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rejection.
     
• FAILURE •
     
    Failure is the belief that you are inadequate in areas of achievement, such as school, work, and sports. You believe you have failed relative to your peers. As a child, you were made to feel inferior in terms of achievement. You may have had a learning disability, or you may never have learned enough discipline to master important skills, such as reading. Other children were always better than you. You were called „stupid,“ „untalented,“ or „lazy.“ As an adult, you maintain your lifetrap by exaggerating the degree of your failure and by acting in ways that ensure your continued failure.
     
    Two lifetraps deal with Self-Expression—your ability to express what you want and get your true needs met: Subjugation and Unrelenting Standards.
     
• 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.
     
• 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.
     
• ENTITLEMENT •
     
    The final lifetrap, Entitlement, is associated with the ability to accept realistic limits in life. People who have this lifetrap feel special. They insist that they be able to do, say, or have whatever they want immediately. They disregard what others consider reasonable, what is actually feasible, the time or patience usually required, and the cost to others. They have difficulty with self-discipline.
    Many of the people with this lifetrap were spoiled as children. They were not required to show self-control or to accept the restrictions placed on other children. As adults, they still get very angry when they do not get what they want.
     
    Now you have an idea of which lifetraps apply to you. The next chapter will tell you about where lifetraps come from—how we develop them as children.

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UNDERSTANDING LIFETRAPS
     
    Lifetraps have three central features that allow us to recognize them.
     

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    RECOGNIZING LIFETRAPS
     
They are lifelong patterns or themes .
They are self-destructive .
They struggle for survival .

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    As we said in the first chapter, a lifetrap is a pattern or theme that starts in childhood and repeats throughout life. The theme might be Abandonment or Mistrust or Emotional Deprivation or any of the others we described. The end result is that, as an adult, we manage to recreate the conditions of our childhood that were most harmful to us.
    A lifetrap is self-destructive. This self-defeating quality is what makes lifetraps so poignant for us as therapists to watch. We see someone like Patrick get abandoned again, or someone like Madeline get abused. Patients are drawn to situations that trigger their lifetraps, like moths to flame. A lifetrap damages our sense of self, our health, our relationships with others, our work, our happiness, our moods—it touches every aspect of our lives.
    A lifetrap struggles hard for survival. We feel a strong push to maintain it. This is part of the human drive