Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (38 page)

You feel like a failure relative to other people you consider your peers. Most of the time, you are probably in touch with your lifetrap, and your sense of failure is close to the surface.

KATHLEEN: I’m just a stupid person. I don’t have what it takes to get ahead. Over and over, I watch younger people get jobs at my level and then pass by me.

I mean,
I’m
thirty-eight years old and
I’m
competing for promotions with twenty-two and twenty-three-year-olds. It’s humiliating. You can’t get much worse than that.

As with Kathleen, your feelings of failure are painful.

Most of the people with this lifetrap are more like Kathleen than Brian. That is, their actual level of achievement is lower than their potential. Their outward status generally matches their inner sense of failure. Occasionally, we see people like Brian, who have achieved a great deal but feel fraudulent.

BRIAN: I feel really out of place where I work. Ifeel like everyone around me is top-shelf I don’t belong there. Somehow I’ve deceived everyone into thinking I’m more intelligent and competent than I am. And it’s only a matter of time before they all discover the truth.

In any case, no matter what your actual status or degree of accomplishment, the inner world is the same. Whether you
appear
to be a success or not, most of the time you experience yourself as a failure. Both Kathleen and Brian feel that because of their own shortcomings, they are doomed to fail.

You reinforce the Failure lifetrap primarily through Escape. Your avoidance is what holds you back. You avoid taking the steps necessary to widen your knowledge and advance your career. You let opportunities for success pass you by. You are afraid that if you try you will fail.

KATHLEEN: A few weeks ago I went and talked to my boss about letting me be in charge of scheduling for this one project. It’s really rare for me to make that kind of move, but I just felt like I had to do it.

Anyway, my boss told me to write up a proposal. You know, a plan, whatever. Well, three weeks have gone by and I still haven’t done it. The project is starting tomorrow and now it’s really too late.

With the Failure lifetrap, the degree to which you use Escape as a coping style is often massive. People avoid developing skills, tackling new tasks, taking on responsibility—all the challenges that might enable them to succeed. Often the attitude is, „What’s the use?“ You feel there is no point in making the effort when you are doomed to fail anyway.

Your avoidance may be subtle. You may
appear
to tackle your work but still do things to avoid. You procrastinate, you get distracted, you do the work improperly, or you mishandle the tasks you take on. These are all forms of
self sabotage.

BRIAN: This last project my boss gave me to do, Tve been so anxious about it that I didn’t get started until this week. I’m really under pressure now. I can’t possibly do the job the way it should be done at this point. The whole thing has got me so frazzled.

Your tendency to run away from the possibility of failure undermines your ability to do a good job. You may suffer real penalties, such as getting demoted or fired.

Another way you surrender to your lifetrap is by constantly twisting events and circumstances to reinforce your view of yourself as a failure. You exaggerate the negative and minimize the positive.

BRIAN: I know I blow things out of proportion. Like yesterday, my boss gave me this really positive feedback about a press release I had written. But he criticized one tiny detail about it. And of course I went home and fretted about that detail all night.

You may also have feelings of depression.

KATHLEEN: I just feel like I’m at a certain point in my life, and I haven’t gotten to where I want to be. And I feel like I’m never gonna get there.

You feel depressed about your failures, and see little hope for change.

The Failure lifetrap is usually an easy lifetrap to assess. You are probably well aware of your painful feelings of failure.

The origin of this lifetrap lies in feelings of failure in childhood. This can happen a number of different ways:

ORIGINS OF THE FAILURE LIFETRAP

1. You had a parent (often your father) who was very critical of your performance in school, sports, etc. He/She often called you stupid, dumb, inept, a failure, etc. He/She may have been abusive. (Your lifetrap may be linked to Defectiveness or Abuse.)
   
2. One or both parents were very successful, and you came to believe you could never live up to their high standards. So you stopped trying. (Your lifetrap may be linked to Unrelenting Standards.)
   
3. You sensed that one or both of your parents either did not care about whether you were successful, or, worse, felt threatened when you did well. Your parent may have been competitive with you—or afraid of losing your companionship if you were too successful in the world. (Your lifetrap may be linked to Emotional Deprivation or Dependence.)
   
4. You were not as good as other children either in school or at sports, and felt inferior. You may have had a learning disability, poor attention span, or been very uncoordinated. After that, you stopped trying in order to avoid humiliation by them. (This may be linked to Social Exclusion.)
   
5. You had brothers or sisters to whom you were often compared unfavorably. You came to believe you could never measure up, so you stopped trying.
   
6. You came from a foreign country, your parents were immigrants, or your family was poorer or less educated than your schoolmates. You felt inferior to your peers and never felt you could measure up.
   
7. Your parents did not set enough limits for you. You did not learn self-discipline or responsibility. Therefore you failed to do homework regularly or learn study skills. This led to failure eventually. (Your lifetrap may be linked to Entitlement.)
   

As you can see, the Failure lifetrap may be associated with other lifetraps—Defectiveness, Abuse, Unrelenting Standards, Emotional Deprivation, Dependence, Social Exclusion, or Entitlement.

Kathleen had a number of forces propelling her toward failure as a child.

KATHLEEN: One thing that hurt me was that my parents didn’t really care about school It was part of their general not caring about me really. I mean, other kids would be scared to death to bring their report cards home. I never worried about it because they just didn’t care. My problem was getting them to look at it long enough to sign it.

It’s weird, but I used to be jealous of kids who were scared to bring their report cards home. I remember once being in the girls’ room at school with my friend Meg. She was in the stall, crying and carrying on, „I can’t go home, my father’s gonna kill me,“ on and on. And as upset as she was, I felt jealous of her. Isn’t that weird?

THERAPIST: She had someone who cared.

KATHLEEN: Yeah. But the other thing that happened was that I was sick a lot. I had asthma. I missed a lot of school in those early years. I fell behind and just never caught up. It’s a miracle, really, that I ever made it through college.

There was no one to help Kathleen when she fell behind. Nobody pushed her to catch up. Instead she began her lifelong pattern of escape.

KATHLEEN: I would try to get out of going to school by playing sick. If there was a test or a paper due, I would get sick that day. I just couldn’t face the humiliation of failing again.

THERAPIST: Would you try to learn the stuff?

KATHLEEN: Nah. I would just watch television. I spent my childhood watching television.

Kathleen failed to develop the skills and discipline necessary to get ahead. Her approach was to try to do as little as possible and hide it as best as she could.

Kathleen’s lifetrap was an outgrowth of Emotional Deprivation. For Brian the issue was more one of Defectiveness.

BRIAN: My father was always criticizing me about everything, not just about school. Actually achievement was the one area where I could sort of do okay. But I never trusted it, I never trusted that I really knew what I was doing.

Brian had been feeling fraudulent about success for a long time. As a child, he did well in school, but he felt so defective generally that he could not believe in himself.

Upon reflection it seemed that his father felt competitive with him. He put Brian down as a way of feeling better about himself.

BRIAN: Particularly after he lost his job and we had to move to a smaller house, when I was eight, he would really light into me. He would boost himself up by humiliating me.

His father was threatened by Brian’s success at school. He was afraid that Brian would surpass him, so he punished Brian for succeeding. His father undermined his self-confidence and damaged Brian’s ability to believe in himself.

The Failure lifetrap feeds on itself in such a way that the entire arena of work becomes a disaster for you. Your expectation of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Here are many of the ways you sabotage yourself and make sure that you remain a failure.

FAILURE LIFETRAPS

1. You do not take the steps necessary to develop solid skills in your career (e.g., finish schooling, read latest developments, apprentice to an expert). You coast or try to fool people.
   
2. You choose a career below your potential (e.g., you finished college and have excellent mathematical ability, but are currently driving a taxicab).
   
3. You avoid taking the steps necessary to get promotions in your chosen career; your advancement has been unnecessarily halted (e.g., you fail to accept promotions or to ask for them; you do not promote yourself or make your abilities widely known to the people who count; you stay in a safe, dead-end job).
   
4. You do not want to tolerate working for other people, or working at entry-level jobs, so you end up on the periphery of your field, failing to work your way up the ladder. (Note the overlap with Entitlement and Subjugation.)
   
5. You take jobs but repeatedly get fired because of lateness, procrastination, poor job performance, bad attitude, etc.
   
6. You cannot commit to one career, so you float from job to job, never developing expertise in one area. You are a generalist in a job world that rewards specialists. You therefore never progress very far in any one career.
   
7. You selected a career in which it is extraordinarily hard to succeed, and you do not know when to give up (e.g., acting, professional sports, music).
   
8. You have been afraid to take initiative or make decisions independently at work, so you were never promoted to more responsible positions.
   
9. You
   feel
   that you are basically stupid or untalented, and therefore feel fraudulent, even though objectively you have been quite successful.
   
10. You minimize your abilities and accomplishments, and exaggerate your weaknesses and mistakes. You end up
    feeling
    like a failure, even though you have been as successful as your peers.
    
11. You have chosen successful men/women as partners in relationships. You live vicariously through their success while not accomplishing much yourself.
    
12. You try to compensate for your lack of achievement or work skills by focusing on other assets (e.g., your looks, charm, youthfulness, sacrificing for others). But underneath you still feel like a failure.
    

Many of these patterns boil down to the issue of Escape: you avoid taking the steps necessary to advance yourself. Through your avoidance, you constantly twist events to reinforce your view of yourself as stupid, untalented, and incompetent.

Excelling in other roles is a way of compensating for the lifetrap. Men might excel in sports or seducing women; women might excel in their looks or ability to give to others. But, particularly for men, it is hard to develop an effective compensation. What does society value more in a man than achievement? A man who feels like a failure in his career is likely to feel like a failure as a person. Of course, this difference between men and women is changing as careers become more central to women’s lives.

As a teenager Brian compensated for his lifetrap by adopting the image of a rebel. He dressed outlandishly and rode motorcycles. He became skilled at chasing women. He found a way to feel good about himself without tackling the prime issue. He compensated for his feelings of failure by carving out an area of success.

One way Kathleen compensates is by choosing a partner who is successful. Wayne, her husband, is the head writer on a top-rated television show. When she goes to job functions, such as cocktail parties and conventions, she moves in the highest circles.

You may be drawn to other roles or to partners who are successful to compensate for your feelings of failure. This is really another avoidance strategy on your part. It is another way for you to escape facing the challenges of achievement.

These compensations are fragile. They easily collapse, and yield to the feeling of failure. You need to deal with the issue of achievement more directly.

These are the steps to changing your lifetrap:

CHANGING YOUR FAILURE LIFETRAP

1. Assess whether your feeling of failure is accurate or distorted.
   
2. Get in touch with the child inside of you who felt, and still feels, like a failure.
   
3. Help your inner child see that you were treated unfairly.
   
4. Become aware of your talents, skills, abilities, and accomplishments in the area of achievement.
   

If you have, in fact, failed relative to your peers:

1. Try to see the pattern in your failures.
   
2. Once you see your pattern, make a plan to change it.
   
3. Make a flashcard to overcome your blueprint for failure. Follow your plan, step-by-step.
   
4. Involve your loved ones in the process.