Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (13 page)

THERAPIST: Close your eyes and give me an image of how you felt.

LINDSAY: I see myself falling backwards. It’s like falling backwards into this dark cellar, where I’ll be all alone forever. Greg is pushing me backwards into the cellar, and the door is going to shut, and I’m going to be all alone.

THERAPIST: What are you feeling?

LINDSAY: Terrified.

If your lifetrap is severe, this is how you experience even minor disruptions in your intimate relationship. You feel that if your connection to the loved person were lost, you would be plunged into utter aloneness.

Some people who have the Abandonment lifetrap cope by avoiding intimate relationships altogether. They would rather remain alone than go through the process of loss again. Patrick was this way for many years before he married Francine.

THERAPIST: You were alone a long time.

KURT: I just couldn’t keep going through it. It was too painful. I could never find someone who would be there for me. I was better off alone. At least I had some peace.

If you are willing to engage in intimate relationships, then you probably do not have peace. Your relationships feel unstable. The sense that you might lose them is always there.

You have difficulty tolerating any withdrawal in a relationship. You worry about even relatively small changes, exaggerating the probability the relationship will end. Lindsay interprets the slightest sign of dissatisfaction from her boyfriends as evidence that they want to end the relationship. Anytime a boyfriend is angry with her, upset with her, feeling disconnected—anything relevant to the possibility that he might abandon her—she feels certain it is the end. Jealousy and possessiveness are common themes. She perpetually
accuses
her boyfriends of wanting to leave her, a habit that can become quite irritating. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, her relationships are marked by frequent breakups and tumultuous reconciliations.

Similarly, every time her husband leaves on a business trip, Abby worries obsessively that his plane will crash and he will die. Other times she gets caught up in worrying that her mother will become sick and die or that her children will die. She goes through periods of thinking only about death and about how she will not be able to manage alone.

Early in your relationships, you become excessively clingy. Clinging reinforces your lifetrap because it reinforces the idea that you are going to lose the person. It keeps the possibility of abandonment
alive
in the relationship.

Your clinging has a desperate quality. Lindsay illustrates this well. As with her mother, her connection with her boyfriend never feels strong enough. She feels lonely and lost, so she pours her whole life into the relationship. Her absorption is total. As she says, she becomes obsessed, forgetting about the outside world. All her energy becomes invested in keeping the connection because it is so important.

You probably feel drawn to lovers who hold some potential for abandoning you. Here are some early warning signs. 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 permanently, or at least get the person to relate to you in a more stable fashion.

You are attracted most to partners who show some degree of commitment and connection, but not so much that you are absolutely sure that they will stay. 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 you ensures that you will continue to reenact your childhood abandonment.

Even if you choose a partner who is stable, there are still pitfalls to avoid. There are still ways for you to reinforce your Abandonment lifetrap.

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. This is the case with Abby. We have met with Kurt several times, and believe he is fully committed to the marriage. Objectively, there is no evidence that he intends to leave Abby. On the contrary, he seems very much in love. But Abby somehow can never be reassured of this. This frustrates Kurt, because he cannot win her trust.

KURT: No matter what I do she doubts me. She drives me crazy. She is especially suspicious about my business trips. For absolutely no reason, she thinks I’m having affairs with other women. Sometimes I wonder if she’s the one who wants to be with other men. Why does she talk about it so much?

You might also fall into another Abandonment lifetrap—behaving in ways that tend to drive your partner away. Lindsay, for example, blows up even minor arguments to such proportions that they threaten to end the relationship. She exaggerates the meaning of fights just as Abby exaggerates the meaning of separations from her husband during his business trips.

Lindsay and Abby constantly say such things to their partners as: „You don’t really love me,“ „I know you are going to leave me,“ „You don’t miss me,“ „You are glad that we have to be apart.“ We know that Lindsay and Abby say these things to their partners, because they also say them to us; they keep waiting for us to throw them out of treatment or move away. Their accusations constantly suggest to their partners that they do
not
care, that they
will
eventually leave. Lindsay and Abby push the people they love away with one hand, while clinging desperately to them with the other.

Whenever the relationship feels threatened in any way, you have a strong emotional reaction. It could be anything that breaks the connection with your partner—a momentary separation, the mention of someone who incites your jealousy, an argument, or a change in your partner’s mood. Your partner almost invariably feels you are overreacting, and might well express bewilderment. It seems like such a drastic response to a minor disruption. Kurt described what it is like:

KURT: We get to the airport and suddenly Abby is all upset She’s crying like someone has died or something. I feel so confused by it all. Here I am, going on a two-day trip, and she’s acting like our marriage is over.

It feels like a tremendous overreaction to a partner who does not share the lifetrap.

You usually do not feel good when you are alone: you probably feel anxious, depressed, or detached. You need the feeling of connection to your partner. As soon as your partner leaves, you feel disconnected. Usually this feeling of abandonment does not go away until your partner returns. You can distract yourself from it, but the feeling of being disconnected is always there. It lurks in the background waiting to engulf you. Almost everyone who has the lifetrap has a limit to the amount of time they can distract themselves, and then they cannot do it anymore.

The better you are at distraction, the longer you can be alone. The worse you are at distraction, the quicker you experience the wanting, the sense of loss, and the need to reconnect.

ABBY: I was gardening, trying to forget about Kurt being gone, and my neighbor came by. Talking to her, it occurred to me that from the outside, it looked as though I was enjoying myself, like I was a person who was really enjoying my solitude. But I wasn’t enjoying myself. Ifelt more like someone who was running and running, and when I was too tired to run anymore, the bad feelings would catch up with me again.

Detachment is the Counterattack for Abandonment. When you are detached, you are denying the need for connection. It is a defiant, „I don’t need you.“ There is usually some anger mixed in with your detachment, and it is partly punitive. You punish your partner for withdrawing from you, for not giving you what you need. Although this helps you cope with your feelings of abandonment, you pay a price: you give up your feelings and exist in a chilly emotional numbness.

A real loss, such as the breakup of a relationship, is devastating to you. It confirms your sense that no matter where you turn, you will never find a stable connection. You might feel ambivalent about starting new relationships. Part of you wants to connect, and another part anticipates abandonment. Part of you wants the closeness, and another part is angry, usually before anything has happened to warrant it. The relationship may be just beginning, and at times you feel like the person is already gone.

If your Abandonment lifetrap is strong, it probably affects other intimate relationships such as close friendships. The same issues come up in a close friendship as in a romantic relationship, although not as intensely.

You have an underlying view of friendships as unstable. You cannot count on them to last. People come and go in your life. You are hypersensitive to anything that might threaten the connection with a friend—the person moving away, separations, the person not returning phone calls or invitations, disagreements, or the person developing other interests or preferring someone else.

LINDSAY: I’m really mad at my friend Valerie. I called her Monday, and it’s Wednesday, and she still hasn’t called me back. I’m thinking of calling her and telling her off. She has no right to treat me this way!

Here are the steps to changing your Abandonment lifetrap:

CHANGING ABANDONMENT

1. Understand your childhood abandonment.
   
2. Monitor your feelings of abandonment. Identify your hypersensitivity to losing close people; your desperate fears of being alone; your need to cling to people.
   
3. Review past relationships, and clarify the patterns that recur. List the pitfalls of abandonment.
   
4. Avoid uncommitted, unstable, or ambivalent partners even though they generate high chemistry.
   
5. When you find a partner who is stable and committed, trust him/her. Believe that he/she is there for you forever, and will not leave.
   
6. Do not cling, become jealous, or overreact to the normal separations of a healthy relationship.
   

1. Underst
a
nd Your Childhood Ab
a
ndonment
.
First, consider whether you have a biological predisposition to develop the lifetrap. Have you always been an emotional person? Did you have difficulty as a child separating from the people you love? Was it hard for you to start school or sleep at a friend’s house? Did you become overly upset when your parents went out for the evening or away for short trips? Did you cling to your mother in new places more than the other children? Do you still have a lot of trouble coping with the intensity of your feelings?

If you answered „yes“ to many of these questions, it may be that you can be helped by medication. We have seen many patients helped to contain their feelings through the use of medication. If you have a therapist, you might speak to him or her about this possibility, or make an appointment with a psychiatrist to be evaluated.

Whether or not you have a biological predisposition, it is important to understand the situations in your childhood that contributed to your lifetrap. When you have some quiet, peaceful time, let images of your childhood float to the top of your mind. When you first start, do not force your images in any direction. Let images emerge undisturbed.

The best place to start is with a feeling of abandonment in your current life. When something happens now in your life that triggers your feelings of abandonment, close your eyes and remember when you felt that way before.

LINDSAY: Ever since Greg told me he was thinking of breaking up, I’ve been so upset I can’t think about anything else. I’ve been snapping at people, even at work. I’m so angry. I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. And I keep calling him. I can’t help it. He’s starting to get realty mad at me, but I can’t help it.