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45 reviews for:
Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns and Feel Good Again
Janet S. Klosko, Jeffrey E. Young
4.09 AVERAGE
45 reviews for:
Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns and Feel Good Again
Janet S. Klosko, Jeffrey E. Young
4.09 AVERAGE
As the poet Philip Larkin famously said in This Be The Verse: “They f**k you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do...”, this book Reinventing Your Life, is a tool to help you counter the damage done in your formative years.
It is therapy in a book, utilising a methodology called Schema Therapy. It opens with a questionnaire to complete that gives you a rough idea of which “Life Traps” you may have and then each chapter has a further questionnaire dedicated to a specific Life Trap and you can use this to confirm whether the Life Trap is a big issue for you or not. I completed each questionnaire and skipped the chapters where the Life Trap was not a significant issue for me. So in the end I could focus on 3 chapters.
Each Life Trap chapter gives you example case studies of the author’s clients; gives a list of behaviours of someone with the Life Trap; gives a list of circumstances that could give rise to the Life Trap and most importantly runs through exercises to work on, to combat the Life Trap. I haven’t done these yet but following my first read through of the book I am going to go back, tab it up and use it as a work book.
You don’t have to have been abused as a child or suffered an intolerable childhood to have Life Traps. You could have grown up in a ‘normal’ family and still have issues to work on, you may not even realise you have them. It was interesting to read about the Life Traps because aside from my own, I certainly recognised behaviours of other people I know, from Life Traps I don’t have.
I would love to find some more books as helpful as this.
I mentioned Philip Larkin at the start, he obviously knew about Life Traps long before this book was ever written:
This Be The Verse
They f**k you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were f**ked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
It is therapy in a book, utilising a methodology called Schema Therapy. It opens with a questionnaire to complete that gives you a rough idea of which “Life Traps” you may have and then each chapter has a further questionnaire dedicated to a specific Life Trap and you can use this to confirm whether the Life Trap is a big issue for you or not. I completed each questionnaire and skipped the chapters where the Life Trap was not a significant issue for me. So in the end I could focus on 3 chapters.
Each Life Trap chapter gives you example case studies of the author’s clients; gives a list of behaviours of someone with the Life Trap; gives a list of circumstances that could give rise to the Life Trap and most importantly runs through exercises to work on, to combat the Life Trap. I haven’t done these yet but following my first read through of the book I am going to go back, tab it up and use it as a work book.
You don’t have to have been abused as a child or suffered an intolerable childhood to have Life Traps. You could have grown up in a ‘normal’ family and still have issues to work on, you may not even realise you have them. It was interesting to read about the Life Traps because aside from my own, I certainly recognised behaviours of other people I know, from Life Traps I don’t have.
I would love to find some more books as helpful as this.
I mentioned Philip Larkin at the start, he obviously knew about Life Traps long before this book was ever written:
This Be The Verse
They f**k you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were f**ked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Şema yaklaşımını ilk duyduğumda çok aydınlatıcı bir kavram olduğunu düşünmüştüm ve bireysel etkilerini de kendi hayatımda yavaş yavaş gözlemlemeye başlamıştım ancak bu kitapta ilerledikçe kavramlar daha iyi oturdu kafamda; sadece kendi şemalarımı değil, yakınlarımın ve çevremdekilerin hayatlarını ve kararlarını etkileyen şemaları da az çok farkedebildim.
Kitapla ilgili ilk dikkatimi çeken "kişisel gelişim" diye bağıran adı elbette. Aslında, nasıl okuduğunuza göre türü değişen bir kitap; kişisel gelişim tadı verdiği de oluyor, başlangıç seviyesinde bir klinik psikoloji terapi yaklaşımı tadı verdiği de.. Kitaba genel puanım 3,5'tan 4.
Kitapla ilgili eleştirebileceğim iki nokta var; ilki ve daha önemlisi danışanların değişim süreci örneklendirilirken değişimin çok kolay içselleştirilebiliyor gibi yansıtılması oldu. Şema terapinin önündeki en büyük engel zaten şemalarımızın değişime müthiş bir direncinin olması ve aşılmalarının hiç kolay olmayışı. Ancak kitaptaki danışanların başa çıkma süreçleri anlatılırken neredeyse hiç direnç hissedilmiyor. Kitabi okurken, anlatıldığı kadar objektif ve sağlıklı bilişsel çıkarımlar yapmanın bu kolaylıkta olmayacağını hatırlamakta fayda var.
Ikinci eleştirim de yine danışan hikayelerinin gerçeküstülüğüyle ilgili. Örneği verilen tüm danışanlar istisnasız olarak mutlu sonla ayrılıyor. Motivasyon kazandırma sebebiyle sadece onların hikayesine yer verilmiş de olabilir ama ilişkilerinde sorun yaşayanların ya evliliğinin kurtarılması ya da işlevsiz ilişkilerine son verip aşkı bularak nihayetinde tüm danışanların sorunsuz ilişkiler yaşaması hiç gerçekçi gelmedi. Onun yerine ilişki yaşamadığı halde şemalarını aşabilen veya yalnızlık duygusuyla başedebilen danışan hikayelerine de yer verilmiş olsa daha motive edici bulabilirdim.
Yine de bütün olarak çok faydalı olduğunu düşündüğüm, özellikle şema yaklaşımı hakkında bilgi edinmek için güzel bir başlangıç kaynağı.
Kitapla ilgili ilk dikkatimi çeken "kişisel gelişim" diye bağıran adı elbette. Aslında, nasıl okuduğunuza göre türü değişen bir kitap; kişisel gelişim tadı verdiği de oluyor, başlangıç seviyesinde bir klinik psikoloji terapi yaklaşımı tadı verdiği de.. Kitaba genel puanım 3,5'tan 4.
Kitapla ilgili eleştirebileceğim iki nokta var; ilki ve daha önemlisi danışanların değişim süreci örneklendirilirken değişimin çok kolay içselleştirilebiliyor gibi yansıtılması oldu. Şema terapinin önündeki en büyük engel zaten şemalarımızın değişime müthiş bir direncinin olması ve aşılmalarının hiç kolay olmayışı. Ancak kitaptaki danışanların başa çıkma süreçleri anlatılırken neredeyse hiç direnç hissedilmiyor. Kitabi okurken, anlatıldığı kadar objektif ve sağlıklı bilişsel çıkarımlar yapmanın bu kolaylıkta olmayacağını hatırlamakta fayda var.
Ikinci eleştirim de yine danışan hikayelerinin gerçeküstülüğüyle ilgili. Örneği verilen tüm danışanlar istisnasız olarak mutlu sonla ayrılıyor. Motivasyon kazandırma sebebiyle sadece onların hikayesine yer verilmiş de olabilir ama ilişkilerinde sorun yaşayanların ya evliliğinin kurtarılması ya da işlevsiz ilişkilerine son verip aşkı bularak nihayetinde tüm danışanların sorunsuz ilişkiler yaşaması hiç gerçekçi gelmedi. Onun yerine ilişki yaşamadığı halde şemalarını aşabilen veya yalnızlık duygusuyla başedebilen danışan hikayelerine de yer verilmiş olsa daha motive edici bulabilirdim.
Yine de bütün olarak çok faydalı olduğunu düşündüğüm, özellikle şema yaklaşımı hakkında bilgi edinmek için güzel bir başlangıç kaynağı.
Slightly outdated guide to the very barest bones of schema therapy, but a useful exercise in self reflection and improvement.
My current therapist suggested that I read this book, and over the weeks since I started getting into it, it’s remarkable how much I’ve been able to make sense of my own life based on the information in this book.
There’s something truly empowering about the realization that certain things in our pasts may push us toward repeating the same type of patterns over and over again...but that recognizing that pattern is the key to ultimately breaking out of it.
This book covers “lifetraps” that you might find yourself in, why you likely have them, and how you can start to break out of them and work toward a more healthy, integrated adult way of living.
I’ll admit I haven’t read all the chapters—I took the quiz at the beginning and scored high on all but two of the lifetraps, so I skipped those two chapters. But especially for someone who has already done a lot of therapy and whose mind is prepared for the self-inquiry, self-awareness, and intentionality that allow for personal progress and improvement, understanding your lifetraps is a fast-track toward a better life. Within a couple weeks of addressing my subjugation lifetrap, it was already getting better to the point that I didn’t test high on it anymore. Awareness really is the key to improvement.
The “schema therapy” approach is an evolving field, as it should be, so there are other books that might cover additional recognized lifetraps. For example, I took a different quiz online and scored high on “self-sacrifice” and “insufficient self-control,” which are kind of evolutions of other lifetraps talked about in this book (the self-sacrifice being a more nuanced form of subjugation, in my opinion, and insufficient self-control being a subset of entitlement that differentiates it from more narcissistic tendencies).
I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about *why* they are the way they are, and concrete examples on how to break out of old patterns. Working with a therapist who specializes in schema therapy is probably preferable, of course, but even if you can’t do that this book is a great resource full of useful knowledge.
There’s something truly empowering about the realization that certain things in our pasts may push us toward repeating the same type of patterns over and over again...but that recognizing that pattern is the key to ultimately breaking out of it.
This book covers “lifetraps” that you might find yourself in, why you likely have them, and how you can start to break out of them and work toward a more healthy, integrated adult way of living.
I’ll admit I haven’t read all the chapters—I took the quiz at the beginning and scored high on all but two of the lifetraps, so I skipped those two chapters. But especially for someone who has already done a lot of therapy and whose mind is prepared for the self-inquiry, self-awareness, and intentionality that allow for personal progress and improvement, understanding your lifetraps is a fast-track toward a better life. Within a couple weeks of addressing my subjugation lifetrap, it was already getting better to the point that I didn’t test high on it anymore. Awareness really is the key to improvement.
The “schema therapy” approach is an evolving field, as it should be, so there are other books that might cover additional recognized lifetraps. For example, I took a different quiz online and scored high on “self-sacrifice” and “insufficient self-control,” which are kind of evolutions of other lifetraps talked about in this book (the self-sacrifice being a more nuanced form of subjugation, in my opinion, and insufficient self-control being a subset of entitlement that differentiates it from more narcissistic tendencies).
I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about *why* they are the way they are, and concrete examples on how to break out of old patterns. Working with a therapist who specializes in schema therapy is probably preferable, of course, but even if you can’t do that this book is a great resource full of useful knowledge.