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Reinventing Your Life
What It’s About
The eleven life-traps, schemas, that quietly run your worst patterns. Jeffrey Young, the founder of schema therapy, walks through how childhood experiences hardwire negative beliefs about love, worth, and identity, and how to dismantle them as an adult. The clinical handbook that became a self-help classic, used by therapists for decades.
Three Key Ideas
Eleven Lifetraps from Childhood
Eleven recognizable schemas formed in early life quietly drive your partner choices, career patterns, and emotional reactions as an adult.
Three Ways Schemas Persist
Adults maintain their lifetraps through surrender, avoidance, or counterattack, often without noticing which mode they are in.
Four-Part Change Process
Lasting change requires cognitive challenge, emotional imagery work, behavioral experiments, and honest evaluation of your closest relationships.
Read a Sample
Reinventing Your Life
By Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko (1993)
The patient who could not stop apologizing
A successful Manhattan attorney sat in Jeffrey Young's office and, with quiet desperation, described a life that looked enviable from the outside. She billed enormous hours, made partner before forty, lived in a doorman building and dated men who seemed reasonable on paper. She also flinched whenever a senior partner walked past her desk. She rewrote routine emails six times before sending them. She apologized to waiters who brought her the wrong dish. When a man treated her well, she lost interest within weeks. When a man treated her badly, she couldn't leave.
She'd been in therapy before. Two competent clinicians, years of work, real insight into her childhood, and still the patterns kept coming back. She knew her father had been cold and critical. She knew her mother had been emotionally absent. She'd read the books. She understood, intellectually, why she acted the way she did. None of that knowledge changed what happened on a Tuesday morning when a partner raised his voice and her stomach dropped through the floor.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who keeps repeating the same painful patterns in relationships despite years of therapy or self-reflection.
- Anyone who suspects that childhood experiences are still shaping their career choices, self-sabotage, or chronic anxiety.
- Anyone who wants a clinical framework for understanding shame, perfectionism, or the compulsion to please others.
- Anyone who feels stuck in a life that looks fine from the outside but feels hollow or exhausting from the inside.
About the Author: Jeffrey E. Young
Jeffrey E. Young is a clinical psychologist who trained under Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, at the University of Pennsylvania. He developed schema therapy as an extension of Beck's cognitive behavioral framework, specifically to treat the deep personality patterns and chronic emotional difficulties that standard short-term CBT could not reliably reach.
Young founded the Cognitive Therapy Center of New York and is the originator of a clinical tradition that now includes training institutes on multiple continents and a substantial body of peer-reviewed research. His co-author Janet Klosko trained under leading anxiety researcher David Barlow and directed the Cognitive Therapy Center of Long Island, bringing extensive clinical experience with anxiety disorders to the collaboration.
