Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (2 page)

After a few years, I started my own private practice in Philadelphia. I continued to have dramatic results with many patients, especially those with specific symptoms like depression and anxiety. Unfortunately, as time went on, I built up a backlog of patients who were not responding at all or who showed only slight improvement. I decided to sit down and figure out what these patients had in common. I also asked colleagues of mine who were cognitive therapists to describe their resistant patients. I wanted to see whether their therapy failures were similar to my own.

What I found in trying to distinguish difficult patients from the ones who responded quickly was a revelation to me. The most difficult patients tended to have
less
severe symptoms; in general, they were less depressed and anxious. Many of their problems concerned intimacy: these patients had patterns of unsatisfactory relationships. Furthermore, most of these resistant patients had experienced their problems for most of their lives. They were not coming to therapy because of a single life crisis, like divorce or the death of a parent. These patients all had
self-destructive
life patterns.

Next I decided to make a list of the most common themes or patterns in these difficult patients. This became my first list of schemas, or lifetraps. It only had a few of the eleven patterns described in
Reinventing Your Life
, such as deep feelings of defectiveness, a sense of profound isolation and loneliness, a tendency to sacrifice their needs for those of other people, and an unhealthy dependence or reliance on others. These lifetraps proved invaluable to me in working with patients who previously had been unresponsive to treatment. I found that by developing a list of lifetraps, I could break down patients’ problems into manageable parts. I could also develop different strategies for solving each problem or pattern.

In retrospect, my search for broad themes and patterns was also very consistent with my own personality. I’ve always longed to see various aspects of my life as part of an organized whole, with some sense of order and predictability. I’ve always felt that I could gain control over my own life by extracting these general themes or patterns. I remember as a college student trying to classify my roommates into various categories of friendship, depending on how much I felt they could be relied upon.

Another thread in my own development as a therapist has been my increasing desire to integrate and blend, rather than eliminate or criticize. Many therapists feel they must choose one approach to therapy and follow it with devotion. That is why we have strict Gestalt therapists, family therapists, Freudian therapists, and behavior therapists. I have come to believe that integrating the best components of several therapies is far more effective than any one alone. There is much of value in psychoanalytic, experiential, cognitive, pharmacological, and behavioral approaches, but each has significant limitations when used alone.

On the other hand, I am also opposed to combining many different techniques haphazardly without a unifying framework. I believe that the eleven lifetraps provide that unifying framework, and that techniques drawn from several approaches can be combined, like an arsenal of weapons, to fight these lifetraps. Furthermore, as described in the chapters that follow, these lifetraps can provide you with a sense of continuity over the course of your life; the past and present can be seen as part of a consistent whole. Each lifetrap has an understandable origin in childhood that intuitively feels right to us. We can understand, for example, why we are drawn to critical partners, and why we feel so badly about ourselves when we make a mistake, once we grasp how demanding and punitive our own parents were.

hope that
Reinventing Your Life
fills the need for a book that deals comprehensively with a broad range of deeply felt, lifelong problems we all face. I also hope that it provides you with a useful framework for understanding how these patterns developed, along with powerful solutions for each lifetrap, drawn from many different psychological approaches that can really work for you.

JEFFREY YOUNG

September 1992

Are you repeatedly drawn into relationships with people who are cold to you? Do you feel that even the people closest to you do not care or understand enough about you?

Do you feel that you are at your core somehow defective, that no one who truly knows you could possibly love and accept you?

Do you put the needs of others above your own, so your needs never get met—and so you do not even know what your real needs are?

Do you fear that something bad will happen to you, so that even a mild sore throat sets off a dread of more dire disease?

Do you find that, regardless of how much public acclaim or social approval you receive, you still feel unhappy, unfulfilled, or undeserving?

We call patterns like these Lifetraps. In this book, we will describe the eleven most common lifetraps and will show you how to
recognize
them, how to understand their
origins,
and how to
change
them.

A lifetrap is a pattern that starts in childhood and reverberates throughout life. It began with something that was done to us by our families or by other children. We were abandoned, criticized, overprotected, abused, excluded, or deprived—we were damaged in some way. Eventually the lifetrap becomes part of us. Long after we leave the home we grew up in, we continue to create situations in which we are mistreated, ignored, put down, or controlled and in which we fail to reach our most desired goals.

Lifetraps determine how we think, feel, act, and relate to others. They trigger strong feelings such as anger, sadness, and anxiety. Even when we appear to have everything—social status, an ideal marriage, the respect of people close to us, career success—we are often unable to savor life or believe in our accomplishments.

JED: A THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD STOCKBROKER WHO IS EXTREMELY SUCCESSFUL. HE CONQUERS WOMEN, BUT NEVER REALLY CONNECTS WITH THEM. JED IS CAUGHT IN THE EMOTIONAL DEPRIVATION LIFETRAP.

When we were first developing the lifetraps approach, we began treating an intriguing patient named Jed. Jed perfectly illustrates the self-defeating nature of lifetraps.

Jed goes from one woman to another, insisting that none of the women he meets can satisfy him. Each one eventually disappoints him. The closest Jed comes to intimate relationships is infatuation with women who sexually excite him. The problem is that these relationships never last.

Jed does not
connect
with women. He
conquers
them. The point at which he loses interest is exactly the point at which he has „won.“ The woman has started to fall in love with him.

JED: It really turns me off when a woman is clingy. When she starts hanging all over me, especially in public, I just want to run.

Jed struggles with loneliness. He feels empty and bored. There is an empty hole inside—and he restlessly searches for the woman who will fill him up. Jed believes he will never find this woman. He feels that he has always been alone and always will be alone.

As a child, Jed felt this same aching loneliness. He never knew his father, and his mother was cold and unemotional. Neither one of them met his
emotional
needs. He grew up emotionally deprived, and continues to recreate this state of detachment as an adult.

For years Jed inadvertently repeated this pattern with therapists, drifting from one to another. Each therapist initially gave him hope, yet ultimately disappointed him. He never really connected with his therapists; he always found some fatal flaw that in his mind justified terminating therapy. Each therapy experience confirmed that his life had not changed, and he felt even more alone.

Many of Jed’s therapists were warm and empathic. This was not the problem. The problem was that Jed always found some excuse to avoid the intimacy with which he was so unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Emotional support from a therapist was essential, but not enough. His therapists did not
confront
his self-destructive patterns often or forcefully enough. For Jed to escape his Emotional Deprivation lifetrap, he had to stop finding fault with the women he met and begin to take responsibility for fighting his own discomfort about getting close to people and accepting their nurturance.

When Jed finally came to us for treatment, we challenged him over and over again, trying to chip away at his lifetrap each time it reasserted itself. It was important to show him that we were genuinely sympathetic with how uncomfortable it felt for him to get close to anyone, in light of his extremely icy parents. Nevertheless, whenever he insisted that Wendy was not beautiful enough, Isabel was not brilliant enough, or Melissa was just not right for him, we pushed him to see that he was falling into his lifetrap again, finding fault with others to avoid feeling warmth. After a year of this
empathic confrontation,
balancing emotional support and confrontation, we were finally able to see significant change. He is now engaged to Nicole, a warm and loving woman:

JED: My previous therapists were really understanding, and I got a lot of insight into my grim childhood, but none of them really pushed me to change. It was just too easy to fall back into my old familiar patterns. This approach was different.

I finally took some responsibility for making a relationship work. I didn’t want my relationship with Nicole to be another failure, and I felt like this was it for me. Although I could see that Nicole wasn’t perfect, I finally decided that either I would have to connect with someone or resign myself to being alone forever.

The lifetrap approach involves
continually confronting
ourselves. We will teach you how to track your lifetraps as they play themselves out in your life, and how to counter them repeatedly until these patterns loosen their grip on you.

HEATHER: A FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WITH TREMENDOUS POTENTIAL, TRAPPED IN HER OWN HOME BECAUSE HER FEARS ARE SO CRIPPLING. ALTHOUGH SHE TAKES THE TRANQUILIZER ATIVAN TO TREAT HER ANXIETY, SHE IS STILL STUCK IN THE
VULNERABILITY
LIFETRAP.

In a sense, Heather has no life; she is too afraid to do anything. Life is fraught with danger. She prefers to stay home where it is „safe.“

HEATHER: I know there’s lots of great stuff to do in the city. I like the theater, I like nice restaurants, I like seeing friends. But it’s just too much for me. I don’t have fun. I’m too worried all the time that something horrible is going to happen.

Heather worries about car crashes, collapsing bridges, getting mugged, catching a disease such as AIDS, and spending too much money. It certainly is not surprising that a trip to the city is no fun for her.

Heather’s husband Walt is very angry with her. He wants to go out and do things. Walt says—and rightly so—that it is not fair for him to be deprived. More and more, he goes ahead and does things without her.

Heather’s parents were exceptionally overprotective of her. Her parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors who spent much of their childhoods in concentration camps. They treated her like a china doll, as she put it. They continually warned her about possible (but unlikely) threats to her welfare: she might catch pneumonia, be trapped in the subway, drown, or be caught in a fire. It is no wonder that she spends most of her time in a painful state of anxiety, trying to make sure that her world is safe. Meanwhile, almost everything that is pleasurable is draining out of her life.

Before coming to us, Heather tried several anti-anxiety medications over a three-year period. (Medication is the most common treatment for anxiety.) Most recently, she went to a psychiatrist who prescribed Ativan. She took the pills every day, and the medication did provide some relief. She
felt
better, less anxious. Life became more pleasant. Knowing she had the medication made her feel more able to cope with things. Even so, she continued to avoid leaving the house. Her husband complained that the medication just made her happier to sit around at home.

Another serious problem was that Heather felt dependent on the Ativan:

HEATHER: I feel like I’m going to have to stay on this for the rest of my life. The idea of giving it up terrifies me. I don’t want to go back to being scared of everything all the time.

Even when Heather coped well with stressful situations, she attributed all her success to the medication. She was not building a sense of mastery—the sense that she could handle things on her own. (This is why, particularly with anxiety treatments, patients tend to relapse when the medication is withdrawn.)

Heather made relatively rapid progress in lifetrap therapy. Within a year, her life was significantly better. She gradually started entering more anxiety-provoking situations. She could travel, see friends, go to movies, and she eventually decided to take on a part-time job that required commuting.

As part of her treatment, we helped Heather become better at estimating the odds of bad things happening. We continually demonstrated how she exaggerated the risk of catastrophe in harmless situations; and we showed her that she overestimated her own vulnerability and weakness outside her home. She learned to take
reasonable
precautions. She stopped asking her husband and friends for reassurance. Her marriage improved. And she got more pleasure from her life.

Jed and Heather illustrate two of the eleven lifetraps: Emotional Deprivation and Vulnerability. As we discuss other patients, you will read about the other lifetraps: Subjugation, Mistrust and Abuse, Abandonment, Defectiveness, Entitlement, Dependence, Failure, Unrelenting Standards, and Social Exclusion. You will probably recognize elements of yourself in several of these.

That we keep repeating the pain of our childhood is one of the core insights of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Freud called this the repetition compulsion. The child of an alcoholic grows up to marry an alcoholic. The abused child grows up to marry an abuser, or becomes an abuser himself. The sexually molested child grows up to be a prostitute. The overly controlled child allows others to control her.