with the women he met and begin to take responsibility 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
familiar patterns. This approach was different.
I finally took some responsibility 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 someone 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.

HEATHER: A FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WITH

TREMENDOUS POTENTIAL, TRAPPED IN HER OWN HOME
BECAUSE HER FEARS ARE SO CRIPPLING. ALTHOUGH SHE
TAKES THE TRANQUILIZER 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 like

the theater, I like nice restaurants, I like 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
certainly 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 parents
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. Meanwhile, 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: I feel like I’m going to have to stay on this for the rest
of my life. The idea of giving it up terrifies me. I don’t want to go
back to being scared of everything all the time.
 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, particularly
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
commuting.
As part of her treatment, we helped Heather become better at estimating
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

Deprivation and Vulnerability. As we discuss other patients, you will read
about the other lifetraps: Subjugation, Mistrust and Abuse, Abandonment,
Defectiveness, 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