Cognitive Analytic Therapy - Traps, snags and dilemmas revisited and briefly explained in 2024

Might be good to briefly talk through what this post aims to inform the reader of, have added a possible suggestion...

Having delivered CAT training all over the world for the past two decades I believe that its core conceptions of Traps, Snags and dilemmas are as important as ever and may help us navigate the increasingly complex relationships we have with each other and the world. There is, of course, a chance that I am falling into a trap of bias towards this model that I know so well however I believe and intend to highlight that the tools of CAT allow for a reflexive capacity to bring such bias to our awareness.

I use the tools of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) to make word maps of our conversations. I say it will help me listen.  It will also scaffold and shape a therapy journey. The process of mapping is intuitive, of the moment and messy. The essential idea is to put the keywords of a conversation on paper in front of us to echo and amplify the conversation developing between us. The words are put down here and there in a non-linear way. I have found it crucial in my teaching of many thousands(is thousands a bit grand?? i suppose it is but also its true) of people to map and talk that the first goal is the confidence to put words down. It forms the basis of mapping and will help us keep track and help us build a listening and exploring conversational relationship.

We learn how and what to feel in our early years with parents, carers and siblings at home, at school, and in the playground.  In CAT we have a simplified way of getting to the heart of this complex and often buried early experience. We identify on paper emotional roles that were central to our primary relationship and which we took upon ourselves or seeped into us to become how we saw then and see now and feel the world. They are called reciprocal roles in CAT to highlight how the emotional tone and social agenda of what others do to us we do to ourselves and pass forward on to others. The part reciprocal roles play in the language and methods of CAT is described in a paper which can be downloaded from this site. Reciprocal roles: the mother of all ideas

To put it another way, we tend to repeat the dances in ourselves that our parents, our teachers and our brothers and sisters did with us and as we do them, we learn the music and make the steps our own. It is a process of interpersonal internalisation and reproduction and for better or worse these become the only dances we know, and we find and maintain a sense of who we are through them. They are our attachment and identity solutions. They can be freeing, liberating and validating or they can be hurtful, restrictive and disorganising of our sense of self and others. Or more often than not we can appreciate they are a confusing mix of both.

When mapping out as we talk, we are trying to reconnect with the early experience of these powerful emotional roles and see how they shaped the narratives we lived by in the present as well as in the past. We map them out as a call and response or push and pull between a top action or doing end and a bottom feeling or done to end as in the ‘Doing and Feeling’ layout in Figures 1 and 2 below. We take care to map from inside the real and remembered experience of specific stories so as to help the story and its narratives be visible. Mostly we are made of several connected or contrasting and conflicting emotional roles. Sometimes the emotional roles are obvious ones to us like striving to please demanding and loving parents and only feeling loved if achieving and meeting their demands. But often the emotional roles are buried deep in the past and we begin to know them indirectly from the surface of our behaviour or through our patterns of coping with ourselves and managing others. We can open a journey of exploration with them with the aid of words on paper in the form of a map or diagram. Learning to do this together is the bread and butter of CAT therapy. We summarise these everyday coping patterns as the steps within and between the emotional roles we play. We call them traps, snags and dilemmas.

A trap describes a narrow way of thinking that works along the lines of ‘I can cope with these feelings or this situation but 'only If I think more narrowly like this.’ For example, if I am feeling hurt because of feelings of neglect then a trap might be to think that only if I am pleasing and attentive to others will I be okay. The trap leads to a narrow range of responses and in pleasing others I may be adding self-neglect to the feeling of neglect from others. A trap is like an attempt to escape a difficult situation that keeps us stuck in it by thinking about ourselves in the same narrow way others are thinking or seem to be thinking about us. They are like a self-defeating circle wherein we end up at the doing end or the feeling end (Fig 1) or pinball between both. We hang on to such a pattern because it is the

pattern (dance - narrative) we were immersed in as children, and it is a kind of attachment solution for our identity as the familiar way we know ourselves to be with others. Traps have an inner push and an outer pull almost addictive and habitual quality like having a cup of tea in the morning and it is curious that when we are reflecting on our own, they don’t seem so compelling but when interacting with others we find ourselves doing them as if on autopilot.  It is as if the pattern is magnetically tied into our ways of relating. This emphasis on the context to how we act as individuals is important. We follow patterns such as traps because they are the narratives that others expect to know us by and recruit us into on the one hand and hw e expect them to position us on the other hand.

So, traps are maintained because they partly work to give us an emotional identity – for example in the pleasing others trap I see myself as a nice person. In mapping out one or more traps about our ways of giving meaning to how we relate and respond the aim is not to blame or shame ourselves or try to get rid of the trap but to be compassionate towards the history behind it; and the context around it; and find shifts in changing its weight or intensity; or finding alternatives to it; and ways of out of it before it kicks in.  The emphasis in CAT is not just on the thinking part but on the interactive whole of the pattern.  It is not so much saying change your thinking but see the whole dance and change your relationship with the dance and the thinking will change.

I have a simple rule for traps which is dont go ahead to head with them A trap is a simplified narrative of relating that we can hold in mind across several stories and situations. It helps to write the trap out in a single sentence from the map. It can tease out how we live our lives in different places and times.

A dilemma is a pinball behavioural choice of Either Or: either this behaviour or that behaviour. If I am feeling hurt either I speak up and cause trouble or I stay quiet, keep out of trouble but remain hurt. Both behaviours seem to come back to restrict me and hit me

emotionally. Or I pinball between two behaviours coloured by gender, class, culture and ethnicity or accent as in as a girl either I speak up and get silenced as loud and shouty or a I stay quiet and am seen as sweet but have no voice of my own. Or as a boy I act tough and get excused and indulged as just like a boy or I show tenderness and am seen as soft and judged as weak. In these examples as in figure 2 there is no middle way, and the therapeutic and reflective conversation is a chance to discover middle ways and be open to the social forces behind the split and divided behaviour.

Dilemmas can define our group membership and our inner world in binary ways and give rise to attitudes of prejudice and racism as in either we are in this group and behave like this in ways that are superior, or you are in that group and behave in ways that we judge as inferior and other than us. One option may be dominant and normal as my way of relating because early on in life I learnt by the rules of gender or class or ethnicity or disability to never opt for one of the behaviours. For example, always being polite because it was not safe to get noisy or angry. The forbidden or buried side of the dilemma can be a ghost role or behaviour which we know the steps to its dance but have long denied it as part of who we are. A dilemma in later life might be either I am pleasant and cheerful and easy to look after but then, as a result, I am dull - and ignored as boring, or I am interesting, but stubborn and disagreeable and a pain to care for. When we wish to assert ourselves or stick up for ourselves the idea of being stubborn and disagreeable in the eyes of others may haunt us and ghost us into keeping quiet. These ghost roles are easier to rework and understand by mapping them out.

To summarise, dilemmas are habitual lines of behaviour or action and are usefully mapped out as patterns that we carry within us as fixed narratives from the past but that are also narratives in our culture and in the organisation of society. If we can map these out with compassion and curiosity together – especially if we are in helping and caring roles or as neighbours, we can find alternative behaviours in the middle group between and outside the pinball effect of either doing this or doing that.

Finally in CAT there is the idea of the Snag (fig.3) as a pattern of relating to self and society that is

driven by a YES, BUT. I am doing okay and getting my needs met but something or someone will pop up to disallow or block me. For example, I am making progress in getting the care and treatment I need, YES. BUT you are jumping the queue, or you are neglecting the grandchildren. Or I am offering to help with the family and the grandchildren YES. BUT we don’t want you to overdo it. The yes but is like a block or glass ceiling that comes from within or from society’s prejudices or values and stops something helpful or worthwhile in its tracks. These can be lifelong narratives that haunt us: Yes, but girls or boys don’t do that. Yes, but you were not very good at drawing at primary school so don’t try that painting class.  Yes, it would be lovely to visit cousins and reminisce, but old people don’t gad about or make a fuss.

When we map and talk our words on paper and our diagrams are messy, regardless of how many times we have done it. We scribble and scrawl our words to keep up with and in tune with the conversation. However, the templates are useful to have in mind as neat versions that might guide us and help us tidy up a messy map and make new connections.