Do You Self-Sabotage?
First Answer to that question for most is No, Way.. Why would I do that? But do you know what Self-sabotage is? I discovered that most of us don’t even know what is really is or how it manifests in our lives.
A few examples of what it looks like or manifest in our lives are as such:
Do you seem to be held back from things you want to have in your life? Do you seem to have obstacles in having a healthy relationship and/or do you pick fights when there is no real issue? Are you able to consistently able to reach your career goals or health goals? Do you put things off or avoid them? Do you procrastinate? Do you overeat or have trouble sticking to an exercise plan? Do you numb yourself with alcohol or drugs? Or with excessive social media, instagram, or do you netflix and chill to the max (like I used to)?
Self Sabotage is when we have things in our lives that are important to use but we subconsciously or semi-consciously prevent ourselves from from getting or having them. So why do we do it. There are 5 common reasons although there are other ones, which are
Sense of Self-Congruence or Cognitive Dissonance
Idea of The Glass Ceiling
Vulnerability Avoidance
Imposter Phenomenon
Ego Protection
SELF-CONGRUENCE / COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
What we feel on the inside is often how we play out our lives on the outside. If the outside is not congruent with what you feel on the inside, what we do is subconsciously or semi-consciously do things to bring into alignment what we truly believe about ourselves or what we are truly feeling. So if things are going great in our lives, it is usually not changing our beliefs albeit to the happy and great stuff going on in our life, instead we destroy, sabotage, or ruin those things to meet how we really truly feel on the inside; feeling unworthy of love, success, reaching our goals and being healthy and strong. If you do not truly feel or believe in your heart that you are worthy of those things or that you deserve them your behaviour will change whatever is going on to match hence make your feelings and your life congruent.
You could be the most motivated, ambitious, make it happen, go-getter type individual and may and will start various projects. But then part way through you give up, procrastinate, you make excuses, or start doing things to ruin it. In essence you don’t believe you deserve it so you ruin whatever is on the outside to match how you truly feel on the inside.
GLASS CEILING
Imagine a Box but with a glass ceiling. You allow yourself to roam freeling in this space as long as it’s inside of the box. However, you don’t go above the ceiling of the box nor do you allow yourself to go below, just all around and all about, as long as it’s in the confines of this box that says who you are, what you are allowed, and what you deserve.
When you get too close to the top, you stop yourself. You start telling yourself, “this is as far as I can go. I can’t have too much. I can’t get too big for my britches, I can’t be too happy.” It's as if we put a limit on how far we can go and then we start to think, It’s too much; I don’t deserve this, I need to bring myself back down to reality… just so we can stay in our box, our comfort zone.
Alternatively, when we you go down, you won’t let yourself get to the bottom, but instead you will bring yourself back up telling yourself now that you deserve it, but… only so much happiness, only so much success, a little healthier, or just enough love.
VULNERABILITY AVOIDANCE
Sometimes having success, fulfilling goals, reaching milestones, and having the things in life that are really important to us means we have to take risks and put ourselves out there. And putting ourselves out there means putting ourselves in situations where we don’t have total control.
This is the hard part, because we are human and are naturally control freaks and control addicts. We feel safe when we are in control. But most often getting what we want means going through things in our lives so that we can achieve those things that are meaningful, fulfilling, and important to us. However taking risks, doing things that are outside of our control and going outside of our comfort zone makes us feel vulnerable. And we don't want to put ourselves out there because we are scared of getting hurt, scared of discomfort, or scared that it might not work out and scared that we might look stupid, and then we would have to deal with that pain.
We say we want these things but then we are not willing to take the risk; Or our subconscious mind kicks in and helps us along by saying things like… you might get hurt, things might not work out, it may be uncomfortable, it’s too difficult or it’s too complicated (they doing too much). It even warns us.. Don't do it; step back and bring yourself back down a notch. It is all related to this fear of vulnerability. But this fear keeps us stuck in this repeating cycle.
Imposter Syndrome or Phenomena.
Next is the Imposter syndrome or imposter phenomenon. As we rise higher and start reaching our goals and it starts looking like we're having a healthy relationship or having more success and reaching our goals, we sometimes start to feel like we are under a lot of pressure and then it all starts again. We start telling ourselves, “I don't deserve this; I'm not worthy of this; it’s too much.” The big one is, “What are people going to think? It's only a matter of time before people think I'm just an imposter, a big fake or fraud. I don't really deserve this. Who do I think I am?
So what happens next is we knock ourselves back down. We do something to ruin it to thwart our success and throw ourselves of course because we are so scared to be found out. All because we don't think we are worthy and that we truly deserve it and it fits into our self concept. Remember we can never go higher than what we truly feel and believe about ourselves inside.
PROTECT THE EGO
Another reason we self-sabotage is we fear failure. So self-sabotage is a way that we protect our ego or shego. We sometimes tell ourselves ‘if you really go for it, if you give it your all and it doesn't work out , that it’s going to mean that we are a failure and that we don't deserve it. But, if you half-ass it, procrastinate or do it at the last minute and it doesn't work out and you don't have success or reach your goals, you basically have given yourself an excuse. It’s deceptive intelligence at it’s finest as you tell yourself, well I really didn't put that much effort in it, I didn't give it my all, or I didn’t have enough time, as an excuse to protect your ego if that makes sense.
The fear is that if you give it the full force, if you give it everything that you have and it doesn't work out that it means we really don't have what it takes, we aren't good enough, and we didn't hit the mark and really we're not sure if our ego/shego can handle that so we stopped ourselves by self-sabotaging so we don't even have to face those feelings which are true anyway. When you think of it, if we really felt that we deserved it and that we were worthy of what we were trying to achieve we wouldn't procrastinate, we wouldn't put things off and we wouldn't make excuses, we would just do it.
Most people think of self-sabotage as a fear of success but really and truly it's a fear of failure it's a fear that if I give it everything that I have and I still come up short, I am a failure and that alone frightens most people. It use to frighten me.
So how do we stop the cycle of self-sabotaging.? We have to fix the most important relationship and that's the relationship we have with ourselves. We have to truly believe that we are worthy and deserving to have what is meaningful, important, and joyous in our life and we have to believe that it's okay for us to have them. part of that process is developing a healthy relationship with failure and learning how to deal with failure.
Have you recognized any of these behaviors in yourself?
Check out my youtube-channel where I talk about self-love, self-care, and developing a better relationship with yourself.