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Excelling in other roles is a way of compensating for the lifetrap. Men might excel in sports or seducing women; women might excel in the...
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Get in Touch with the Child Inside of You Who Felt, and Still Feels, Like a Failure. Try to recall memories of being criticized, humiliated, compared, or discouraged by your family or peers. Understand the origins of your lifetrap.
How well could you have done if you had been praised, supported, and guided in areas of achievement where you had potential?
Make a list of your talents, skills, abilities, and accomplishments in the area of achievement, especially your natural talents. Review this list each day to remind yourself of your potential. Get help from friends or significant others in making this list.
You need behavior change. You have to change your fundamental stance of escape and avoidance into one of confrontation and mastery.
How did your parents deal with your success and failure? Were they critical, supportive, reinforcing? As a child, did you avoid tasks or did you follow through on them? Did you avoid taking on challenges?
You have potential, but you have not actually developed it. Because you have avoided so much, you may have some real gaps in your learning.
THE EXPERIENCE OF SUBJUGATION To a large degree, you experience the world in terms of control issues.
Other people in your life always seem to be in control—you feel controlled by the people around you. At the core of your subjugation is the conviction that you must please others, that you must please parents, brothers, sisters, friends, teachers, lovers, spouses, bosses, coworkers, children, and even strangers. In all likelihood, the only exception to this rule of pleasing people—the only person you do not feel obliged to please—is yourself. It is what the other person wants that comes first.
Constantly meeting the needs of other people is so much responsibility. It is exhausting. Life loses much of its joy and freedom. Subjugation deprives you of your freedom because the choices you make are dictated by their effects on other people. Your focus is not on yourself. It is not, “What I want and feel,” but rather, “What you want and what I can do to make you happy with me.”
You are passive. Life happens to you.
You probably think of yourself as the kind of person with whom it is easy to get along. Since you are so agreeable and eager to please, and tend to avert conflict, naturally you get along with others.
When people ask you to do things that are unreasonable, such as more than your share of the work, you say “yes.” And you find it extremely difficult to ask other people to change their behavior, no matter how much their behavior disturbs you.
you might feel proud that you are able to serve others—that you are able to help other people and be attentive to other people’s needs.
However, one of your weaknesses is that what you want often gets lost. Too often you are unassertive and silent about your needs.
We hear this argument often from subjugated patients: that they do not fight for what they want because their desires seem so trivial. But in the end, when you add all the trivial desires together, you are left with a life in which few of your needs are met.
Easygoing people have some areas in which they have strong feelings, and will assert what they feel. In minor matters, they will not express opinions, but in major matters they usually will express themselves. They will stand up for certain things. In subjugation, there are almost no strong opinions across the board.
in subjugation there is no strong sense of self. Unexpressed anger is another clue that you are subjugated rather than easygoing.
You can become so immersed in trying to meet the needs of other people that you begin to blend or merge into these people. The boundary between who you are and who they are becomes blurred. You might adopt other people’s goals and opinions as your own. You might adopt other people’s values. You might lose yourself in the other. There is a chance that you might subjugate yourself to a group, particularly a group with a charismatic leader.
we have identified two major reasons why subjugated patients allow other people to control them. The first is that they subjugate themselves out of guilt, or because they want to relieve the pain of others; and the second is that they subjugate because they anticipate rejection, retaliation, or abandonment.
TWO TYPES OF SUBJUGATION 1. Self-Sacrifice (subjugation out of guilt) 2. Submissiveness (subjugation out of fear)
Carlton subjugates himself out of guilt. He wants to gain approval. He wants everyone to like him. Gaining approval is his primary motivation. In addition, Carlton feels the pain of others very deeply. When he feels that another person is suffering, he is moved to take care of that person. He tries to meet other people’s needs. Whenever he believes he has failed, he feels guilty. He finds the experience of guilt very uncomfortable, and his self-sacrifice helps him avoid this guilt.
• SELF-SACRIFICE • Self-sacrificers feel responsible for the well-being of others. As a child, you may have experienced too much responsibility for the physical or emotional welfare of a parent, sister, brother, or of some other close person.
You are empathic; perhaps this is part of your innate temperament. You feel the pain of others and want to ease their pain. You try to fix things, to make everything better.
It is important to note that your subjugation is mostly voluntary. Whoever subjugated you as a child did not force you to do what he or she wanted. Rather, because they were in pain or especially weak, you felt that their needs took precedence over yours.
The give-get ratio is out of balance in your life—you are giving much more than you are getting.
you are almost certain to have some anger, even though you may not acknowledge any resentment.
Your lifetrap gets its strength primarily from the emotion of guilt. You feel guilty whenever you put yourself first.
Whenever you step out of your subjugated role, you feel guilty.
You are going to have to learn to tolerate this guilt in order to change.
SUBMISSIVENESS • Submission is the second form of the Subjugation lifetrap. You submit to the subjugation process involuntarily. Whether you actually have a choice or not, you feel as though you have no choice.
As a child, you subjugated yourself in order to avoid punishment or abandonment, probably by a parent. Your parent threatened to hurt you or to withdraw love or attention.
She felt that her house was a prison. Outwardly, she obeyed her father because she was afraid. Inwardly, she was filled with rage.
At one time, your subjugation really was involuntary: as a child. In relation to the adults who subjugated you, you were dependent and helpless. A child cannot withstand the threat of punishment or abandonment. Your subjugation was adaptive. But as an adult, you are no longer dependent and helpless.
Although you probably have an easygoing manner, many strong feelings press upon you. Anger in particular builds up from having to surrender your own needs to the needs of others, time after time. When your needs constantly are frustrated, anger is inevitable. You might feel that you are being used or controlled, or that people are taking advantage of you, or you might feel that your needs do not count.
You believe that it is dangerous and wrong to express your anger to others, so you deny and suppress these feelings.
since you typically hold back your anger and refrain from self-assertion, you ignore your body’s natural signals and fail to correct situations.
Although there may be times when you display your anger directly, it is more common for you to express it indirectly, in a disguised fashion—passive-aggressively. You get back at people in subtle ways, like procrastinating, being late, or talking about them behind their backs. You may do this unknowingly.
Passive-aggressive behaviors—procrastinating, talking behind other people’s backs, agreeing to do something and not following through, making excuses—all share the feature that they irritate other people, but it is difficult for other people to know whether the passive-aggressive person intends the irritation.
Subjugated people are generally most comfortable in a passive role. However, some people with Subjugation lifetraps learned to cope through Counterattack. Instead of submitting, they take on the opposite role. They become aggressive and domineering. By rebelling, they overcompensate for their feelings of subjugation.
rebels tend to act as though only they are important and only they have needs.
Rebels are not actually any more free than other subjugated people. They do not freely choose their interests or relationships; choices are made for them by the people they are rebelling against.
Some people make up for their feelings of subjugation by engaging in excessive self-control. Because they feel out of control of most areas of their lives, they seize control of some aspect of themselves.
Through the symptoms of anorexia, she rebels against her mother, and unknowingly reenacts her Subjugation lifetrap.
ORIGINS OF THE SUBJUGATION LIFETRAP 1. Your parents tried to dominate or control almost every aspect of your life. 2. Your parent(s) punished, threatened, or got angry at you when you would not do things their way. 3. Your parent(s) withdrew emotionally or cut off contact with you if you disagreed with them about how to do things. 4. Your parent(s) did not allow you to make your own choices as a child. 5. Because your mother/father was not around enough, or was not capable enough, you ended up taking care of the rest of the family. 6. Your parent(s) always talked to you about their personal
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Such parents place their needs first, above the needs of their children, and lack empathy. They do great damage to their children. If you were a child of such a parent, it is almost certain that you have a strong Subjugation lifetrap.
Near the middle of the Subjugation continuum, one of your parents may have criticized or reprimanded you whenever you expressed any individuality.
DANGER SIGNALS IN POTENTIAL PARTNERS 1. Your partner is domineering and expects to have things his/her way. 2. Your partner has a very strong sense of self and knows exactly what he/she wants in most situations. 3. Your partner becomes irritated or angry when you disagree or attend to your own needs. 4. Your partner does not respect your opinions, needs, or rights. 5. Your partner pouts or pulls away from you when you do things your way. 6. Your partner is easily hurt or upset, so you feel you have to take care of him/her. 7. You have to watch what you do or say carefully because your partner
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You have the strongest feelings of attraction and attachment to partners who trigger your lifetrap. These relationships become intense for you because they unlock the emotions of your childhood subjugation.
If you are self-sacrificing, you may be drawn to needy and dependent partners. You rush to fill their needs. You might try to save or rescue them. Sometimes subjugated people choose narcissistic partners, who are demanding but give little in return, and who really do not care about others’ feelings.
