Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (11 page)

Kurt has begun to dread coming home. Abby also calls him on the telephone too often when he is away. She once had him paged away from an important business meeting just because she wanted to hear his voice.

PATRICK: THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OLD. HE IS MARRIED TO A WOMAN WHO HAS AFFAIRS WITH OTHER MEN.

Patrick did not face such dramatic losses in his life. His story was more one of constant loss, day by day. Until Patrick was eight years old, his mother was an alcoholic.

PATRICK: At her worst, she went on binges. She’d be gone for two or three days. I was never sure if she was coming back.

Even at her best, when she was drinking at home, she wasn’t there for me. Whether she was gone or home, if she was drinking, I was alone.

Patrick is married to Francine, a woman who has had a series of affairs with other men. She keeps promising that she will stop and be faithful to Patrick, but she does not stop. She leaves the house, with one of numerous explanations and protestations of innocence, and Patrick knows she is lying.

Even before he started therapy, Patrick had been struck by the similarity between how he feels now, waiting for his wife to come home, and how he felt as a child waiting for his mother.

PATRICK: I wonder about it. Even though Francine doesn’t drink, I’m going through the whole thing with my mother again. I don’t understand it. I wait for Francine to come home, and it’s that same lonely feeling.

LINDSAY: THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD. SHE HAS ONE RELATIONSHIP AFTER ANOTHER AND NEVER SETTLES DOWN.

Our first impression of Lindsay was that she was likable and intense. Most people take a while to warm up to us, but not Lindsay. She very quickly became emotionally involved with us. Within a few sessions we felt like we had been her therapists for years.

In the first session, Lindsay told us why she had come:

LINDSAY: I wish I could find that right man, the one who will marry me and we’ll stay together forever, but it never seems to happen.

THERAPIST: What happens instead?

LINDSAY: I go from one man to another.

Lindsay’s relationships are turbulent. She gets involved very intensely, very fast. She feels frightened but swept away. Sometimes even in the first weeks of a relationship, she is saying „I love you,“ wanting to be with the man every minute, and talking about being together forever. In fact, she scares most men away because she is too much too soon.

Lindsay is passionate. She has always had more intense feelings than the average person. In romantic relationships, she seems to lose all sense of reason and to get lost in her emotions. As soon as the man pulls away slightly, she begins accusing him of wanting to leave her. And she tests him, seeing how far she can go before he will leave her, sometimes doing outlandish things. For example, she once attended her boyfriend’s birthday party and left with another man.

When a relationship ends and she is alone, she feels bored and empty. Negative feelings start to overwhelm her, and she rushes into another relationship. Her relationships are short, and they always end with the man abandoning her. In the end, all her boyfriends have left her.

This questionnaire will measure the strength of your Abandonment lifetrap. Answer the items using the scale below. Rate each item based on the way you have felt or behaved
in general during your adult life.
If there has been a lot of variation during different periods of your adult years, focus more on
the most recent year or two
in rating an item.

SCORING KEY

1. Completely untrue of me
   
2. Mostly untrue of me
   
3. Slightly more true than untrue of me
   
4. Moderately true of me
   
5. Mostly true of me
   
6. Describes me perfectly
   

If you have any 5’s or 6’s on this questionnaire, this lifetrap may still apply to you, even if your score is in the low range.

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.

You have a fundamental belief that you will lose the people you love and be left emotionally isolated forever. Whether people will die, send you away, or leave you, somehow you feel that you will be left
alone.
You expect to be abandoned, and you expect it to last forever. You believe you will never regain the person you have lost. In your heart, you feel it is your destiny to live your life completely alone.

PATRICK: There are times, when Tm driving or something, when it comes to me. I know Francine’s eventually going to leave me. She’ll fall in love with one of these guys, and that’ll be it. And all I’ll have left is missing her.

The lifetrap gives you a sense of despair about love. You believe that no matter how good things seem, in the end your relationships are doomed.

It is difficult for you to believe that people will be there for you—and that they are still there for you in some way even when they are absent. Most people are not upset by short separations from their loved ones. They know the relationship will survive the separation intact. But with the Abandonment lifetrap there is no such security. As Abby says, „Whenever I see Kurt walking out the door, I feel like he is never coming back.“ You want to cling to people too much, and you become inappropriately angry or frightened at the possibility of any separation, no matter how slight. Particularly in romantic relationships, you feel emotionally dependent on the other person, and you fear the loss of that intimate connection.

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. However, if you try to talk about the experience, the words are something like, „I’m all alone,“ „No one is there for me.“ Because the lifetrap begins so early, it has tremendous emotional force. A person with a severe Abandonment lifetrap responds to even brief separations with the feelings of a small child who has been abandoned.

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. However, separations do not have to be real to trigger the lifetrap, nor do they have to occur on a physical level. If you have the lifetrap, you are overly sensitive and often read the intent to abandon you into innocent remarks. The most powerful triggers are real loss or separation—divorce, someone moving or going away, death—but often triggers are much more subtle events.

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.

Lindsay, for example, once abruptly left a dinner party because her boyfriend ignored a remark she had made.

LINDSAY: Greg and I were at a dinner party, and he was talking to the woman sitting next to him, and he didn’t hear what I was saying to him. I got up and left. I felt totally crushed. When he called me the next day, I flew into a rage about it.

THERAPIST: What was it that upset you so much?

LINDSAY: I had seen him looking at this woman earlier. I was sure he was attracted to her.

Greg, who had not even heard her remark, was naturally confused by her extreme reaction. This episode further convinced him that Lindsay was not the right person for him. In the end (as Lindsay had always known he would), he left her.

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. But if the anxiety goes on long enough, it passes. Eventually it subsides, and yields to acceptance that the person is gone. 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.

TWO TYPES OF ABANDONMENT

1. Abandonment based upon dependence
   
2. Abandonment based upon instability or loss
   

Many people who have the Dependence lifetrap also have the Abandonment lifetrap. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a person having the Dependence lifetrap and
not
having 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.
Abby is an example of a person who has both lifetraps.

THERAPIST: What do you imagine would happen to you if you actually lost Kurt?

ABBY: I don’t know. I just couldn’t cope without him. I couldn’t live. I can’t imagine my life without him.

THERAPIST: Would you be able to survive—to eat, clothe yourself, keep yourself sheltered?

ABBY: No. I can’t function in the world alone. (Pause.) I guess I believe I would die without him.

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.

However, the reverse is not true. 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. Both Patrick and Lindsay are afraid of being abandoned by the people they love, but they can function independently. They have a dependence of sorts on their partners, but it is an
emotional
, rather than a
functional,
dependence.

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. It is a matter of feeling connected to the rest of humanity. When the connection is lost, you are thrown into nothingness.

LINDSAY: After Greg left me, I was totally alone. I could feel it around me, like an ache. There was just nothing at all.

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.