Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthough Program to End Negative Behavior...and Feel Great Again Kindle Edition

I have been suicidally depressed since I was five years old. I have spent 40 years in therapy and I am on a cocktail of meds. I have had ECT treatments with varying success. I was ready to give up on therapy and possible pay for deep brain stimulation with my 401(k) money (my idea; My psychiatrist was not enthusiastic about the idea.).Then I found this book. It all seems familiar. There is nothing radical in it, but seeing things presented as lifetraps (schemas) allowed me to see myself in a new way. I recognized myself in the subjugation lifetrap. As difficult as it was I started to assert myself, to ask for help and be honest with myself about my own passive-aggressiveness and the symptoms of my depression started lifting! As soon as I was manipulated into doing something I didn't want to do, I could feel the depression symptoms returning. I later told that person I would not be able to help after all and the depression symptoms lifted again.I am looking forward to finding myself in some of the other lifetraps.This book is not a cure. I still have bipolar disorder and I still take meds. However, I consider this book to have been an important piece of my progress toward a more normal life.

I am a masters in counseling student and purchased this book to use with clients in my internship. I absolutely recommend this book to all counselors and anyone who just wants to learn more about themselves and make their lives better. The book is based on Schema therapy and breaks down the original 200-some question assessment for schemas. The first few chapters explain what schema therapy is and how it works. It has a 22 question inventory to determine what schemas you may relate to. Then, you can skip to the chapters of those schemas to learn more. In those later chapters, there are more indepth questions about each schema to determine the severity of that schema for you individually. This seems much more valid than the original phq schema assessment. The text is very readable and understandable. The schema chapters include exercises and examples to help readers to evaluate themselves and decrease the effect of their personal schema.The packaging was very nice and the book came very quickly. Highly recommend this book and this seller!!

Reinventing Your Life is an insightful book that can help one to determine self destructive patterns that may have emerged in early childhood and continue to cause havoc in your adult life. The different "lifetraps" as the author calls them are poor behavioral patterns that an adult can get stuck repeating, which can lead to absolute misery in relationships, work, and family life. There is a test early in the book to help you determine which lifetraps may apply to you, and then a chapter devoted to each of them that goes into further detail. Overall, I liked the book. I gained some insight into some of my own negative behavior patterns, and it certainly gave me some things to think about as far as relationships! With a foreword by renowned psychiatrist Aaron Beck, the book held great promise for insightful psychological breakthrough. I enjoyed reading about the different lifetrap patterns and how each could be unknowingly cultivated in a child by parents who are either absent, addicted, or well meaning and just uneducated. Young and Klosko go into great detail of childhood origins of each behavior pattern, giving examples of each and an anecdotal story of how some of their patients (of course with privacy protected) learned to overcome the self defeating behavior. The book was an easy read, used little medical jargon that was not well explained to the layperson, and will get you thinking. All that being said, there were some negative points, as to why I felt it only earned 4 stars. For starters, the information can be somewhat dated. The book has a copyright of 1993, so some of the interactions and anecdotes are not as applicable to the current world. That in of itself, however, is a minor flaw. The biggest issue I had with the book was the fact that there were just not enough time and words spent on how to fix the behaviors and how long that was going to take the average person. While a list of steps to take to remedy the behavior was presented with some explanation, I felt that wasn't enough to really assist a person in making drastic changes in thinking and interaction patterns without a professional therapist to assist. Therapy is great, but the point of a self help book is to help yourself, so they could have spent some more time explaining just how to implement these recovery steps and give more detail into how each of the examples did so in their lives. Compared to the amount of information provided on childhood origins (which provide great insight, but that is only half the battle), I think the implementation of change sections were lacking. In the end, I do recommend the book for use with your therapist in helping to determine and solve some self defeating behavior. I'm a huge fan of education and self improvement, so if you enjoy the same, this book might be worth your time to check out.

This is brilliant work. It is easy to read, there are interesting examples of all nine schema (the filters you see your life through) and the "how to" chapter offers the diligent a way to work through behaviors that no longer serve you. The reader must make the commitment to complete the exercises and be willing to get assistance when the going gets tough, but the tools are here to help you understand and accept yourself and make healthy choices.I have shared the book with numerous friends and family members. The feedback has been positive and what people tell me again and again is that the book gave them hope...hope of conquering behaviors that interfered with relationships, career advancement, handling money prudently. It is very powerful, so if you want to feel better about yourself and you've been wondering how to make that happen, give this book a try. I am confident you will feel you got your money's worth.

Easy to follow step by step book with exercises and quizzes to doHelps identify unconscious behaviors that are blocking progress in your life and solutions, practices to change the behaviorsNot hokey not a quick fixVery valuable if your really interested in understanding why the same things keep going wrong in your lifeI was recommended this by my therapist and we worked through it together, but it's entirely possible to do it yourself

My therapist told me to buy this my first day with her. Awesome book. So helpful. I've only worked on one schema but it has been a huge help in fixing my relationship with my kid. It helped me realize how critical I am due to my own issues

I had a really bad 2014 and made some really stupid decisions and upset a LOT of people in the process. Issues had been bubbling under the surface all my life (i cared for after a terminally ill parent since I was a child) but had started to take over my mind from 40 - 44 as I matured and start to discover myself - and confuse myself in the process. I have to say I have never been happy with "ME" and always felt like something was missing in life. Even though I dragged myself up from stacking super market shelves to running a very successful business - I never felt happy with my achievements.This book really has changed my life! I have never understood myself, and have never understood what makes me tick, what makes me do the things I do, and behave in the way I do. I often got into situations and then got frustrated and unhappy as a result.This book has helped me unravel ALL of my life from the day I was born. It has helped me piece together so many different aspects, to the point where I was able to sum up my life in a short 1000 word essay and completely discover who I was.I didn't read chapter one of this book, I was a bit impatient so went to straight to chapter 2 - the quiz. Out of 11 of the lifetraps - 8 of them were problems for me. Ouch!I then read chapters 3,4,5 to understand more about lifetraps in general and how we respond to them. Fascinating insight in to my life already. I then did the longer questionnaires for the 8 potential lifetraps and whittled it down to 5 confirmed lifetraps. I then set about reading just these 5 chapters. I would NOT recommend you jump into this book without first doing the test in chapter 2 and working out your lifetraps - this is really important.I have to say that reading these chapters was like reading a biography - it was ME - in a book!! It was a very emotional time. Not only did the book tell me about the lifetraps but it provided me with practical advice on how to stop them controlling my life.This book - in combination with reaching the lowest point in my life at the end of 2014 has been a revelation and I cannot praise it enough. Buy it.

This book was highly recommended to me by my Psychologist. It is a BRILLIANT book. You read it and BAM "that's me" ,"that's sooooo like me", "That's exactly what I have done" all the way through. I find it hard to read much at a time though - because it hits so many nails on the head and can feel a bit raw at times. Somewhere it mentions if bits are too hard then to work through some of your revelations with a therapist. Very good idea. Otherwise you would end up identifying your problems, TRYING to solve them with the books ideas but maybe not totally succeeding. Incredibly good, insightful, self help book. Found the american-isms & terminology tricky at first, but you get used to it. Amazing how he has turned what could have been a good - but dry, dusty academic text book - into real human situations. It is definitely helping me be less of a sadgirl! Thanks Jeffrey x

This book is incredibly in depth and well written. In the simplest of terms it unravels the most complex and troubling parts of ourselves. It has helped me understand myself so much better, but it has also given me an intimate understanding of the people around me. I can not recommend this book enough. It won't just change your life, it will change your world.My abusive ex partner borrowed the book after me. After reading the first few chapters, he has taken it upon himself to calculate how much money he stole from me over the years, and has taken a second job to pay it back. He apologized for the way he treated me when I was with him, and for the first time I see genuine empathy and emotional connection in his eyes. We have been broken up for 1.5 years, and in that time he was unable to connect with to anyone, let alone me. While the book didn't come in time to save that relationship, it may have at least saved his self worth, and prevented him from victimizing anyone else in the way he hurt me. This is such a powerful book.

I was advised to buy this book by my psychotherapist - though I've not yet read through the relevant chapters which apply to myself I can already see that I have many of the lifetraps (or maladaptive schemas) outlined in the text. After living with depression, feeling like an outsider, having various problems and being rather lonely for many years I've finally discovered that much of how I think and behave has originated from how I was parented and dates from the earliest years of my childhood. To say that this has been a revelation is something of an understatement; I've found myself going 'yes, I'm just like that; yes that's me' as the authors discuss several patient case studies; my earliest years had become something of a blank in my memory and I'd always felt there was something of a void in my life and now I know why. The book has a number of short questionnaires that enable the reader to determine which lifetraps apply and each lifetrap is then described in detail with advice on how to deal with it and overcome the associated problems; as such the book offers a route for self-help although those with deep issues might need the assistance of a professional therapist. There are several Internet sites which deal with Schema Therapy, such as author Jeffrey Young's Schema Therapy Institute http://www.schematherapy.com/id201.htm and another run by psychotherapist Shari Schreiber which has lots of useful information, particularly concerning Borderline Personality Disorder. On the subject of personality disorders (or PDs); schema therapy is especially useful in the treatment of these because it appears that most PDs have origins in early childhood and it's this area that receives attention in Young and Klosko's book.

The authors give clear information on what they see as the causes and effects of different problem behaviours and suggestions on how to live with someone exhibiting those patterns of behaviour. Plenty of case histories and examples. The authors don't use labels or over technical language, which may be helpful to a reader not familiar with psychology, but there may be an over optimism around the management of damaging behaviour patterns such as personality disorders. But a readable book with much interesting material.