Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (7 page)

There are three signs that your self-expression is restricted. The first is that you are extremely
accommodating
to other people. You are always pleasing everybody else, always taking care of everybody. You are selfeffacing, almost like a martyr. You do not seem concerned with your own needs. You cannot stand to see those around you in pain and will repeatedly sacrifice your own desires to help them. You may do so much for people that it makes them feel guilty to be with you. Inside, you may feel weak and passive, or resentful when all your giving is not appreciated. You are too much at the mercy of other people’s needs.

A second sign that you have problems in this realm is that you are overly
inhibited and controlled.
You may be a workaholic—your whole life revolves around your work. Your work may be a career or it may be other things. You may work to look perfectly beautiful at all times, or to keep everything perfectly neat and clean, or to always do things in the perfectly proper, correct way.

You may be emotionally
flat.
There is no spontaneity in your life. You suppress your natural reactions to events. Whether it is because you feel you have to do what other people want (the Subjugation lifetrap) or because you have to live up to some impossibly high standard (the Unrelenting Standards lifetrap), you have the sense that you are not really enjoying your life. Your life is somber and joyless. You somehow rob yourself of fun, relaxation, and pleasure.

A third indication of problems in Self-Expression is having a great deal of
unexpressed anger.
Chronic resentment may simmer underneath, occasionally erupting unexpectedly, almost out of your control. And you may feel depressed. You are trapped in an unrewarding routine. Your life seems empty. You are doing everything you should, yet there is no pleasure in it.

Realistic Limits problems are, in many respects, the opposite of Self Expression problems. When you are not permitted Self-Expression, you are overly controlled. You suppress your own needs and attend to the needs of others. With Limits problems, you attend so much to your own needs that you
disregard other people.
You may do so to such an extent that others see you as selfish, demanding, controlling, self-centered, and narcissistic. And you may have problems with self-control. You are so impulsive or emotional that you have difficulty meeting your long-term goals. You always go for immediate gratification. You cannot tolerate routine or boring tasks. You learn that you are special, entitled to do everything your own way.

To have realistic limits means
to accept realistic internal and external limits on our own behavior.
This includes the capacity to understand and take the needs of others into account in our actions—to balance fairly our own needs with those of others. It is also the capacity to exercise enough self-control and self-discipline to reach our goals and to avoid punishment from society.

When we are raised in a childhood environment that sets realistic limits, our parents set up consequences for our behavior that reward realistic self-control and self-discipline. We are not
excessively
indulged or permitted excessive freedom. We are taught to be responsible. We have to do schoolwork and carry through on chores. Our parents help us learn to take the perspective of others and to be sensitive to other people’s needs. We are taught not to hurt people unnecessarily. We learn to respect other people’s rights and freedom.

But perhaps your childhood did not foster realistic limits. Your parents may have been overly indulgent and permissive. They gave you whatever you wanted. They rewarded you for manipulative behavior—whenever you threw a temper tantrum you got your way. They did not adequately supervise you. They permitted you to express anger without restriction. You never learned the notion of
reciprocity.
You were not encouraged to understand the feelings of others, nor to take the feelings of others into account. You were not taught self-discipline and self-control. All of these errors can lead to an Entitlement lifetrap.

In an alternative scenario, perhaps your parents were emotionally cold and depriving. You were constantly criticized and devalued. You developed a sense of Entitlement later in life to make up for, or escape, the deprivation and devaluation.

Entitlement can be damaging to your life. Eventually people get fed up with you. They either leave you or retaliate. Your partner breaks up with you, your friends stop spending time with you, you are fired from your job. If your Limits problems include difficulty with self-discipline and self-control, even your health can be affected. You might smoke too much, become addicted to drugs, get too little exercise, overeat. You might even commit criminal acts, such as losing your temper and assaulting someone or getting arrested for drunken driving. Self-discipline problems may also cause you to fail to reach your goals in life. You may have too much trouble disciplining yourself to do the necessary work.

People with Limits problems tend to be very
blaming.
Instead of recognizing themselves as the source of their problems, they blame others. Therefore it is unlikely that someone with Limits problems would be reading this book. They believe that
other
people have problems, not them. However, it
is
likely that many people reading this book are
involved
with someone who has Limits problems. None of the five patients in Chapter 1 had Limits problems. However, many were in self-destructive relationships with people who had Limits issues.

To summarize, here is a chart of all the lifetraps in their appropriate categories:

The Eleven Lifetraps

1. Basic Safety
   

1. Abandonment
   
2. Mistrust & Abuse
   

1. Connection to Others
   

1. Emotional Deprivation
   
2. Social Exclusion
   

1. Autonomy
   

1. Dependence
   
2. Vulnerability
   

1. Self-Esteem
   

1. Defectiveness
   
2. Failure
   

1. Self-Expression
   

1. Subjugation
   
2. Unrelenting Standards
   

1. Realistic Limits
   

1. Entitlement
   

In the next chapter, we explain how lifetraps work, and how different people cope with their lifetraps.

Lifetraps
actively
organize our experience. They operate in overt and subtle ways to influence how we think, feel, and act.

Different people cope with lifetraps in different ways. This explains why children raised in the same environment can appear to be so different. For example, two children with abusive parents may respond to abuse very differently. One becomes a passive, frightened victim and remains that way throughout life. The other child becomes openly rebellious and defiant and may even leave home early to survive as a teenager on the streets.

This is partly because we have different temperaments at birth—we tend to be more frightened, active, outgoing, or shy. Our temperaments push us in certain directions. And it is partly because we may choose different parents to copy or model ourselves after. Since an abuser often marries a victim, their children have both serving as models. The child can copy the abusive parent
or
the victimized parent.

Let us look at three different individuals: Alex, Brandon, and Max. Each one has the Defectiveness lifetrap. Deep down, all three feel flawed, unlovable, and ashamed. Yet they
cope
with their feelings of defectiveness in entirely different ways. We call these three styles
Surrender, Escape, and Counterattack.

Alex: He surrenders to his sense of defectiveness.

Alex is a nineteen-year-old college student. When you meet him, he does not look you in the eye. He keeps his head down. When he speaks, you can barely hear him. He blushes and stammers, puts himself down in front of other people, and is constantly apologizing. He always takes the blame for things that go wrong, even if they are not really his fault.

Alex always feels „one down“—inferior to others, and he constantly compares himself to others unfavorably. He feels that other people are somehow better. Social events are invariably painful for this reason. In his first year of college, he went to parties but was too anxious to talk to anyone. „I couldn’t think of anything to say,“ he explains. So for, in his second year, he has not attended a single college party.

Alex has begun dating a woman who lives in his dorm. She criticizes him all the time. His best friend is very critical of him as well. His expectation that people are going to be critical is often borne out.

THERAPIST: Why do you criticize yourself so much?

ALEX: I guess I want to do it first, before other people do it for me.

Alex has a lot of feelings of shame. He blushes and walks around with his head down because he feels ashamed of himself. He
interprets
events in his life as continual proof of his defectiveness, unlovability, and worthlessness.

ALEX: I feel like such a social reject. We’re halfway through the semester and I still don’t know anyone in any of my classes. Other people sit around and talk, but I just sit there like a bump on a log. No one talks to me.

THERAPIST: Do you ever talk to anyone?

ALEX: Nah. Who would want to talk to me?

Alex
thinks
,
feels
, and
acts
as though he were defective. The lifetrap permeates his experience of life. This is how it is with Surrender as a coping style. The lifetrap is very much with us. Alex is well aware of his feelings of defectiveness.

When we Surrender, we distort our view of situations to confirm our lifetrap. We react with strong feelings whenever our lifetrap is activated. We select partners and enter situations that reinforce our lifetrap. We keep the lifetrap going.

Alex consistently distorts or misperceives situations so that they reinforce his lifetrap. His view of situations is inaccurate: he feels people are attacking and humiliating him even when they are not. He has a strong bias to interpret events as proving he is defective, exaggerating the negative and minimizing the positive. He is illogical. When we surrender, we continually misinterpret and misconstrue people and events in ways that maintain our lifetraps.

We grow up accustomed to certain roles and certain ways of being perceived. If we grow up in a family in which we are abused, neglected, yelled at, constantly criticized, or dominated, then that is the environment that feels most comfortable to us. Unhealthy as it may be, most people seek and create environments that feel familiar and similar to the ones where they grew up. The whole essence of surrendering is somehow managing to arrange your life so that you continue to repeat the patterns of your childhood.

Alex grew up in a family that criticized and demeaned him, a typical origin for the Defectiveness lifetrap. As an adult, he behaves in ways that ensure he will end up being criticized and demeaned. He chooses partners and friends who are very critical of him. He acts ashamed and apologetic. He criticizes himself in front of others. When people are nice to him, he distances or somehow undermines the relationship. Alex tries to maintain the
status quo
. When the environment becomes too supportive, he alters the situation so he can go back to that comfortable state of shame and dejection. If he feels superior or equal for a moment, he somehow manages to return to a lesser position.

Surrender includes all the self-destructive patterns we keep repeating over and over. It is all the ways we replicate our childhood lives. We are still that child, going through that same old pain. Surrender extends our childhood situation into our adult life. For this reason it often leads us to feel hopeless about changing. All we know is the lifetrap, which we never escape. It is a self-perpetuating loop.

Br
a
ndon: He esc
a
pes his feelings of defectiveness.

Brandon is forty years old and has never had a close relationship. He spends most of his spare time yakking with his buddies at the neighborhood bar. Brandon is most comfortable with casual, friendly relationships where nothing very personal is discussed.

Brandon is married to a woman who is out of touch with her feelings. She is very concerned with keeping up appearances. She is more interested in being married than in being married to Brandon particularly. She has close female friends, but does not expect closeness from Brandon. She wants a man just so she can fulfill the conventional role of wife. Their relationship is based on traditional roles, not on real intimacy. They rarely confide in each other.

Brandon has been an alcoholic his entire adult life. Although his family and friends have suggested Alcoholics Anonymous, he ignores them. He insists that he is not an alcoholic—he says he only drinks for recreation, and that he has control over his drinking. Besides drinking in his neighborhood bar, he tends to drink in social settings when he is around people he feels are better than he is.

Brandon became depressed, which is what originally brought him to therapy. But in contrast to Alex, he was not in touch with his lifetrap. He spent much of his life making sure that he was
not
in touch. When he first started therapy, he was only dimly aware of his feelings of defectiveness. When we asked him how he felt about himself, he denied having feelings of low self-esteem or shame. (Later in treatment these feelings came out very strongly.)