Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (9 page)

THERAPIST: I want you to talk to your inner child. Help her. DANIELLE: Well... (pause) I come into the image and take little Danielle onto my lap. I say, „I’m so sorry this is happening to you. Your parents aren’t able to be there for you the way you need. But I will be here for you. I will help you get through this and make sure you come out all right.“

Giving comfort to your inner child, offering guidance and advice, and empathizing with how the child feels are some of the things we will ask you to do. Even though these exercises may seem silly or uncomfortable to you at first, we have found that most people benefit enormously from them.

Your life has utterly convinced you of the truth of your lifetrap. Danielle believes with her whole being that anyone she loves will abandon her. She accepts her lifetrap emotionally and intellectually.

This change step involves attacking your lifetrap on an intellectual level. In order to do this, you must prove that it is not true, or at least that it can be changed. You must cast doubt on the validity of your lifetrap. As long as you believe that your lifetrap is valid, you will not be able to change it.

To disprove your lifetrap, you will first list all the evidence pro and con regarding the lifetrap throughout your life. For example, if you feel
Socially Undesirable
, first you will list all the evidence that supports your lifetrap—that you are undesirable. Then you will make a separate list of all the evidence against your lifetrap—that you are socially desirable.

In most cases, the evidence will show that your lifetrap is false. You are not, in fact, defective, incompetent, a failure, doomed to be abused, etc. But sometimes the lifetrap is true. For example, you may have been so rejected and shunned all your life that you have failed to develop social skills, and thus really are socially undesirable in certain ways. Or you may have avoided so many school and career challenges that you have failed in your chosen field.

Look at your list of pros. Is any evidence supporting the lifetrap
inherently
true of you, or were you brainwashed into thinking this way by your family or peers during childhood? For example, were you born incompetent, or was your incompetence so drummed into you by a critical parent that you came to believe it was true (Dependence)? Were you
really
special as a child, or did your parents spoil and pamper you, and teach you to feel entitled to more than everyone else (Entitlement)? And ask yourself, is any evidence supporting the lifetrap still true of you? Or was it only true in your childhood?

If, after all this analysis, you still feel the lifetrap is true, then ask yourself, „How could I change this aspect of myself?“ Explore what you could do to remedy the situation.

Here is a sample from Danielle’s list of evidence supporting her Abandonment lifetrap:

EVIDENCE THAT EVERYONE I LOVE WILL ABANDON ME

Here is part of Danielle’s list of evidence that her lifetrap is false:

EVIDENCE THAT NOT EVERYONE ABANDONS ME

1. My sister and I have been close all my life.
   
2. I’ve had several boyfriends who wanted to be with me, but I’ve been so obsessed with Robert that I never gave any of them a chance.
   
3. My therapist is there for me.
   
4. I have an aunt who has always taken an interest in me and tried to help.
   
5. I have friends who have been around for years and years.
   
6. Robert and I have stuck together for eleven years, even if it’s been up and down.
   

After making your list, summarize the case against your lifetrap on a flashcard. This is a sample flashcard Danielle wrote:

ABANDONMENT FLASHCARD

Even though I
feel
that everyone I get close to will abandon me, it isn’t true. I feel this way because when I was a child both my parents abandoned me.

Even though I have experienced a lot of abandonment in my life, in a lot of ways this is because I’ve been most attracted to men and friends who have trouble making commitments.

But the people in my life don’t have to be like that. I can eliminate the people who really are like that from my life. And I can choose to associate with people who are able to be there for me and make a commitment.

A lot of times when I feel abandoned by someone, I should ask myself if I’m just being oversensitive. Even though I feel like the person’s abandoning me, it may just be my Abandonment lifetrap being triggered. Something is reminding me of what happened when I was a child. People have a right to some space. I have to allow people some space.

Read this flashcard every day. Carry it with you. Keep a copy near your bed or some other place where you will see it every day.

It is important to ventilate your anger and sadness about what happened to you. One thing that keeps your inner child frozen is all your strangled feelings. We want you to give your inner child a voice—to allow your inner child to express his or her pain.

We will ask you to write letters to all the people who hurt you. We realize you will probably have to overcome a lot of guilt to do this, particularly in regard to your parents. It is not easy to attack our parents. They may not have been malicious. They may have had good intentions. But we want you to put aside such considerations for a time, and just tell the truth.

Express your feelings in the letter. Tell them what they did that was hurtful, and how it made you feel. Tell them they were wrong to behave as they did. Tell them how you wished it could have been instead.

You will probably decide not to send the letter. It is the
writing
and
expressing
of your feelings that is most important. It is often
not
possible to change the feelings or behavior of your parents, anyway. You should know this from the start. The purpose of the letter is not to change your parents. It is to make you a whole person again.

Here is the letter Danielle wrote to her mother:

Dear Mom,

You have been an alcoholic for all my life. I need to tell you what it’s done to me.

I feel like I never got to be a child. Instead, I had to worry all the time about stuff other kids never even dream of. I couldn’t be sure that we would have food on the table. I had to do everything myself. While other lads were out playing and having fun, I was cooking dinner and cleaning the house.

You don’t know how much humiliation I went through because of you. I remember learning to iron when I was six so the other kids wouldn’t laugh at my wrinkled clothes. And I could never bring anybody to the house.

And you were never around like the other mothers. You never came to watch me at school. I couldn’t talk to you about my problems. Instead you lay on the couch, drinking yourself senseless.

I would try so hard to get you to get up and be my mother. But you never did.

I feel so sad about what I missed. There were a few times that you were there for me, and those were special. Like the time I was upset about my high school boyfriend, and you got up and talked to me. I wish we could have had more of those times.

But instead I had to grow up with a big hole where there should have been a mother. And I’m still living with that big hole inside me. It wasn’t right for you to do this to me. What you did was wrong.

A letter like this can set the record straight. It can tell your story aloud, perhaps for the first time.

We want you to make explicit how your lifetrap plays itself out in your current life. The chapters on individual lifetraps will help you identify the self-defeating habits that reinforce your lifetrap.

We will ask you to write down the ways you surrender to your lifetrap, and how you can change them. On page 50 is a sample from one of Danielle’s tables.

After you have taken the Lifetrap Questionnaire in Chapter 2 and have identified your lifetraps, we want you to choose
one
lifetrap to work on first. Choose the one that has the most impact on your life now. If that seems too difficult, choose one that seems more manageable. We always want you to take manageable steps.

Danielle had more than one lifetrap. In addition to Abandonment, she had Defectiveness. She thought it was her fault that she could not make her father stay and did not have a better mother. As we mentioned earlier, it is very common for children to blame themselves when they are abused or neglected.

But Abandonment was Danielle’s core lifetrap. It was the one she chose to work on first. She felt she needed a stable base from which to challenge her other lifetraps. We agreed.

Using the charts you filled out in Step 5, select two or three ways you instead of calling them right away and getting angry, or getting excessively upset. She also worked on enhancing her relationships with her more committed friends and downplaying her relationships with her less committed ones. She decided to drop some friends who were particularly unsteady (and usually alcoholic) from her life. This was a loss, but at least it was
she
who was doing the deciding.

Use the techniques we describe in subsequent chapters to help you change your particular lifetrap. Work your way down your list of reinforcing behaviors. Once you have a reasonable degree of mastery with a lifetrap, move to the next one.

Do not give up or get discouraged easily. Lifetraps
can
change, but it takes a long time and a lot of work. Persevere.
Confront yourself over and over again.

Danielle has been in therapy with us for more than a year. Occasionally, events in her life still trigger her Abandonment lifetrap, but it happens less frequently, her feelings are less intense, and the whole thing is over more quickly. In addition, the triggering event has to be much more serious, such as the breakup of a relationship. Her life has changed.

The most dramatic changes have been in her relationship with Robert. She has learned to allow Robert a more normal amount of separation. He had been feeling smothered by her, and spent a lot of time trying to get away from her. Some of his lack of commitment was an attempt to resist her clinging. In addition, when she is angry, she tells him, but in a calm rather than a rageful way. She tries to listen when he tells her about his anger or his life. She tries to let him make his own decisions.

A few months ago, Danielle told Robert that either he had to marry her or she was going to end the relationship. He chose to marry her. Of course, things do not always work out this way. Sometimes relationships end. But we believe it is better to end a truly hopeless relationship than to stay caught in the Abandonment lifetrap.

Forgiving your parents is not required. Particularly if there was severe abuse or neglect, you may never be able to forgive them. This is totally your choice. But we have found that, in most cases, forgiving one’s parents is something that happens naturally, as the healing process progresses.

Patients gradually come to see their parents less and less as giant, negative figures in their mind, and more and more as just people with problems and concerns of their own. They see that their parents were caught within their own lifetraps, and were in fact more like children than giants. They become able to forgive them.

Again, this does not always happen. It may or may not happen to you. Depending upon what happened in your childhood, you may decide never to forgive them. In fact, you may even decide the opposite—to cut off all contact. At the end of your path there may or may not lie forgiveness, but you have to do what is right for you. We will support you either way.