Negative Life Patterns
JEFFREY E. YOUNG, Ph.D., and
JANET S. KLOSKO, Ph.D.
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How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns |
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Reinventing Your |
Life | |
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JEFFREY E. YOUNG, Ph.D., and |
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JANET S. KLOSKO, Ph.D. |
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D o you feel that even the people closest to you don't care enough about you or don't understand you as well as you would like? Do you believe that you are somehow defective--that no one who truly knows you could possibly love and accept you as you really are? Do you find that even when you earn approval, you still feel unfulfilled or undeserving? If so, you're caught in a "lifetrap": a self-defeating pattern that starts in childhood and reverberates throughout your life. In this vital guide, psychologists Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko draw upon the breakthrough techniques of cognitive therapy to help you recognize and change self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and behaviors--quickly and easily. They describe eleven of the most common lifetraps, provide a diagnostic test for each, and offer specific, step-by-step suggestions on how to help you break free of lifelong hurts, damaging beliefs, and negative behaviors. The results are both tremendously exciting and inspiring. You'll discover real-life success stories like these: Carton, a friendly, easy-going people-pleaser, was miserable working for his domineering father. He was stuck in the subjugation lifetrap, one of the fastest patterns to break. An action-oriented approach taught him to be more assertive, and not only dramatically improved his work-life but made his home life happier too. Madeline was sexually abused by her stepfather and was playing out the abuse lifetrap by engaging in erratic behavior with men, from promiscuity to avoidance. She conquered this toughest of lifetraps with the help of a therapist and a support group plus the concrete skills and exercises that dramatically improved the way she felt about herself and related to people. Carton, Madeline, and thousands of others have seen the visible, long-term results of Dr. Young and Dr. Klosko's program, outlined in this clear compassionate, liberating book. Its innovative, effective approach to solving long-term emotional problems will help you create a more fulfilling, productive life. [from the inside cover] |
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About the Authors |
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| Jeffrey E. Young, Ph.D., is Founder and Director of the Cognitive Therapy Centers of New York and Fairfield County. He completed his bachelor's degree at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, he remained there to complete a post-doctoral fellowship with Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, at the Center for Cognitive Therapy. He then went on to serve as the Center's Director of Research and Training. Using well-known procedures and materials he has developed over the past ten years, he has trained over a thousand cognitive therapists at workshops throughout the United States and Europe. Dr. Young has written numerous publications on cognitive therapy, and is co-author of a major psychotherapy outcome study evaluating the effectiveness of cognitive therapy. Dr. Young is on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. Janet S. Klosko, Ph.D., is a training therapist at the Cognitive Therapy Center of New York, and co-director of the Cognitive Therapy Center of Long Island, in Great Neck. She also has a residence in the Albany, New York, area, where she has a private practice. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Albany, and interned at Brown University. She has done extensive work researching treatments for anxiety disorders. She won the Albany Award for Excellence in Research, and the Dissertation Award from the American Psychological Association Section on Clinical Psychology as a Science. She has written numerous publications on treating anxiety. Since completing her graduate training, Dr. Klosko has worked with Dr. Young doing schema-focused therapy with individual patients and couples, and supervising and training other therapists. In addition, she has a master's degree from McGill University, and a B.A. from Union College. [from the hardbound edition] |
Table of Contents |
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[from the hardbound edition] |
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Excerpts |
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| Why another self-help book? We believe that Reinventing Your Life fills an important gap in the books currently available for self-improvement. There are many excellent self-help books, just as there are many fine therapy approaches. However, most of these are limited. Some books only deal with one specific problem, like codependency, depression, lack of assertiveness, or making poor partner choices. Some deal with many problems, but only use one means of change, like inner-child work, couples exercises, or cognitive-behavioral methods. Other books are inspirational or do a great job of describing a universal problem like loss, but the solutions they offer are so vague that we don't know how to go about changing once we have the inspiration. In Reinventing Your Life, Janet Klosko and I share with you a new therapy for changing major life patterns. Lifetrap therapy addresses eleven of the most destructive problems we encounter every day in our practices. To help you change these lifetraps, we combine techniques from several different therapies. As a result, we think this book will provide you with a far more thorough and comprehensive approach to a variety of lifelong problems than most books you have read so far. Reinventing Your Life: The experience of emotional deprivation is harder to define than some of the other lifetraps. Often it is not crystallized into thoughts. This is because the original deprivation began so early, before you had the words to describe it. Your experience of emotional deprivation is much more the sense that you are going to be lonely forever, that certain things are never going to be fulfilled for you, that you will never be heard, never be understood. Emotional deprivation feels like something is missing. It is a feeling of emptiness. Perhaps the image that most captures its meaning is that of a neglected child. Emotional deprivation is what a neglected child feels. It is a feeling of aloneness, of nobody there. It is a sad and heavy sense of knowledge that you are destined to be alone... Some people with this lifetrap show a tendency to be demanding in relationships. There is an insatiable quality to the lifetrap. No matter how much people give you, it never feels like enough. Ask yourself, "Do people keep telling me that I am too needy, or that I ask for too much?" Reinventing Your Life: One final assumption about change involves the need to create a personal vision. Change is not just the absence of lifetraps. We must each discover who we want to be and what we want from life. We feel that it is vital to have this direction before going too far along the change process. We want you to look beyond the elimination of your individual lifetraps to an image of what will lead you finally to feel fulfilled, happy, and self-actualized. Many of us go through life with only a fuzzy sense of where we are going. This explains why many of us reach middle-age or retirement feeling disappointed and disillusioned. We have never had a broad set of overriding goals to guide us. It would be like playing football without knowing where the goal posts are, or getting on a plane without knowing its destination. It is crucial for each of us to have such a blueprint. The eleven lifetraps are obstacles to reaching our goals; they do not tell us what each of us uniquely needs to be happy. Once you develop a set of life goals, you can begin to plan specific steps to get there. We urge you to approach change in a strategic way, not haphazardly. To create a personal vision, you must discover your natural inclinations, which include those interests, relationships, and activities that inherently lead us to feel fulfilled. We believe that each person has a innate set of personal preferences. Perhaps the most vital task we can undertake in our lives is to discover what these inborn desires are. Our best clues to recognizing the natural inclinations are our emotions and our bodily sensations. When we engage in activities or relationships that fulfill our natural inclinations, we feel good. Our body is content and we experience pleasure or joy. Unfortunately, many of us are trained as children to disregard our natural inclinations and to do what is expected of us: We are forced to be tough when by nature we are sensitive; we are forced to pursue medicine, when our natural preference is for outdoor activities; we are forced to be conventional when by nature we are unconventional; we are forced to act in routine ways when by nature we prefer stimulation. Reinventing Your Life: [from the hardbound edition] |
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Read more about this book on the Amazon.com website: Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns  |
Purchasing |
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Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko's book Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns may be purchased through Amazon.com.  |
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