up our emotional life. We do not feel We walk around numb—unable to experience real pleasure and pain. Because we avoid confronting problems, we often end up hurting those around us. We are also prone to the terrible consequences of addictions like alcohol and drugs.

In feeling superior, Max experiences the opposite of what he felt as a child. He is trying to be as different as possible from the worthless child that his parents made him feel he was. We might say he spends his whole life trying to keep that child at bay and to fight off the attacks of those he expects to criticize and abuse him.

All three men—Alex, Brandon, and Max—have Defectiveness as a core lifetrap. Deep down, all three feel worthless, unlovable, and defective. Yet they cope with their feelings of defectiveness in completely different ways.

Most of us use a combination of Surrender, Escape, and Counterattack. We must learn to change these coping styles in order to overcome our lifetraps and become healthy again.

1. LABEL AND IDENTIFY YOUR LIFETRAPS. • The first step is to recognize what your lifetraps are. This can be accomplished by taking the Lifetrap Questionnaire

2. UNDERSTAND THE CHILDHOOD ORIGINS OF YOUR LIFETRAP. FEEL THE WOUNDED CHILD INSIDE YOU. • The second step is to feel your lifetrap. We have found that it is very difficult to change deep pain without first reliving it. We all have some mechanisms for blocking this pain. Unfortunately, by blocking the pain, we cannot get fully in touch with our lifetraps.

Try to picture these early memories as vividly as possible. If you do this a few times, you will begin to remember what you felt as a child. You will feel the pain or emotions connected with your lifetrap.

This kind of imagery is painful. If you feel completely overwhelmed or frightened by the experience, that is a sign you need therapy. Your childhood was so painful that you should not remember it alone.

Once you have reconnected with your childhood self, we will ask you to open a dialogue with this child. This inner child is frozen. We want to bring it back to life, where growth an...

• 3. THE THIRD STEP IS TO BUILD A CASE AGAINST YOUR LIFETRAP. DISPROVE ITS VALIDITY AT A RATIONAL LEVEL.

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.

To disprove your lifetrap, you will first list all the evidence pro and con regarding the lifetrap throughout your life. For example, if you feel Socially Undesirable, first you will list all the evidence that supports your lifetrap—that you are undesirable. Then you will make a separate list of all the evidence against your lifetrap—that you are socially desirable.

And ask yourself, is any evidence supporting the lifetrap still true of you? Or was it only true in your childhood?

After making your list, summarize the case against your lifetrap on a flashcard.

Read this flashcard every day. Carry it with you. Keep a copy near your bed or some other place where you will see it every day.

4. WRITE LETTERS TO THE PARENT, SIBLING, OR PEER WHO HELPED CAUSE YOUR LIFETRAP

It is important to ventilate your anger and sadness about what happened to you. One thing that keeps your inner child frozen is all your strangled feelings. We want you to give your inner child a voice...

We will ask you to write letters to all the peop...

5. EXAMINE YOUR LIFETRAP PATTERN IN CAREFUL DETAIL. • We want you to make explicit how your lifetrap plays itself out in your current life.

We will ask you to write down the ways you surrender to your lifetrap, and how you can change them.

• 6. THE NEXT STEP IS PATTERN-BREAKING. • After you have taken the Lifetrap Questionnaire in Chapter 2 and have identified your lifetraps, we want you to choose one lifetrap to work on first. Choose the one that has the most impact on your life now.

it is very common for children to blame themselves when they are abused or neglected.

She also worked on enhancing her relationships with her more committed friends and downplaying her relationships with her less committed ones.

Once you have a reasonable degree of mastery with a lifetrap, move to the next one.