Reinventing Your Life

by Jeffrey E. Young

• 7. KEEP TRYING. • Do not give up or get discouraged easily. Lifetraps can change, but it takes a long time and a lot of work. Persevere. Confront yourself over and over again.

• 8. FORGIVING YOUR PARENTS. • Forgiving your parents is not required. Particularly if there was severe abuse or neglect, you may never be able to forgive them. This is totally your choice. But we have found that, in most cases, forgiving one’s parents is something that happens naturally, as the healing process progresses. Patients gradually come to see their parents less and less as giant, negative figures in their mind, and more and more as just people with problems and concerns of their own. They see that their parents were caught within their own lifetraps,

Gradually start working less or making a little less money. Try to refrain from deliberately impressing others. Feel what it is like to be the same as everyone else rather than special or superior. Unless you can allow these feelings in, you will not make yourself vulnerable enough to change.

Madeline had to stop escaping the pain that sexual intimacy evoked for her. Heather had to stop avoiding activities that she considered dangerous. Jed had to stop escaping from emotional closeness.

Stop escaping through drinking, overeating, using drugs, overworking, etc., for a few days. Keep a diary in which you write down what you feel.

If this lifetrap is too overwhelming, you may not be able to make progress. Or, perhaps you have chosen an appropriate lifetrap, but your plan is too ambitious. You may have started with a change strategy that is too difficult.

Remind yourself that insight comes quickly, but change comes slowly. Your healthy side will become stronger and stronger, and your lifetrap side will become weaker. Be patient. Your feelings will change.

Write dialogues between your healthy side and your lifetrap. Get angry at your lifetrap. Cry about the way you were treated as a child. Let yourself feel the injustice.

Ask someone you trust to review your lifetrap and plan with you. Perhaps this person will notice something in your life pattern that you have missed.

It may be that you cannot change alone. If this happens, seek out therapy. A close relationship with someone you trust may well be what you need. A therapist can reparent you, or confront you, or be more objective in pointing out problems.

INTERPRETING YOUR ABANDONMENT SCORE 10–19 Very low. This lifetrap probably does not apply to you. 20–29 Fairly low. This lifetrap may only apply occasionally. 30–39 Moderate. This lifetrap is an issue in your life. 40–49 High. This is definitely an important lifetrap for you. 50–60 Very high. This is definitely one of your core lifetraps.

Abandonment is usually a preverbal lifetrap: it begins in the first years of life, before the child knows language. (Abby is an exception. Her lifetrap began later, at seven, when her father died. Correspondingly, her lifetrap is slightly less severe than it might be otherwise.)

In most cases, the abandonment starts early, before the child has words to describe what is happening. For this reason, even in adulthood there may be no thoughts connected to the experience of the lifetrap.

The Abandonment lifetrap is triggered primarily by intimate relationships. It may not be apparent in groups or in casual relationships. Separations from a loved one are the most powerful triggers.

You often feel emotionally abandoned. Perhaps your spouse or lover acts bored, distant, momentarily distracted, or more attentive to another person. Or perhaps your spouse or lover suggests a plan that involves spending a brief time apart. Anything that feels disconnected can trigger the lifetrap, even if it has nothing to do with real loss or abandonment.

Once the lifetrap is triggered, provided the separation lasts long enough, the experience progresses through a cycle of negative emotions: fear, grief, and anger. This is the cycle of abandonment. If you have the lifetrap, you will recognize it.

First, you have a panicky feeling, as though you are a small child left alone, perhaps in a supermarket, and you cannot find your mother temporarily. You have a frantic, “Where is she, I’m all alone, I’m lost,” kind of feeling. Your anxiety can build to the level of panic, and can last for hours, even days.

Then you experience grief about your loneliness, as though you never will recover the lost person. This grief can evolve into depression. And finally, particularly when the person returns, you experience anger at the person for leaving you and at yourself for needing so much.

There are two types of abandonment, and they come from two types of early childhood environments. The first type comes from an environment that is too secure and overprotected. This type represents a combination of the Abandonment and Dependence lifetraps. The second type comes from an environment that is emotionally unstable. No one is consistently there for the child.

Many people who have the Dependence lifetrap also have the Abandonment lifetrap.

People who have the Dependence lifetrap believe that they cannot survive alone. They need a strong figure to guide and direct them through the activities of day-to-day life. They need help.

If you believe your life depends on another person, then the possibility of losing that person is terrifying. Certainly, anyone who has a strong Dependence lifetrap will also have an issue with abandonment.

Many people have a strong Abandonment lifetrap and do not have an issue with dependence. They belong to the second type, whose lifetrap arose from the instability of the child’s emotional connections to the people who are most intimate—the mother, the father, sisters and brothers, and close friends.

If your lifetrap arose from instability, then what happened was you experienced an emotional connection, and then it was lost. You cannot bear to be apart from the people you love because of the way you feel without them.

You need other people to feel soothed. This differs from abandonment based upon dependence, in which you need someone to take care of you as a child needs a parent. In one case, you are looking for guidance, direction, and help; and in the other case, you are looking for nurturance, love, and a sense of emotional connection.

Researchers who study infants have observed that some babies react far more intensely to separation than do others. This suggests that some people may be biologically predisposed to develop the Abandonment lifetrap.

BOWLBY’S THREE PHASES OF SEPARATION 1. Anxiety 2. Despair 3. Detachment

First the babies “protested,” as we have noted, and exhibited great anxiety. They searched for their mothers. If another person tried to comfort them, they were inconsolable. They showed flashes of anger at their mothers. But as time passed and their mothers did not come, they grew resigned and settled into a period of depression. In this phase they were apathetic and withdrawn. They were indifferent to attempts to connect with them emotionally by the staff. If enough time passed, however, the babies came out of this depression and formed other attachments. If the mother then returned, a baby entered the third phase, detachment. The baby was cold to the mother and did not approach or show interest in her. As time passed, however, the baby’s detachment broke, and the baby became attached to the mother once again. This baby was likely to be clingy and anxious when the mother was out of sight—to have what Bowlby calls “anxious attachment” to the mother.

Not only human infants but infants of all animal species generally display the same pattern. Such universality of behavior strongly suggests a biological predisposition.

People who are born with a tendency to respond to separation so intensely and who are unable to soothe themselves in the absence of a loved person are probably more likely to develop the Abandonment lifetrap.

Nevertheless, it is likely that the more a person has the biological predisposition, the less trauma is needed to activate the lifetrap,

You lost the attention of a parent in a significant way. For example, a brother or sister was born or your parent remarried.

With Emotional Deprivation, the parent was always physically there, but the quality of the emotional relationship was consistently inadequate. The parents did not know how to love, nurture, and empathize well enough. The connection with parents was stable, but not close enough. With Abandonment, the connection once existed and it was lost. Or the parent would come and go unpredictably.

Deprivation - nepriteklius

Aside from the loss of a parent, another origin for Abandonment is the absence of one person who consistently serves as a maternal figure for the child. Children whose parents have no time for them, who are raised by a succession of nannies or in a succession of day-care centers, or who are raised in institutions where the staff constantly changes are examples of this origin.

The next origin is more subtle. You may have a stable mother figure, but there may be instability in the way she relates to you. For example, Patrick’s alcoholic mother could be very loving and connected one moment, and then totally indifferent within a matter of a few hours.

This origin reflects the moment-to-moment interactions that pass between mother and child. If these interactions are unstable, then the child can develop the Abandonment lifetrap.

To a child who can get little else from a parent, even punishment can be experienced as a connection.

Perhaps your parents were continually fighting, and you felt the family was unstable and might dissolve. Or perhaps your parents divorced and one or both remarried into families with other children.

Or perhaps your parent withdrew attention and nurturing from you to give it to a younger sibling. Of course, not all new births in a family are traumatic for the older child. These events do not always create the lifetrap. It depends upon the degree of disconnection. To create the lifetrap, the events must trigger powerful feelings of abandonment.

Often, a child who feels abandoned by a parent will follow that parent around. The child will shadow the parent, watch the parent, stay near the parent at all times.

Finally, as we noted before, the Abandonment lifetrap can arise from an overprotective environment and become mixed with Dependence. The dependent child fears abandonment.

Some people who have the Abandonment lifetrap cope by avoiding intimate relationships altogether.

You probably feel drawn to lovers who hold some potential for abandoning you.

They are signs that your relationship is triggering your Abandonment lifetrap. DANGER SIGNALS IN POTENTIAL PARTNERS 1. Your partner is unlikely to make a long-term commitment because he/she is married or involved in another relationship. 2. Your partner is not consistently available for you to spend time together (e.g., he/she travels a lot, lives far away, is a workaholic). 3. Your partner is emotionally unstable (e.g., he/she drinks, uses drugs, is depressed, cannot hold down a regular job) and cannot be there for you emotionally on a consistent basis. 4. Your partner is a Peter Pan, who insists on his/her freedom to come and go, does not want to settle down, or wants the freedom to have many lovers. 5. Your partner is ambivalent about you—he/she wants you but holds back emotionally; or one moment acts deeply in love with you and the next moment acts as though you do not exist.

You are not looking for partners who present no hope of a stable relationship, rather you are attracted to partners who present some hope for stability, but not complete hope—who present a mixture of hope and doubt. You feel as if there is a possibility that you might win the person perma...

You are attracted most to partners who show some degree of commitment and connection, but not so much that you are ab...

Living in an unstable love relationship feels comfortable and familiar to you. It is what you have always known. And the instability keeps activating your lifetrap, generating a steady flow of chemistry. You stay passionately in love. Choosing partners who are not really there for...

ABANDONMENT LIFETRAPS IN A RELATIONSHIP 1. You avoid intimate relationships even with appropriate partners because you are afraid of losing the person or getting too close and being hurt. 2. You worry excessively about the possibility that your partner will die or otherwise be lost, and what you would do. 3. You overreact to minor things your partner says or does, and interpret them as signs that he/she wants to leave you. 4. You are excessively jealous and possessive. 5. You cling to your partner. Your whole life becomes obsessed with keeping him/her. 6. You cannot stand to be away from your partner, even for a few days. 7. You are never fully convinced that your partner will stay with you. 8. You get angry and accuse your partner of not being loyal or faithful. 9. You sometimes detach, leave, or withdraw to punish your partner for leaving you alone.

It is possible that you are in a stable, healthy relationship, yet continue to feel that the relationship is unstable.

You might also fall into another Abandonment lifetrap—behaving in ways that tend to drive your partner away.