The term “lifetrap” originates from the Schema theory coined by Dr Jeffrey Young who pronounced that lifetraps create a belief system in such a way that you are attracted towards someone unsuitable because they replay your core conflict over and over again. Yet, you move towards them because you don’t recognise anything different, ending up in heartbreak almost every time.
As a therapist, I ensure that even before I begin my work, I take my clients through a detailed assessment of their personalities and lifetraps. Over the years, I have gained adequate insights and data, allowing me to study patterns in these findings. What I have learnt from these studies is that three lifetraps are most operational in toxic relationships – emotional deprivation, abandonment and self-sacrifice.
Emotional deprivation
A 45-year-old woman, Gitanjali, is the picture of confidence. While she loves her job and the perks of corporate life, she feels terrible about herself, as despite her attempts, she fails to get the love she desires. When she was a child, her father was always distant and unaffectionate. She spent her entire childhood trying to win a warm smile or a hug from him. When she grew up, she kept falling for distant men who were disapproving of her. She sincerely believed these men loved her but didn’t know how to show her and that she could change that with her love. With every relationship, she felt tired of craving warmth and connection, and she did not realise when she became demanding and clingy. She was confused when these men broke up with her, saying nothing was ever enough for her.
Do you see a deep emotional, insatiable hunger in Gitanjali? If you too tell yourself absolute statements such as, “I’ll never find the love that I need”, then it is possible that your emotional hunger was created due to an early childhood experience, including an absentee parent, an emotionally detached parent, or parents who provided all the material comforts you needed but nobody could connect with your inner world. This creates a feeling of perpetual emptiness within, making you crave for love and fulfilment and nothing ever seems to be enough.
When you meet someone emotionally unavailable, you recognise this unavailable energy as familiar, because this was what you grew up with. The mind always gravitates towards familiar energy, which is not necessarily healthy. It is the exact opposite of what you crave yet you feel an unexplainable pull towards this person. You believe, “If only this time I can make this person love me, I’ll be happy forever!” This happens because your unconscious mind is full of all the pain you have locked away, trying to resolve your life’s earliest psychological conflicts and fill those early voids.
The unavailable person is not a bad human; they just aren’t right for us. Due to these unconscious conflicts, love seems worthy only when it comes from a person who makes us work hard for it, rather than someone willingly offering it. We don’t recognise it, because that’s unfamiliar to us, making us think, “There’s something missing here!”
This traps us in a vicious cycle wherein we offer everything you have, especially emotionally, and often all at once, in the desire to get the love we want. We also try to change the person into giving the love desired instead of reading the signs that convey this is not the person for us.
Abandonment
I was recently watching season six of Love is Blind on Netflix, a reality series where men and women form connections without seeing each other, get engaged, and spend time together to see if they are truly compatible. One of the contestants, Chelsea, caught my attention. She formed intense connections with two men on the show: Trevor, who was all in from the start, and Jimmy, who was unsure and formed a connection with another woman as well.
Eventually, both men proposed to Chelsea, but she chose Jimmy, feeling a huge sense of relief when he declared his love for her. However, as their relationship progressed, Chelsea’s constant need for reassurance from Jimmy that he loved her led to frequent conflicts and she gets visibly upset when he has a friendly conversation with another woman. When they moved in together, she was always hyper-alert about whether he kissed her today, turned towards her, or looked at her a certain way. She continued to challenge him that these little signs showed her that she couldn’t be sure about his commitment.
Mind you, Jimmy is not doing anything different, he’s the same as always. One day, during a fight, Jimmy tells her that he finds her clingy and Chelsea loses her temper and breaks down. Jimmy is so overwhelmed and confused hearing her say that she has been giving and giving to the relationship, that he has to leave home for the night. Although I had not even finished watching the show, I knew that Chelsea’s lifetrap was her deep-rooted sense of abandonment, which was constantly telling her: “People who love me can leave me anytime!”
Like Chelsea, people who grow up with a fear of abandonment usually come from households where caregivers are completely wrapped up in their own emotional drama such that their moods define how they meet the child’s need for love and security. On one hand, the child naturally loves feeling secure when love is provided, and parallelly, feels an intense anxiety that the feeling of being safe and secure may go away at any time. Growing up in an environment where unpredictability is high, and affection and a sense of security are either conditional and/or highly erratic, the child becomes good at reading people’s faces and body language cues to figure out what mood they are in. If the child learns to please people, it is to ensure that they are loved. However, the child carries a looming uncertainty about the feelings, which leads to the development of the fear of abandonment.
When she grows up and engages in romantic relationships, she finds it hard to believe her partner will stay. She keeps expecting to be abandoned at any time and finds it hard to trust a man’s commitment. So, when he seems distant, she sometimes clings to him for reassurance, and other times withdraws completely at a perceived rejection, thinking that he doesn’t want her and she shouldn’t give any more of herself. Therefore, she swings between wanting a deeper connection and protecting her fragile heart, ending up giving mixed signals to her partner, which, in turn, creates distance, making her think, “See, I knew it, he’s drifting away!”
Just like emotional deprivation, the fear of abandonment also draws people to partners more likely to make this prophecy come true – men who are not willing to commit, who are erratically available, or who make their love conditional. And once again, many women gravitate towards the same kind of men, because erratic and conditional love is what they are used to, and they can’t imagine anything better. Moreover, their nervous system is so conditioned to this chaotic attachment style that stable attachment from anyone feels “boring” or “suspicious”.
Self sacrifice
The third life trap I see in every single profile of someone caught in a toxic relationship pattern is self-sacrifice. This life trap states: “I will do everything in my power to make you happy because I love you.” On the surface, this looks like a noble thought to have. After all, haven’t we all been taught the virtues of sacrifice for love? But this life trap is a sneaky devil that also makes us extremely vulnerable to toxicity.
This schema develops in people who were made responsible for someone’s care as children. Either you had a sick parent whom you had to play caregiver for, or you had a parent whose emotions you had to take care of by either tiptoeing around their moods or by becoming their shoulder to cry on. It could also be that you had a sibling with challenges and were made to play the “bigger” person repeatedly to accommodate that sibling. All this was done while conditioning you to believe this was how you show love.
Remember how I had to constantly tiptoe around my mother’s erratic moods so I could avoid beatings? I also had to constantly “prove” my love to my parents by doing exactly what they wanted or by being exactly how they wanted me to be. This is the template I carried forward for all my subsequent relationships and I constantly tried to anticipate what they needed and tried to fulfil all their needs while ignoring my own. I had the self-sacrifice life trap, too. On a healthy level, we all go the extra mile for the people we love, and we do so willingly. But when it becomes a maladaptive schema or a life trap, which is an unconsciously ingrained survival coping strategy, it leads to self-destruction. There are two toxic traits that arise because of the self-sacrifice life trap.
First, they are so used to giving their all to make the other person happy that they never think about their own boundaries. They constantly put their own needs on the back burner in favour of their partner’s. In this manner, they teach their partners to put their needs second. After a while, when their cup runs empty, they try to bring their needs to the forefront, but their partners don’t acknowledge them because they have never seen these needs before.
Ordinarily, for someone without the self-sacrifice schema, this would be a sign to pause and figure out how to get their needs met. On the contrary, someone with the self-sacrifice schema thinks, Oh, let me give some more to this relationship … maybe then they will recognise my needs. They were already running on empty, now they have gone beyond it. However, nothing changes because they just give and give, not knowing how to say “enough” or draw boundaries. When this continues for a long time, they begin to resent the person they love for not meeting their needs, therefore acting out, rebelling, or lashing out. They still don’t know how to stop giving.
The second toxic trait of this schema is that they think they know better about what makes their partner happy and continue to do the things they feel are good for them, without often paying attention to what their partner needs.
We can be so caught up in our identity as the “giver” that we don’t even stop to take notice if the partner even wants what we are giving. You can also think of this as a love language clash. For instance, if your partner’s love language is physical touch, but yours is giving gifts, you may continue to buy them the most luxurious things to express your love, but if you aren’t engaging in physical affection or sexual intimacy, your partner will not feel loved. The self-sacrifice life trap suggests that the giver’s actions are superior.
This schema convinces the sacrificer that they know what will truly make others happy, but the recipients just fail to appreciate their efforts. This thought process leaves both partners unsatisfied because the receiver is not getting what they need to feel loved, and the giver is not getting acknowledged and seen for what they are giving because they are offering the wrong gifts. So, they get caught in this vicious cycle where the giver feels, “But what about all that I have done for you?” and the receiver wonders, “Did I even ask you to do that for me?”
Let me end this section with two very interesting facts about the self-sacrifice life trap. You would be shocked to know that even narcissists have self-sacrifice life traps in their profiles. Although many believe that narcissists are supposed to be the most selfish people alive, even they believe that they do everything for everyone and what they do for everyone is superior to what others do for them, and yet nobody appreciates them. Second, the higher the level of self-sacrifice schema in your profile, the more you’re likely to get attracted to a ‘taker’ or an entitled person who is used to taking everything given to them for granted. This further makes you doubly vulnerable to falling into a toxic relationship from the get-go.
You have now learnt how our early childhood experiences and their deeper emotional impact make us vulnerable to falling prey to toxic relationships and/or even enable toxic patterns to be repeated. We stay trapped in these patterns because:
We are not aware of its roots
We find safety in familiarity, so we avoid a relationship that’s likely to heal these wounds
We struggle with breaking the pattern and forming new habits
Excerpted with permission from When You Give Everything All at Once: The Indian Woman’s Guide to Navigating Toxic Relationships, Prachi Saxena, Hay House Publishers India.
