Hello. I'm The ASMR Psychologist. Welcome to my Whispered Reading series: Self-help
books. Today, I'm going to be reading to you a little
bit more of my favourite self-help book. It's called 'Reinventing Your Life', and it's by
two American psychologists called Jeff Young and Janet Klosko.
Now, if you missed my last video where I started to read this, and I also explained why it's
such a great book, you can watch that video, here.
Okay. Now, in the last video, we read a little bit
about a man called Jed, who had an 'Emotional Deprivation lifetrap', and today, we're going
to be reading about a woman called Heather, who has what is called a 'Vulnerability lifetrap'.
Before we start, just to explain why I'm using the ASMR whisper. The whispering voice triggers
a state, a little bit like REM sleep, in which our minds are primed to learn. So, if you
can listen to this really important information, whilst it's being whispered to you, your mind's
going to be more open to the information, and more able to take it on board and use
it. Okay, so, if you're sitting comfortably, I
will begin. Okay, so...
Heather is a 42-year-old woman with tremendous potential, trapped in her own home because
her fears are so crippling. Although she takes the tranquilliser, 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'. —This is Heather speaking now.—
'I know there’s lots of great stuff to do in the city. I like the theatre. 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.
—This is Heather speaking again.—
'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 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 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.
—Okay, this next section has the title, 'The Irony of Repetition'.—
Jed and Heather illustrate 2 of the 11 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 recognise 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 '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 create these patterns.
The technical term for a lifetrap is a 'schema'. The concept of a schema comes from cognitive
psychology. Schemas are deeply entrenched beliefs about ourselves and the world, learned
in early 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. 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.
Okay, I'm going to finish there and leave
you to mull over that information, maybe to think about how it relates to you and your
life, and the things that you struggle with. And I shall be reading a little more to you
in a couple of days. In the meantime, if you enjoyed this video,
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In the meantime, thank you for watching. Enjoy the rest of your day,
and, hopefully, I will see you soon.