Reinventing Your Life

Reinventing Your Life

By Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko (1994)

The patient who could not stop apologizing

A successful Manhattan attorney sat in Jeffrey Young's office and described, with quiet desperation, a life that looked enviable from the outside. She billed enormous hours, made partner before forty, lived in a doorman building, 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 served her wrong dishes. When a man treated her well, she lost interest within weeks. When a man treated her badly, she could not leave.

She had been to therapy before. Two competent clinicians, years of work, real insight into her childhood, and yet the patterns kept reasserting themselves. She knew her father had been cold and critical. She knew her mother had been emotionally absent. She had read the books. She understood, intellectually, why she behaved the way she did. None of that knowledge changed what happened on Tuesday morning when a partner raised his voice and her stomach dropped through the floor.

This is the puzzle that drove Young to develop schema therapy, and it is the puzzle this book is built around. Insight is not enough. Standard cognitive techniques work beautifully on situational depression and anxiety, but they bounce off the deeper patterns that organize a personality. Something underneath the conscious mind keeps pulling people back into the lives they say they want to escape. Young and Klosko call those somethings lifetraps. Eleven of them, mapped from thousands of patient hours, each one a recognizable shape of suffering with a recognizable origin in childhood and a recognizable path out.