LIFE TRAP

THE ELEVEN LIFETRAPS

Two life traps relate to a lack of safety or security in your childhood family – Abandonment and Mistrust

1.      Abandonment: The abandonment life trap is the feeling that people you love will leave you, and you will end up emotionally isolated forever. Whether you feel people close to you will die, leave home forever or abandon you because they prefer someone else, somehow, you feel that you will be left alone. Because of this belief, you may cling to people close to you too much. Ironically, you end up pushing them away. You may get very upset or angry about even normal separations.

2.      Mistrust and abuse: The mistrust and abuse life trap is the expectation that people will hurt or abuse you in some way – that they will cheat, lie, manipulate, humiliate, physically harm or otherwise take advantage of you. If you have this life trap, you hide behind a wall of mistrust to protect yourself. You never let people get too close. You are suspicious of other people’s intentions and tend to assume the worst. You expect that people you love will betray you. Either you avoid relationships altogether, form superficial relationships in which you do not really open up to others or you form relationships with people who treat you badly and then feel angry and vengeful toward them.

Two life traps relate to your ability to function independently in the world – Dependence and Vulnerability.

3.      Dependence: If you are caught in the dependence life trap, you feel unable to handle everyday life in a competent manner without considerable help from others. You depend on others to act as a crutch and need constant support. As a child, you were made to feel incompetent when you tried to assert your independence. As an adult, you seek out strong figures upon whom to become dependent and allow them to rule your life. At work, you shrink from acting on your own. Needless to say, this holds you back.

4.      Vulnerability: With vulnerability, you live in fear that disaster is about to strike – whether natural, criminal, medical or financial. You do not feel safe in the world. If you have this life trap, as a child, you were made to feel that the world is a dangerous place. You were probably overprotected by your parents, who worried too much about your safety. Your fears are excessive and unrealistic, yet you let them control your life and pour your energy into making sure that you are safe. Your fears may revolve around illness: having an anxiety attack, getting AIDS or going crazy. They may be focused around financial vulnerability: going broke and ending up on the streets. Your vulnerability may revolve around other phobic situations, such as fear of flying, being mugged or earthquakes.

Two life traps relate to the strength of your emotional connections to others – Emotional deprivation and Social exclusion.

5.      Emotional deprivation: It is the belief that your need for love will never be met adequately by other people. You feel that no one truly cares for you or understands how you feel. You find yourself attracted to cold and ungiving people or you are cold and ungiving yourself, leading you to form relationships that inevitably prove unsatisfying. You feel cheated and you alternate between being angry about it and feeling hurt and alone. Ironically, your anger just drives people further away, ensuring your continued deprivation. These are people who do not know what love is.

6.      Social exclusion: Social exclusion involves your connection to friends and groups. It has to do with feeling isolated from the rest of the world, with feeling different. If you have this life trap, as a child, you felt excluded by peers. You did not belong to a group of friends. Perhaps you had some unusual characteristic that made you feel different in some way. As an adult, you maintain your life trap mainly through avoidance. You avoid socializing in groups and making friends.  You may have felt excluded because there was something about you that other children rejected. Hence, you feel socially undesirable. As an adult, you may feel that you are ugly, sexually undesirable, and low in status, poor in conversational skills, boring or otherwise deficient. You re-enact your childhood rejection – you feel and act inferior in social situations. It is not always apparent that someone has a social exclusion life trap. Many people with this life trap are quite comfortable in intimate settings and are quite socially skilled. Their life trap may not show in one-to-one relationships. It sometimes surprises us to realize how anxious and aloof they may feel at parties, in classes, at meetings or at work. They have a restless quality – a quality of looking for a place to belong.

The two lifetraps that relate to your self-esteem are Defectiveness and Failure.

7.      Defectiveness: With defectiveness, you feel inwardly flawed and defective. You believe that you would be fundamentally unlovable to anyone who got close enough to really know you. Your defectiveness would be exposed. As a child, you did not feel respected for who you were in your family. Instead you were criticized for your “flaws”. You blamed yourself – you felt unworthy of love. As an adult, you were afraid of love. You find it difficult to believe that people close to you value you, so you expect rejection.

8.      Failure: Failure is the belief that you are inadequate of achievement, such as school, work and sports. You believe you have failed relative to your peers. As a child, you were made to feel inferior in terms of achievement. You may have had a learning disability or you may never have learnt enough discipline to master important skills such as reading. Other children were always better than you. You were called “stupid”, “untalented”, or “lazy”. As an adult, you maintain your life trap by exaggerating the degree of your failure and by acting in ways that ensure your continued failure.

Two life traps deal with self-expression – your ability to express what you want and get your true needs met: Subjugation and Unrelenting standards.

9.      Subjugation: With subjugation, you sacrifice your own needs and desires for the sake of pleasing others or meeting their needs. You allow others to control you. You do this either out of guilt – that you hurt other people by putting yourself first or fear that you will be punished or abandoned if you disobey. As a child, someone close to you, probably a parent subjugated you. As an adult, you repeatedly enter relationships with dominant controlling people and subjugate yourself to them or you enter relationships with needy people who are too damaged to give back to you in return.

10.  Unrelenting standards: If you are in unrelenting standards life trap, you strive relentlessly to meet extreme high expectations of yourself. You place excessive emphasis on status, money, achievement, beauty, order or recognition at the expense of happiness, pleasure, health, a sense of accomplishment and satisfying relationships. You probably apply your rigid standards to other people as well and are very judgemental. When you were a child, you were expected to be the best and you were taught that anything else was failure. You learnt that nothing you did was quite good enough.

Entitlement: The life trap entitlement is associated with the ability to accept realistic limits in life. People who have this life trap feel special. They insist that they be able to do, say or have whatever they want immediately. They disregard what others consider reasonable, what is actually feasible, the time or patience usually required at the cost of others. They have difficulty with self-discipline. Many of the people with this life trap were spoiled as children. They were not required to show self-control or to accept restrictions placed on other children. As adults, they still get very angry when they do not get what they want.