LifeCourse Institute of Adlerian Psychology
"LEAP On Line" . . . to explore and change your limiting Life Patterns

Three questions:
Question # 1

If childhood was the foundation for your life, what size is the house you've built on it since?

Chances are, in many ways, it is child-size, more like a play-house than the size house an adult would live in. Because chld-size is the only size a child can imagine!

But you can imagine larger now than you did then! You don't need to live as an adult in a childhood-size house. It can be as big as a you can imagine it to be. Don't limit yourself to what a little child could imagine!

Question # 2

I hope I'm not being too personal here: Do you still wear the clothes you wore when you were a child?

Of course you don't! You know better! Such a smart person! And so good looking too! Of course childhood's clothes are too small for you now!

Yet this smart person still tries to manage adult life based on small childhood experiences and ideas.

If childhood clothes are too small for you now, are not the child's ways of managing childhood too small for your life today?

Question # 3

You're in a car speeding along a busy highway. It wanders from lane to lane; drivers honk and make angry gestures as they pass. But you are not driving! You look  at the driver and it is YOU when you were 5 years old! You become aware that your life is in the hands of a child who hasn't even started first grade yet!

Do you want a 5-year-old child running your life? A child deciding what's important? A child deciding where you are going, and how far, in your life?

A child making the  decisions in your adult life:
* whom you will marry?
* how you will raise your kids?
* how you will vote?
* your goals and dreams?
* how to solve problems?
* how far to go and when to quit?
* what books or movies or TV shows you like or hate?
* your hobbies and interests?
Until you change child-thinking to adult-thinking, the child inside runs everything right now!

There are ten major LifeCourse Patterns, briefly defined below. As you see, they are not mysterious, and certainly not part of some "secret psychological knowledge" known only to certain privileged people! (In fact, if you have a counselor who won't explain what he or she does or why she or he is doing it...you do best to move on

The LifeCourse Patterns are familiar because they are part of every human being in the world. The point is not that they're familiar or unfamiliar...but are they serving good purposes in your life right now???

For example: When we explore your Background Patterns we look at ways your family influenced you right from the beginning of your life, and how they guided you in certain directions or away from other things. What do you do or not do today because of family influence? What kind of person have you married? What kind of job do you have? How do you raise your own children? What language do you speak? How do you vote? What religion are you? What is the atmosphere in your home today, compared with what it was like when you were a child? So much was present to influence you when you were born. You don't sit down and think about it (until you take LEAP!) but how different would your life be today without your family's influences then? And so we begin by looking at . . .

Background Patterns -- These are influences on you from before you were born. They are what shapes you by your family and its ways: genetics/heredity, family morality and values, family attitudes about religion, politics, education, holidays, work, etc. (and your reactions to those attitudes), your family's "motto" or "prescription for living," your family's basic "atmosphere" (and how you repeat or reject it in your own family today).

Beginning Patterns -- These are your parents' examples of what it means to be a mother and father, husband and wife, male and female, providers, mature grown-ups and adults. Today, in your own family, you repeat your parents' roles, or perhaps you reject how your parents played those roles in favor of some other ways, perhaps top rebel, or to be independent, or just to be creative in how you play the role of parent, or partner, or person.

Birth Order Patterns -- This involves both sibling numerical birth order (first, second or middle, last, only) and sibling psycho-social positions based on sex, handicaps/illnesses, interests, skills, comparisons, "ghost siblings," and more. You continue aspects of your sibling positions today with friends, partner, at work, etc., repeating your childhood position among your siblings but now with friends, partner, co-workers, boss, etc.

Boyhood/Girlhood Patterns -- By the time you started first grade you had experienced more than 2102400 * events, including: favorite stories, movies, TV/radio programs; heroes and heroines; pets; choices; books; imaginary friend; games; play/playmates; family events such as circus, vacations, holidays, relative visits, shopping, etc.; first day of school; grade school; high school; six specific early recollections (ERs); dreams and nightmares, and more. Here we look for general themes you repeat as an adult today.
* Six years: 2190 days x 16 waking hours x 60 minutes per hour =  2,102,400 events at only one per minute. Of course there were many more per minute...but hey, who's counting?)

Belonging Patterns -- These Patterns involve six ways you tried to be significant or feel important in your family, especially your parents. You had six goals in mind: affection, attention, approval, control, fairness, and help. You did specific things to gain each goal. And today, you still do those things to gain the same goals in your family, at work, among your friends, or in groups you belong to.  Success led (and leads) you to feel encouraged and hopeful, while failure led (and leads) you to feel discouraged and hopeless.

Behaving Patterns -- The important Event-Belief-Response cycle you use to make sense of, and respond to, everything that happens to you. (The cycle is "hard-wired" into each of us, perhaps into all living creatures.) We use it to understand everything every moment of our lives from beginning to end. Some clients have said that learning to use the E-B-R Cycle was worth the cost of LEAP all by itself!

Believing Patterns -- Here we look at six Early Recollections (ERs) (specific childhood memories) that have come to stand for some basic belief. Such beliefs are basic Truths about yourself, others, and the world. Basic then, they are basic now. You could not imagine your life without these fundamental Beliefs!

Bewildering Patterns -- Of the many ways you go astray on life's road, we look at three very important ones: Your self-defeating behaviors, Your Private Logic; and your Mistaken Mission in life (which is to solve The Problem your couldn't solve as a child, and MUST solve as an adult!)

Being Patterns -- Idealized mental images of your Self, your partner, parent, child, job, etc. You use them as ways to know how you are doing in life, and how close your ideals come to reality. Results include happiness and satisfaction, as well as disappointment, motivation to improve or change, etc.

Becoming Patterns -- We look at ways you used as a child to solve problems, make decisions, set and seek goals, etc., and how you still use them today in much the same ways...thus limiting yourself to what you understood about life as a four-year-old!

(MAP) Master Action Pattern  -- Your MAP is all your Patterns together, forming the "atlas" that guides your entire life. This is our interpretation of Adler's concept of the individual's Life Style, in which the Solution to The Problem becomes the guiding goal and the guiding line of the person's life, appearing like a graph-of-life.

Practice Task -- This is a problem, decision, question, or other issue in your life right now, to use in applying what you learn about each Pattern. For the last 15 minutes of each session you apply Pattern-learning here, the "counseling" part of LEAP, for a total of about 2 1/2 hours. Many people find that the Practice Task resolves their problem, and more quickly than regular counseling. (Others may continue counseling with me at a fee of $100 for 3 1-hour sessions. This is the same fee as for LEAP. Such counseling takes advantage of what has been learned in the ten LEAP sessions, and is therefore "Adlerian-based" counseling.