Reinventing your Life: 5. Steps to Change

Life traps are long term patterns. They are deeply ingrained, and like addictions or bad habits, they are hard to change. Change requires willingness to experience pain. You have to face the lifetrap head-on and understand it. Change also requires discipline. You have to systematically observe and change behaviors every day. Change cannot be hit-or-miss. It requires constant practice.

1. Label and Identify your life traps.Your life trap is your enemy. We want to know your enemy.
2. Understand the childhood origins of your life trap. Feel the wounded child inside you. Close your eyes and let images from your childhood flood in. Reconnect with your childhood self and have an open dialogue with the child. We want to bring the frozen inner child back to life, where growth and change are possible. We want this child to heal. You can talk aloud or write a letter to this child. Write to the child using your dominant hand and have the child write as a response in your non-dominant hand. "I am sorry this is happening to you. Your parents aren't able to be there for you the way you need. But I will be here for you. I will help you get through this and make sure you come out all right."
3. Build a case against your life trap. Disprove its validity at a rational level. List out all the evidence pro and con regarding the life trap throughout your life. Example: Evidence, Is this inherently true or was i brainwashed? How could I change? Then write a flash card that summarize the case against your life trap.
4. Write letters to the parent, sibling or peer who helped cause your life trap. Give your inner child a voice to express her pain. Tell them what they did that was hurtful, and how it made you feel. Tell them they were wrong to behave as they did. Tell them how you wished it could have been instead.
5. Examine your life trap pattern in careful detail. What ways do I reinforce my life trap day to day? How can I change?
6. Pattern Breaking Select 2 or 3 ways you reinforce your life trap. Try to carry out the ways you can change.
7. Keep Trying. Persevere. Confront yourself over and over again.
8. Forgiving your parents. Not required. Parents are just people with problems and concerns of their own. Parents are caught within their own life traps.

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Obstacles to change:

You are counterattacking instead of acknowledging and taking responsibility for the life trap.

1. Make a list of all the choices you have regretted in your life. What if they were your fault? How would you feel? What if the criticisms others have of you have some validity? Try to feel the pain of your flaws. Try to acknowledge the pain of your childhood - what you wanted but did not get.
2. Gradually start working less or making a little less money. Feel what it is like to be the same as everyone else rather than special or superior.

You escape from experiencing your life trap. You do not allow yourself to think about your problems, your past, your family, or your life patterns. You keep cutting off feelings or dulling them. It takes motivation to overcome Escape as a coping style. You have to see the rest of your life before you - either stuck in the lifetrap or finally free of it.

1. You must allow yourself to think through your problems and feel your childhood pain before you can change.
2. Make a list of advantages and disadvantages of avoiding your feelings. Reread the list everyday to remind yourself of why you are doing this.
3. Stop escaping through drinking, overeating, using drugs, over working, etc. Keep a diary in which you write down how you feel. 

You have not disproved the lifetrap to yourself. You still accept it on a rational level. A lifetrap does not give way all at once. Rather you must continually chip away at it, bit by bit, gradually weakening its pull.

1. Return to the exercise of disproving your lifetrap.
2. Look carefully through your life for any evidence that challenges your life trap.
3. Write your flash card and read it several times a day.

You started with a lifetrap or task that was too difficult.

1. Break your plan into smaller steps.
2. Start with the easier steps. Slowly build a sense of mastery.

You realize your lifetrap is wrong on a rational level, but emotionally you still feel it is valid.

1. Remind yourself insight comes quickly, but change comes slowly. Your healthy side will become stronger and stronger and your life trap side will become weaker. Be patient.
2. Speed up the process by doing experiential exercises. Write dialogues between your healthy side and your life trap. Get angry at your life trap. Cry about the way you were treated as a child. Let yourself feel the injustice.
3. Work hard to change the behaviors that reinforce your lifetrap.

You have not been systematic and disciplined about changing. "Slow and steady wins the race."

1. Go through the chapter and complete all the exercises.
2. Set aside a few minutes everyday to review your progress.

Your plan is missing an important element.

1. Review your lifetrap and plan.
2. Did you overlook part of the pattern that really does apply to you?

Your problem is too entrenched or deep rotted to correct on your own.

Seek professional help from a therapist or group.