Dr. Jeffrey Young and Dr. Janet Klosko have written a potentially life-altering book, Reinventing Your Life – The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again. The authors describe common negative life behaviors, feelings and patterns called lifetraps, which they describe as “patterns that start in childhood and reverberate throughout life”. They write that it is necessary to “continually confront ourselves when faced with self-destructive lifetraps. These traps usually emanate from childhood pain that carries over into our adult professional and personal lives.

The authors describe a technical term for a lifetrap – schema. “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”. Lifetraps result in us interpreting several situations in our lives inaccurately. In the workplace, this results in destructive habits that are toxic to the individual, team and organization.

Young and Klosko point out that cognitive therapists “believe that if we can teach patients to become more accurate about the way they interpret situations, we can help them feel better”. Cognitive therapy is “an active approach that teaches patients to control their own moods by controlling their thoughts”.  Reinventing Your Life is a useful book for those who want to examine their own lives and analyze if their childhood experiences resulted in lifetraps that have become destructive from a personal and professional perspective. This makes it a very worthwhile resource for those difficult people issues that so often crop up in the modern day workplace.

The book describes eleven common lifetraps that might be the cause of self-destructive behaviors:

  1. Abandonment – It is difficult for you to believe that people will be there for you.
  2. Mistrust & Abuse – Relationships are not the place to relax and become more vulnerable. Rather, they are dangerous and unpredictable. You have to stay on your guard. It is difficult for you                                      to trust people.
  3. Emotional Deprivation – Emotional deprivation is the sense that you will be lonely forever, that certain things are never going to be fulfilled for you, that you will never be heard, never be                                                      understood. It is a feeling of emptiness.
  4. Social Exclusion – The primary feeling is loneliness. You feel excluded from the rest of the world because you feel either undesirable or different.
  5. Dependence – Life seems overwhelming. You feel that you cannot cope. You believe that you are incapable of taking care of yourself in the world, and that therefore you have to turn to other                             people for help.
  6. Vulnerability – You feel anxiety. Catastrophe is about to strike and you lack the resources to deal with it. You both exaggerate the risk of danger and minimize your own capacity to cope.
  7. Defectiveness – The primary emotion is shame which is what you feel when your defects are exposed. You will do almost anything to avoid this feeling of shame. Consequently you go to great                              lengths to keep your defectiveness hidden.
  8. Failure – You feel like a failure to other people you consider your peers.
  9. Subjugation – You experience the world in terms of control issues. Other people in your life seem to be in control – you feel controlled by the people around you. At the core of your                                               subjugation is the conviction that you must please others. The only person you do not feel obliged to please – is yourself.
  10. Unrelenting Standards – You always feel pressure. You can never relax and enjoy life. You are always pushing, pushing, to get ahead. You fight to be the best at whatever you do. You have to                                                 be perfectly creative and perfectly organized.
  11. Entitlement – You are either spoiled (you see yourself as special), dependent (you feel entitled to depend on other people and for them to be there to take care of you) or impulsive (you have                            difficulty controlling your behavior and feelings).

For each lifetrap, the authors describe it in detail, discuss its potential origins and consequences and recommend how to change your behaviors. All in all, Reinventing Your Life is a very powerful book that will help you examine your own lifetraps and recommend how to overcome destructive behaviors.