Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (10 page)

After working with many patients, we have made a list of the most common obstacles to change. We have also listed some possible solutions.

If you are having trouble changing, you may still be blaming others for your problems or your lack of progress. You may still be having trouble admitting your mistakes or taking responsibility for changing. Or you may still be overcompensating by working harder, impressing people more, making more money, pleasing people more, and so on. (For more about Counterattacking, see Chapter 4.)

Jed, the man who moved from woman to woman, had to struggle hard to stop Counterattacking. His criticalness of women, his demand that they meet his impossibly high standards for beauty and status, and his need for constant excitement were ways he made himself feel better about his loneliness. He had to get beyond his Counterattacks to connect at a human level with a woman without criticizing her or trying to impress her. He had to get close enough to see beyond the lifetrap.

Here are some solutions to this obstacle:

Do an experiment. Make a list of all the choices you have regretted in your life. What if they were your fault? How would you feel? What if the criticisms others have of you
have
some validity? What would that mean about you?

Try to feel the pain of your flaws. Try to acknowledge the pain of your childhood—what you wanted but did not get.

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.

Escape is a common problem. Many patients have trouble giving up their escape routes. You may find that you have a similar difficulty. You do not allow yourself to think about your problems, your past, your family, or your life patterns. You keep cutting off feelings or dulling them by drinking or taking drugs.

We understand why you want to Escape. To stop avoiding means to lay yourself open to intense anxiety and pain. All five of the patients in Chapter 1 had to struggle with this issue. Patrick had to stop avoiding the problems in his life by obsessing about Francine. 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. And Carlton had to stop running away from his own needs and preferences.

It takes motivation to overcome Escape as a coping style. You have to see the rest of your life before you—either stuck in the lifetrap or finally free of it.

You must allow yourself to think through your problems and feel your childhood pain before you can change.

Force yourself to try some of the childhood memory exercises we describe in your lifetrap chapter. Write down some criticisms of your parents or some of your flaws and vulnerabilities.

Keep doing this every day.

Make a list of the advantages and disadvantages of avoiding your feelings. Reread the list every day to remind yourself of why you are doing this.

Stop escaping through drinking, overeating, using drugs, overworking, etc., for a few days. Keep a diary in which you write down what you feel. Try some of the imagery exercises in your lifetrap chapter during these days. Go to a twelve-step program.

Another obstacle is continuing to believe the lifetrap is true. If you accept your lifetrap on a rational level, you are not going to try to change it. You have to cast enough doubt on the validity of your lifetrap for you to do some of the experiments to change.

For example, for a long time Heather felt extremely anxious in the situations she was entering. This was because she still
believed
the situations were dangerous and that catastrophe could strike at any moment. She maintained a hypervigilant state, ever alert for possible harm.

Heather still believed her lifetrap. She believed that she was excessively vulnerable to harm. She had to change her beliefs. She did this in a number of different ways: she educated herself about realistic appraisals of danger, worked continually to lower the odds she assigned to danger, and took reasonable precautions. She learned to relax her body in these situations. Her beliefs gradually yielded.

A lifetrap does not give way all at once. Rather, you must continually chip away at it, bit by bit, gradually weakening its pull.

Return to the exercises in your lifetrap chapter on disproving your lifetrap. Go through them again. Make a commitment to fighting your beliefs.

You may find it helpful to ask someone you trust to help you with the exercises. This person can provide a more objective point of view.

Look very carefully through your life for any evidence that challenges your lifetrap. Look for any possible avenues of change. Were there extenuating circumstances that invalidate the lifetrap? Were you abused? Did you avoid trying harder because you were afraid of rejection and failure? Did you choose friends, lovers, bosses, etc., who confirmed your lifetrap? Try to play devil’s advocate in arguing against your lifetrap.

Write your flashcard and read it several times a day.

Perhaps you have several lifetraps, and you started with the one that is most upsetting for you. 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. Carlton, the people-pleaser, is an example of this. When Carlton first started doing assertiveness exercises, he began by attempting to be assertive with his father. This was a mistake: it was too hard. Carlton would become very fearful and unable to express himself. Trying to confront his father right off the bat was setting himself up for failure.

Carlton eventually mastered assertiveness with his father. But he had to sharpen his skills and his confidence on less threatening people first. He started with strangers, such as salespeople and waitresses, gradually moved up to acquaintances and coworkers, and
then
began focusing on more intimate relationships.

This is one of the most important rules:
Always attempt manageable tasks.

Break your plan into smaller steps.

Start with the easier steps. Slowly build a sense of mastery. Work your way up to the difficult steps.

This happens a lot. Most patients tell us that for many months they still
feel
deep down that the lifetrap is true, regardless of what logic and evidence tell them.

Patrick—the man whose wife kept having affairs—would say this. Even when he was in a healthy relationship with a stable woman who could be there for him, he would still
feel
like she was going to abandon him. If she seemed momentarily preoccupied or withdrawn, he became alarmed and began desperately trying to get her back. He would not allow the woman any space.

Patrick finally had to experiment by letting go. He had to learn to give her some space. He was not going to lose her. He had to learn that it was safe to let her go.

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.

You can speed up the process somewhat by doing more experiential exercises. 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.

You can also speed up the process by working harder to change the behaviors that reinforce your lifetrap. As you change old patterns, you will see new evidence that contradicts your lifetrap. This new evidence will have a powerful effect on the way that you feel.

Finally, ask friends for help and support. Your friends can help you see that your lifetrap is invalid.

You may approach change in a hit-or-miss fashion. Perhaps you only work on it once in a while. You miss steps. You skip from lifetrap to lifetrap. You resist doing all the writing that is required.

In this we are advocates of the cliche, „Slow and steady wins the race“ Your lifetrap is like a rock which you must chip away with a hammer. If you only hammer it sporadically, sometimes on one part and sometimes on another, with half-hearted taps, the rock is going to be there for a long time. It is much more efficient and effective to hammer away systematically with hard, decisive taps.

Go back through the chapter on the lifetrap and make sure you have completed all the exercises. Did you do imagery? Did you list the evidence pro and con? Did you write a flashcard? Write a letter to your parents? Make a plan for behavior change? Do all the exercises in writing, not just in your head?

Set aside a few minutes every day to review your progress. Reread your flashcards. Was your lifetrap activated today? Did you do anything to surrender to your pattern? Push yourself to think, feel, or act differently
each day.

Perhaps you do not fully understand all the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reinforce your lifetrap. You are missing a change step that is necessary to making progress.

Carlton illustrates this. Despite becoming more assertive with his wife and children, he remained quite angry and unhappy. He would calmly tell them when he was angry, he would say „no“ to unreasonable requests, he would ask them to change their behavior when it disturbed him. But he still
felt
subjugated and angry.

We realized what the problem was. It was really quite simple. He was not communicating what
he
wanted—his opinions and preferences. He was not telling other people what he wanted from them, and then was angry he was not getting it. Communicating his needs was an important element for Carlton.

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.

Review the list of behaviors that are typical of your lifetrap more carefully. (See the chapter devoted to your lifetrap to find this list.) Did you overlook part of the pattern that really
does
apply to you?

Before they come to us, many patients try very hard to change on their
own. It is when they have little success at self-help that they start therapy.

This may happen to you. Even if you follow all the steps outlined in this book, you may still be unable to change. Despite all your efforts, the lifetrap still rules your life.

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.

Seek professional help from a therapist or group.

Now that you have an idea of our general plan of action, let us turn to the
chapters on individual lifetraps. In this way, the change process can begin.

ABBY: TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD. SHE LIVES IN FEAR THAT SHE IS GOING TO LOSE HER HUSBAND.

The very first thing Abby told me about herself was that her father had died when she was a child.

ABBY: I was seven years old when it happened. He had a heart attack at work.

It really hurts me to admit this, but I have only vague memories of him left. And pictures, of course. He was big and warm. He hugged me a lot.

After he was gone, I used to stand by the window and wait for him to come home. (Starts to cry.) I guess I just couldn’t accept that it had happened.

I’d never forget the feeling I had waiting for him by the window.

THERAPIST: Is that feeling with you anywhere in your life now?

ABBY: Yes, it’s a feeling that’s with me now. It’s the way I feel when my husband goes away.

Abby and Kurt, her husband, are having problems about Kurt’s frequent business trips. Each time he leaves on a trip, Abby becomes very upset.

ABBY: There is always a scene. I start to cry, and he tries to reassure me, but it doesn’t work. While he’s away, half the time I’m terrified and half the time I’m crying. I feel so alone.

When he gets back I’m so angry at him for what he put me through. That’s the irony of the whole thing. When he finally gets home, I’m so mad that I don’t even want to see him.