|
Word and promise
Old ramblings
|
Various lifetrap I have, that i must deal with
Thursday, February 20, 2014; ( 2:18 PM )
Abandonment The Abandonment lifetrap is the feeling that the 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. 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 lifetrap, 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 a fear of flying, being mugged, or earthquakes. Social exlcusion 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 lifetrap, 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 lifetrap 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 felt socially undesirable. As an adult you may feel that you are ugly, sexually undesirable, low in status, poor in conversational skills, boring, or otherwise deficient. You reenact your childhood rejection-you feel and act inferior in social situations. It is not always apparent that someone has a Social Exclusion lifetrap. Many people with this lifetrap are quite comfortable in intimate settings and are quite socially skilled. Their lifetrap 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. 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 are afraid of love. You find it difficult to believe that people close to you value you, so you expect rejection. Unrelenting standards If you are in the Unrelenting Standards lifetrap, you strive relentlessly to meet extremely 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 judgmental. When you were a child, you were expected to be the best, and you were taught that anything else was failure. You learned that nothing you did was quite good enough. 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. |