Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (5 page)

If you are unsure about whether a lifetrap applies to you or someone close to you, do not worry about trying to be sure now. When you get to the chapter devoted to each lifetrap, we will give you a much more detailed test you can take to be sure that it fits.

Two lifetraps relate to a lack of safety or security in your childhood family. These are
Abandonment
and
Mistrust.

The
Abandonment
lifetrap is the feeling that the people you love will leave you, and you will end up emotionally isolated forever. Whether you feel people close to you will die, leave home forever, or abandon you because they prefer someone else, somehow you feel that you will be left alone. Because of this belief, you may cling to people close to you too much. Ironically, you end up pushing them away. You may get very upset or angry about even normal separations.

The
Mistrust and Abuse
lifetrap is the expectation that people will hurt or abuse you in some way—that they will cheat, lie to, manipulate, humiliate, physically harm, or otherwise take advantage of you. If you have this lifetrap, you hide behind a wall of mistrust to protect yourself. You never let people get too close. You are suspicious of other people’s intentions, and tend to assume the worst. You expect that the people you love will betray you. Either you avoid relationships altogether, form superficial relationships in which you do not really open up to others, or you form relationships with people who treat you badly and then feel angry and vengeful toward them.

Two lifetraps relate to your ability to function independently in the world. These lifetraps are
Dependence
and
Vulnerability.

If you are caught in the
Dependence
lifetrap, you feel unable to handle everyday life in a competent manner without considerable help from others. You depend on others to act as a crutch and need constant support. As a child you were made to feel incompetent when you tried to assert your independence. As an adult, you seek out strong figures upon whom to become dependent and allow them to rule your life. At work, you shrink from acting on your own. Needless to say, this holds you back.

With
Vulnerability,
you live in fear that disaster is about to strike—whether natural, criminal, medical, or financial. You do not feel
safe
in the world. If you have this lifetrap, as a child you were made to feel that the world is a dangerous place. You were probably overprotected by your parents, who worried too much about your safety. Your fears are
excessive
and
unrealistic,
yet you let them control your life, and pour your energy into making sure that you are safe. Your fears may revolve around illness: having an anxiety attack, getting AIDS, or going crazy. They may be focused around financial vulnerability: going broke and ending up on the streets. Your vulnerability may revolve around other phobic situations, such as a fear of flying, being mugged, or earthquakes.

Two lifetraps relate to the strength of your emotional connections to others:
Emotional Deprivation
and
Social Exclusion.

Emotional Deprivation
is the belief that your need for love will never be met adequately by other people. You feel that no one truly cares for you or understands how you feel. You find yourself attracted to cold and ungiving people, or you are cold and ungiving yourself, leading you to form relationships that inevitably prove unsatisfying. You feel
cheated,
and you alternate between being angry about it and feeling hurt and alone. Ironically, your anger just drives people further away, ensuring your continued deprivation.

When patients with emotional deprivation come to see us for therapy sessions, there is a loneliness about them that stays with us even after they have left the office. It is a quality of emptiness, of emotional disconnection. These are people who do not know what love is.

Social Exclusion
involves your connection to friends and groups. It has to do with feeling isolated from the rest of the world, with feeling
different.
If you have this lifetrap, as a child you felt excluded by peers. You did not belong to a group of friends. Perhaps you had some unusual characteristic that made you feel different in some way. As an adult, you maintain your lifetrap mainly through avoidance. You avoid socializing in groups and making friends.

You may have felt excluded because there was something about you that other children rejected. Hence you felt socially
undesirable.
As an adult you may feel that you are ugly, sexually undesirable, low in status, poor in conversational skills, boring, or otherwise deficient. You reenact your childhood rejection—you feel and act inferior in social situations.

It is not always apparent that someone has a Social Exclusion lifetrap. Many people with this lifetrap are quite comfortable in intimate settings and are quite socially skilled. Their lifetrap may not
show
in one-to-one relationships. It sometimes surprises us to realize how anxious and aloof they may feel at parties, in classes, at meetings, or at work. They have a restless quality, a quality of looking for a place to belong.

The two lifetraps that relate to your self-esteem are
Defectiveness
and
Failure.

With
Defectiveness
, you feel
inwardly
flawed and defective. You believe that you would be fundamentally unlovable to anyone who got close enough to really know you. Your defectiveness would be exposed. As a child, you did not feel respected for who you were in your family. Instead, you were criticized for your „flaws.“ You blamed yourself—you felt unworthy of love. As an adult, you are afraid of love. You find it difficult to believe that people close to you value you, so you expect rejection.

Failure
is the belief that you are inadequate in areas of achievement, such as school, work, and sports. You believe you have failed relative to your peers. As a child, you were made to feel inferior in terms of achievement. You may have had a learning disability, or you may never have learned enough discipline to master important skills, such as reading. Other children were always better than you. You were called „stupid,“ „untalented,“ or „lazy.“ As an adult, you maintain your lifetrap by exaggerating the degree of your failure and by acting in ways that ensure your continued failure.

Two lifetraps deal with Self-Expression—your ability to express what you want and get your true needs met:
Subjugation
and
Unrelenting Standards.

With
Subjugation,
you sacrifice your own needs and desires for the sake of pleasing others or meeting their needs. You allow others to control you. You do this either out of
guilt
—that you hurt other people by putting yourself first—or
fear
that you will be punished or abandoned if you disobey. As a child, someone close to you, probably a parent, subjugated you. As an adult, you repeatedly enter relationships with dominant, controlling people and subjugate yourself to them or you enter relationships with needy people who are too damaged to give back to you in return.

If you are in the
Unrelenting Standards
lifetrap, you strive relentlessly to meet extremely high expectations of yourself. You place excessive emphasis on status, money, achievement, beauty, order, or recognition at the expense of happiness, pleasure, health, a sense of accomplishment, and satisfying relationships. You probably apply your rigid standards to other people as well and are very judgmental. When you were a child, you were expected to be the best, and you were taught that anything else was failure. You learned that nothing you did was quite good enough.

The final lifetrap,
Entitlement,
is associated with the ability to accept realistic limits in life. People who have this lifetrap feel
special.
They insist that they be able to do, say, or have whatever they want immediately. They disregard what others consider reasonable, what is actually feasible, the time or patience usually required, and the cost to others. They have difficulty with self-discipline.

Many of the people with this lifetrap were spoiled as children. They were not required to show self-control or to accept the restrictions placed on other children. As adults, they still get very angry when they do not get what they want.

Now you have an idea of which lifetraps apply to you. The next chapter will tell you about where lifetraps come from—how we develop them as children.

Lifetraps have three central features that allow us to recognize them.

RECOGNIZING LIFETRAPS

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

As we said in the first chapter, a lifetrap is a pattern or theme that starts in childhood and repeats throughout life. The theme might be Abandonment or Mistrust or Emotional Deprivation or any of the others we described. The end result is that, as an adult,
we manage to recreate the conditions of our childhood that were most harmful to us.

A lifetrap is self-destructive. This self-defeating quality is what makes lifetraps so poignant for us as therapists to watch. We see someone like Patrick get abandoned
again,
or someone like Madeline get abused. Patients are drawn to situations that trigger their lifetraps, like moths to flame. A lifetrap damages our sense of self, our health, our relationships with others, our work, our happiness, our moods—it touches every aspect of our lives.

A lifetrap struggles hard for survival. We feel a strong push to maintain it. This is part of the human drive for consistency. 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.

A number of factors contribute to the development of lifetraps. The first is temperament. Temperament is inborn. It is our emotional makeup, the way we are
wired
to respond to events.

Like other inborn traits, temperament varies. It also covers a range of emotions. Here are some examples of traits we believe may be largely inherited.

POSSIBLE DIMENSIONS OF TEMPERAMENT

Shy <—> Outgoing

Passive <—> Aggressive

Emotionally Flat <—> Emotionally Intense

Anxious <—> Fearless

Sensitive <—> Invulnerable

You might think of your temperament as the combination of your locations on all of these dimensions, and others we do not yet know of or understand.

Of course, behavior is influenced by environment as well. A safe and nurturing environment may make even a shy child relatively outgoing; and, if things get bad enough, even a relatively invulnerable child can be beaten down.

Heredity and environment shape and influence us. This is true (although to a lesser degree) even of traits that seem purely physical, such as height. We are born with a potential for a certain height, and whether we reach that potential depends in part on our environment—whether we are well fed, have a healthy environment, etc.

The most important early influence in our environment is our family. To a large extent, the dynamics of our family were the dynamics of our early world. When we reenact a lifetrap, what we are reenacting is almost always a drama from our childhood family. For example, Patrick reenacts what happened to him, his abandonment by his mother, and Madeline reenacts being abused.

In most cases the influence of family is strongest at birth and progressively declines as the child grows up. Other influences become important—peers, school, etc.—but the family remains the primal situation. Lifetraps develop when early childhood environments are destructive. Here are some examples:

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.
   

Heredity and environment interact. The destructive influences of our childhood interacted with our specific temperament in the formation of our lifetraps. Our temperament may partially determine how we were treated by our parents. For example, often only one child in a family is singled out for abuse. And our temperament partially determines how we responded to that treatment. Given the same environment, two children can react very differently. Both might be abused, but one becomes passive and the other fights back.