Beartrapper is the person who reaches out for help, support, assistance, or advice, and then refuses it, explaining that whatever you are proposing won’t work, didn’t work, or the situation is more complicated than you can even imagine. This is a lose/lose dynamic. Nothing will work. Things are truly hopeless, and the “helper” doesn’t understand how bad it is. These people are also called “help-rejecting complainers.” This syndrome is called “beartrapping” because the person soliciting help opens up a trap into which the helper with the best of intentions insert his foot. The trap is then closed on the foot, and the “bear” or helper feels trapped, annoyed, and becomes angry.
This is an example of the beartrapping conversation:
MARIE: Things are really bad.
CHÉRIE: Okay, maybe it is time to have a talk?
MARIE: Oh, he won’t talk! He ignores me every time I try.
CHÉRIE: Maybe you should write him a note, and leave it on his side of the bed?
MARIE: He throws them in the garbage unopened. He does it just to hurt me.
CHÉRIE: Why don’t you phone him at the office?
MARIE: His secretary knows my voice and won’t put me through to him.
CHÉRIE: What about sending him a registered letter?
MARIE: I’ve never tried that, but knowing him he’d refuse to receive it.
CHÉRIE: Tell him that you’ve set up an appointment with a mediator and you want him there.
MARIE: He’d just laugh at me, and he wouldn’t show up.
CHÉRIE: All right, if you can’t talk to him, or write to him, or call him, then why don’t you leave him?
MARIE: Because I don’t have any money. He controls all of the bank accounts and I have only grocery money. How far would that get me?
CHÉRIE: Why don’t you file for a divorce?
MARIE: Lawyers cost money and I don’t have any. The house is in his name and I would get nothing.
CHÉRIE: Sound like you’re stuck. I don’t know what to say
Every suggestion I gave to Marie was countered with a “Yeah-but” arguing for her limitations. She was asking for help, but in reality she was not willing to find a solution. This does not mean that she was being difficult. Her problems really seem hopeless to her.
Herald of Disaster
“We’re going to have a global financial collapse and there will be complete mayhem!” “I won’t be able to pay the rent, I’ll be evicted, and end up on the street, homeless.”
“I know she’s going to leave me, just like all the others. I’ll be abandoned and alone. That’s my lot in life; I’m just meant to be alone.” “With rising tides, global warming is going to be like Noah’s Ark and we will all die!” Disaster Negaholics anticipate tragedies, and calamities. They live in a state that imagines the worst that can happen.
Mary Alice is a good example, “California is going to fall into the ocean; the entire coastline is going to fall into the sea. You must move before the summer of 2020, or you will drown,” Mary Alice announced in a high-pitched tone.
Her latest calamity is that we will all die of cancer. She is predicting another earthquake. If disease, seismic activity, and financial ruin don’t destroy us, then a nuclear attack will be our demise. Mary Alice wants everyone to be prepared for all disasters, and she takes her job as a herald quite seriously.
Gloom and Doomer
A first cousin of Herald of Disaster is Gloom and Doomer. The difference between the two is that Heralds of Disaster is urgent, panicky, and focused on specific disastrous events. Gloom and Doomers have a hopeless tone to them. They are resigned to things being hopeless, helpless, and unalterable. They never become frantic or upset. In fact their reactions are flat. “It can’t be done, if it hasn’t been done before it isn’t going to happen now.” These are the people who told the Wright brothers, “If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings.” If you have a new invention, don’t tell one of them, because they will definitely throw dirt on your sparks.
Ernie was attempting to plan a last-minute promotion for his advertising company. After a stimulating brainstorming session, he thought of the perfect gift to launch the program.
“The aqua T-shirt with the white company logo printed on the front is the perfect way to end the program!” Ernie said triumphantly. “It’s too bad that we couldn’t pull it off. There is no way we could get those produced in one day. It’s just too bad that we didn’t think of this sooner.”
Right on the heels of his great idea were all the reasons why it couldn’t possibly happen. Ernie believed that either they wouldn’t have the quantity needed in stock, or the T-shirt colors wouldn’t be right, or they couldn’t imprint them in the limited time frame. He almost gave up on the idea before he tried to see if it was even possible. It wasn’t until his secretary grabbed the idea and ran with it and actually produced the T-shirts in less than six hours, that Ernie started to become a believer. The T-shirts happened in one day, however, Ernie’s attitude didn’t change that day. This was the beginning of Ernie starting to believe in making the seemingly impossible happen.
Self-Sabotage, or Shooting Yourself in the Foot
All four forms of Negaholism: attitudinal, behavioral, mental, and verbal have low self-esteem at their root and in various ways show self-sabotage; this is the unconscious thoughts and behaviors that get in your way so you can’t have what you truly want. Whenever a person engages in an activity that is self-sabotaging or self-deprecating, he is displaying Negaholic behaviors.
Shirley, an underwriter for an insurance company, aspires to become an officer in the company. She has a bad habit of gossiping about people she works with behind their backs. She has made so many enemies in the company that people don’t want to work for or with her because they don’t want information about themselves used against them. She says, “I don’t understand why, after being in the company for ten years and doing a better job that anyone else in the department, they don’t consider me for a promotion,” Shirley says incredulously. She simply doesn’t understand what she is doing to sabotage herself.
Very often an unconscious saboteur undermines the Negaholic’s intentions. Not waking up in time for a final exam, forgetting to pay your phone bill, running out of gas before an important appointment, leaving important papers on the plane, saying out too late the night before a client presentation and waking up with a hangover are subtle, and insidious ways to sabotage yourself.
If you are ready to break old habits and change the way you operate, then read on and discover how this condition became what it is today.
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How It All Happened
At this point you will either recognize yourself, or identify someone you know. We will now examine the anatomy of the Negaholic condition.
How did a nice person like you become like this? After all, you’re a nice person, you do your job, and you try not to hurt anyone. You’re considerate, responsible, appropriate and polite. So, you ask yourself, “How did this happen to me? How did I become this way?
The way you are today is a direct result of how you were parented, educated, and raised. The beliefs you have about your capability relate back to early childhood experiences, when you made decisions about yourself, then formulated beliefs about life, then unconsciously searched for evidence to validate those decisions and beliefs.
The voices in your head may say, “I had a wonderful childhood. My parents loved us children and provided everything for us. We all loved one another, and we had such good times.” All these comments may seem true to you, and in fact they very well may be, but there is a relationship between what happened then and how you are now.
It is normal to defend your parents, to argue that they did the best they could, given the circumstances, their pressures, and their restrictions. The hardest part of examining the origin of your Negaholism is coming to terms with the fact that your parents had a key role in the Negaholism that you developed.
Your parents may have been the model pare
nts to whom you compared yourself and never measured up. You may feel as if you fall short of your expectations. Maybe they only wanted the best for you, and set such high standards in hopes that you would live up to their expectations. As a result, you may have turned out to be your own worst critic, driving yourself relentlessly to produce and perform in order to gain the respect and approval that you always deeply wanted.
Your parents may have been warm and loving toward you, and you may have developed guilt feelings for having such great parents when your friends were raised by less desirable parents, in difficult circumstances. Maybe your parents, with the best of intentions, passed on to you their own limiting beliefs regarding life; their beliefs may have been true in their day, but may be inaccurate today. What if they were stressed at times and took their frustrations out on you? You, in turn, may have internalized their outbursts as your fault and blamed yourself for their actions. What if one or both of your parents or caretakers were ill, or an alcoholic? You may have felt responsible for their behavior and believed that the way you were flawed.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether your parents were wonderful, average, or dreadful. The end result is the same. If you are Negaholic, you formed a set of self-protective decisions and beliefs that reinforced the fact that “You couldn’t, you shouldn’t, and mustn’t be who you are, do what your heart tells you, or have everything in life that you desire.” These are the seedlings of Negaholism, which when nourished and fertilized grow into an adult self-concept. In silent, subtle moments of internal decision-making, you chose to mistrust your own inner sense of rightness.
I have worked with individuals who have come from extremely abusive homes with those who were raised in apple-pie “Happy” or “Perfect” families. Negaholism is still present. The main difference is the degree to which the “I cant’s” are in the driver’s seat.
But where do the “I cant’s” originate? How do they become imprinted? When do we internalize them as our own? Why do we do this? These are good questions and deserve a thoughtful response, but first it is essential that the issue of loyalty be addressed.
Loyalty Above All Else
Your parents brought you into the world. They gave you life, and nourished you so that you grew into who you are today. They are key people in the formation of your identity, your self-concept, and your orientation to the world. You have them to thank and to blame for how you turned out; they probably did the very best they could, given the information and the tools that were available to them at the time.
Unfortunately, parenting is a role for which we are ill prepared and untrained. For the most part, your parents raised you in much the same way that they themselves were parented. The legacy becomes passed down from generation to generation. Right or wrong, we hand down our psychological “parenting” in much the same way as we pass on family photographs, linens, heirlooms, and china. With photographs, you can draw your own conclusions. With psychological baggage, you usually inherit or construct a skewed picture of reality.
It may sound similar to this: “My parents were so wonderful. They scrimped and saved and went without so that we could have an education and a roof over our heads. My mother lived for us, and did everything for us.” Now this may be true, but there may be ways in which it backfired. Perhaps you took on the guilt for their “going without” in order to provide for you. Perhaps you drive yourself relentlessly in order to justify all the sacrifice and suffering that they experienced. Maybe you even decided that you were the cause of their pain and hardship. Whatever the outcome, it is rare that you would end up without any trace of Negaholism.
Part of being a child is the inheritance of a set of assumptions that underline all our perceptions about our families. The characteristics I am referring to appear to be so natural that we don’t even perceive them as tendencies. The basic assumptions that block your ability to discern the origin of your Negaholism are…
An Unconscious Loyalty Toward Your Parents
You have an innate loyalty toward your parents because they are who they are. No matter how well or how poorly your parents treated you your innate loyalty toward your family overrides everything.
Karen came in for a coaching session to find out which career she wanted to pursue. As we probed her likes and dislikes, her wants and dreams, she drew much of her information from childhood experiences, which is quite normal. During the conversation, clues began to leak out which were contrary to the ideal family picture she had previously recounted. The reality was antithetical to her rose-colored view. In fact, both her parents had been alcoholics; she was physically and mentally abused by her mother and her sister; and no real, honest communication ever took place in her home.
Selective Amnesia
Regarding Past Incidents
As a result of loyalty towards your family, you may have blocked hurt feelings, painful incidents, and/or traumatic memories from the past. Your survival mechanism probably has skillfully edited out those experiences that flawed your ideal picture and made it impossible to be integrated into your happy family fantasy scenario.
To talk with Karen, you would never suspect that anything was awry, since she had constructed her life story from her heart’s desires and not from the reality of the situation. Karen was not lying; she had unconsciously and selectively stored in her mind only those incidents that were happy memories.
Karen’s coping mechanisms ceased when she stopped smoking, an activity that served as the glue holding the pieces of the picture together. It was very difficult for Karen to come to terms with the fact that her unconscious loyalty toward her family had overridden the reality of the actual situation.
Her mother was extremely proud of the fact that people could come to visit any time, day or night, and never know that she had five children. The children were always out of sight, engaged in some quiet, neat activity, and the house was always in perfect order. Her mother placed a high priority on order and silence. She didn’t anticipate that such a highly controlled and ordered environment could affect the development of the children. As it turned out, of the five siblings in Karen’s family, one committed suicide, one is in a mental institution, one refused ever to leave home, and one is an alcoholic. Karen herself married an alcoholic, subsequently got divorced, and is struggling to cope with life as best she can. None of the siblings have children of their own, and probably never will.
Rose-Colored Glasses
Are Used in Hindsight
Psychologically speaking, you put on rose-colored glasses in order to see the past in the best possible light. Incidents are recalled that give your parents the benefit of the doubt, at times skewing the facts, justifying and explaining your parents’ behavior so that the past fits within the fantasy scenario that you have skillfully constructed.
On the exterior, Karen, a thirty-seven-year-old-women, is happy, motivated, cheerful, fun-loving, competent, open, and a thoroughly delightful person to have around. To talk to her, you would think that she had a perfect childhood. She would describe her parents and four siblings as loving, happy, and wonderful people. She had great memories of summer vacations and fishing trips during childhood. She loved her family and wanted them all to be happy. Karen had painted a rosy picture of her life not because she was fabricating the past, but rather because she made the best of everything in order to survive, and found a way to keep her spirit alive by being cheerful and happy no matter what. When sad feelings would surface, specifically around the issue of relationships, Karen would put on her happy face and simply forge ahead.
Your True Feelings Were
Often Denied or Suppressed
In order for you to survive, function, and integrate into your family and society, it was necessary for you to deny, suppress, and sublimate those feelings that were deemed unacceptable. Many feelings were probably declared offensive, and, appropriately, you sought euphemistic ways of dealing with them. They were avoided altogether, denied, or completely suppressed.
A
t the urging of her doctor, Karen finally stopped smoking. When she did, she realized how difficult it was to continue suppressing her feelings. She discovered underneath the deep inhalations some old unresolved feelings that she eclipsed by smoking. Without the smoking mechanism to anesthetize her feelings, she started to feel edgy, nervous, and fearful. She would wake up in the morning feeling anxious and resist getting out of bed. She didn’t know what was going on with her, and was fearful that something was seriously wrong. She started feeling irritable and cranky. She began to feel disoriented and had difficulty figuring out what she liked or wanted. She went out with friends who would ask her offhandedly, “What do you want to do?” or “What do you want to eat?” Her response more often than not was “I don’t know. What do you want?” out of touch with her feelings and her wants, she would defer to others. She sought to be accommodating and acquiescent, and became resentful later when she didn’t have a good time.
After several sessions, Karen began to listen to her own words, to own the painful reality that she had previously denied, and to come to terms with the truth she had been unwilling to deal with. Her commitment to having a healthy and happy life enabled her to face the truth, own the past, and embark on the road to recovery.
These basic assumptions helped Karen survive childhood and adolescence. Karen is not alone in this. Many of us have inherited these same assumptions about those who
raised us. What complicates matters is that this veil of assumptions is not flawless, but moth-eaten and filled with holes. These holes allow pieces of undesirable facts from the past that confuse the rose-colored picture to pass through the scrim.
We all find ways to put on rose-colored glasses and make the unpleasant realities of life melt away. It is one of our ways of coping with painful realities that we can’t handle. Our coping mechanisms are different, but the end result is the same.
I understood Karen’s situation, and I felt I could relate to her denial. I grew up in the United States where I spent countless hours watching “perfect families” on TV relate to each other in ideal ways. I dreamed of being Betty in Father Knows Best , or having Donna Reed for my mother. I even fantasized about marrying one of My Three Sons. My home wasn’t fun, and when I wasn’t lost in my dollhouse playing all the various parts, I was in search of the perfect family to show me what a functional family looked like. By watching these perfect families on TV, I believed that they existed and this world of make-believe was much more appealing than my reality.
Negaholics Page 4