1 LIFETRAPS 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 ap- proval you receive, you still feel unhappy, unfulfilled, or undeserving? We call patterns like these Hfetraps. 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. Even- tually 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, 12 REINVENTING Your LIFE 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. Jep: A THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD STOCKBROKER WHO IS EX- TREMELY SUCCESSFUL. HE CONQUERS WOMEN, BUT NEVER REALLY CONNECTS WITH THEM, JED IS CAUGHT IN THE Emo- TIONAL 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 sexu- ally 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;Liretraps 3 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. Emo- tional support from a therapist was essential, but not enough. His thera- pists 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 responsibil- ity 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 familar patterns. This approach was different. I finally took some responsibilty 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 some- one 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.4 REINVENTING Your LIFE HEaTHER: A FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WITH TREMEN- DOUS POTENTIAL, TRAPPED IN HER OWN HOME BECAUSE HER FEARS ARE SO CRIPPLING. ALTHOUGH SHE TAKES THE TRAN- QUILIZER 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 bke the theater, I lke nice restaurants, | lke 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 cer- tainly 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 par- ents 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. Mean- while, 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: / feel kke I’m going to have to stay on this for the rest of my fe. The idea of giving it up terrifies me. I don’t want to go back to being scared of everything all the time.Lirerraps 5 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, particu- larly 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 com- muting. As part of her treatment, we helped Heather become better at estimat- ing 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. THE IRONY OF REPETITION Jed and Heather illustrate two of the eleven lifetraps: Emotional Depriva- tion and Vulnerability. As we discuss other patients, you will read about the other lifetraps: Subjugation, Mistrust and Abuse, Abandonment, Defec- tiveness, 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. This is a baffling phenomenon. Why do we do this? Why do we reenact our pain, prolonging our suffering? Why don’t we build better lives and escape the pattern? Almost everyone repeats negative patterns from childhood in self-defeating ways. This is the strange truth with which therapists contend. Somehow we manage to create, in adult life, conditions remarkably similar to those that were so destructive in childhood. A lifetrap is all the ways in which we recreate these patterns. The technical term for a lifetrap is a schema. The concept of a schema6 REINVENTING Your LIFE comes from cognitive psychology. Schemas are deeply entrenched beliefs about ourselves and the world, learned early in life. These schemas are central to our sense of self. To give up our belief in a schema would be to surrender the security of knowing who we are and what the world is like; therefore we cling to it, even when it hurts us. These early beliefs provide us with a sense of predictability and certainty; they are comfortable and familiar. In an odd sense, they make us feel at home. This is why cognitive psychologists believe schemas, or lifetraps, are so difficult to change. Let us now look at how lifetraps affect the chemistry we feel in romantic relationships. Patrick: A THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD BUILDING CONTRACTOR. THE MORE HIS WIFE, FRANCINE, HAS AFFAIRS WITH OTHER MEN, THE MORE HE DESIRES HER. PATRICK 1S CAUGHT IN THE ABANDONMENT LIFETRAP. Patrick is acutely unhappy. His wife keeps having affairs with other men. Whenever she has an affair, he becomes desperate. PATRICK: It’s ike I'll do anything to get her back. I can’t stand it. I know tf I lose her I'll fall apart. I can’t understand why I put up with this; it’s as if [love her more when I know she’s not there for me. I start thinking, “Tf only I could be better, she wouldn’t need to do this. If only I were better, she would stay with me.” I can’t stand the uncertainty. Francine keeps promising to be faithful, and each time Patrick believes her. And each time his hopes are dashed. PATRICK: J can’t believe she’s doing this to me again. I can’t bekeve she’d put me through it. After last time I was sure she would stop. I mean, she saw what she did to me. I was almost suicidal. I can’t believe she would do it again. Patrick’s marriage is a roller coaster. He rides, out of control, from wild hope to despair, rising and crashing again and again. PATRICK: The hardest part for me is the waiting. Knowing what she is doing and waiting for her to come home. There have been times when I have waited days. Just sat there and waited for her to come home.Liretraps 7 While Patrick waits, he alternates between sobbing and rage. When Fran- cine finally comes home, there is a scene. A few times he has hit her, afterward always begging her forgiveness. He wants to get off the roller coaster. He says he wants some stability and peace. Yet this is the irony of the Abandonment lifetrap: the more unpredictable Francine is, the more he is drawn to her at a deep emotional level. He feels more chemistry when she threatens to leave. Patrick’s childhood was fraught with loss and unpredictability. His father abandoned the family when Patrick was only two years old. He and his two sisters were raised by their mother, an alcoholic who neglected them when she was drunk. These feelings are familiar to him, and he has managed to recreate them by marrying Francine and tolerating her infidelity. Patrick was in psychoanalysis (Freudian therapy) for three years. He saw his analyst three times a week for fifty minutes each time—at consid- erable expense. PATRICK: I would go in and ke down on the couch and talk about whatever came into my mind. It was very lonely for me. My analyst said very Kittle in the whole three years. Even if I was crying or yelling at him he usually wouldn’t say anything. I felt ike he wasn’t really there. He talked a lot about his childhood, and about what it felt like to lie there on the couch. He became frustrated with analysis. He found his progress very slow. He understood his problems better, but he still had them. (This is a common complaint about psychoanalysis: Insight is not enough.) He wanted a therapy that was quicker and more directive. He wanted more guidance. The lifetrap approach offered Patrick the guidance he needed. Instead of being distant and neutral with Patrick, we collaborated with him. We helped him see exactly what his pattern was and how he could break it. We taught him how to become more selective in his relationships with women. We warned him of the danger in romantic relationships of being drawn to destructive partners who generate a lot of sexual chemistry. He was con- fronted with the painful reality that he, like many of us, had fallen in love with a partner who reinforced his lifetrap. After a year and a half of lifetrap therapy, Patrick decided to end his marriage to Francine. In that time he had given her every chance. He had tried to correct his behaviors that were destructive to the relationship—and that were inadvertently driving her away. He had stopped trying to control8 REINVENTING Your LIFE her. He had given her more freedom. He had asserted himself when she treated him badly. But through it all Francine had not changed. In fact, things had grown worse. When we first asked if he had considered leaving Francine, Patrick insisted that he was too afraid he would fall apart. But when he finally left her and ended his marriage, he did not fall apart. Instead, he became calmer and more self-confident. He saw that he could have a life apart from Francine. We think he was right to leave the self-destructive relationship. Patrick slowly started seeing other women. At first, he dated women who were just like his wife—unstable and unable to support him. It was as though he were running through the whole cycle again in fast motion. We gradually helped him to make healthier choices, even though the chemistry he felt was not quite as high. He has been living for six months with Sylvia, a very stable and reliable woman who seems devoted to him. While she is less glamorous than Francine, for the first time in his life Patrick is learning to be content in a consistent, nurturing environment. The lifetrap approach shows you exactly what types of relationships are healthy for you to pursue, and what types to avoid, given your particu- lar lifetraps. Often, this is not easy. Like Patrick, you may have to make choices that are painful in the short run and even go against your gut feelings in order to escape a rut that you have been mired in throughout your life. CaRLTON: THIRTY YEARS OLD, WORKS FOR HIS FATHER IN A FAMILY TEXTILE BUSINESS. HE IS NOT VERY GOOD AT MANAG- ING OTHER PEOPLE AND WOULD MUCH RATHER BE DOING SOMETHING ELSE. CARLTON IS CAUGHT IN THE SUBJUGATION LIFETRAP. Carlton is a people-pleaser. He puts everyone’s needs before his own. He is the one who always says, “I don’t care, you decide,” when other people ask him what he wants. Carlton tries to please his wife by saying “yes” to everything she says and wants. He tries to please his children by never saying “no.” He tries to please his father by going into the family business, even though it means doing a job he does not like. Ironically, despite the fact that he tries so hard to please, other people often feel irritated with Carlton. He is so self-sacrificing. His wife is angry that he has no backbone. Although the children take advantage of his permissiveness, at some level they are angry that he fails to set limits. His