Why Do You Keep Self Sabotaging?

And it’s probably not because of why you think

Here’s one I hear all the time, “I don’t know why I keep getting everything wrong…”

Sometimes people mean it as a joke. Sometimes people want to let me know how frustrated they are. And sometimes it tells you about an internal fight the person has been quietly battling for years.

Do you recognise the pattern?

Things are plodding along pretty well… and then something happens.Something you were in total control of.

You put something off.
You build an emotional wall.
You say something you didn’t mean to say in a way you didn’t mean to say it.
You create an issue where there was no need.

And then you sit there thinking:

“Why do I do this to myself?”

Let’s clear something up first

You’re not unconsciously trying to ruin your life. There is no hidden internal saboteur.

Here’s a truth that you might find it difficult to accept.Your mind never does anything to hurt you.Never.Even all those things you do that look ridiculous from the outside (and the inside!) are trying to help in some way.

The problem is, they’re not always using the most up to date strategy. In fact, what your mind is doing most often is responding like a child.

Where this actually comes from

Imagine a younger version of you in a situation that feels too much.Something in school or at home, whatever.But it is just way bigger than anything you’ve ever faced before.

You don’t have the experience to understand it properly. You don’t have the language to explain it. But you feel every last inch of it. At this point your brain needs to do something so it makes a childlike choice -

Maybe you avoid and hope it goes away
Maybe you keep quiet and accept your fate
Maybe you stay out the way until the dust settles
Maybe you try to keep everyone happy at the expense of yourself

And at the time, that works. It keeps things manageable. So your mind goes, “Awesome, that’s a winner. Let’s keep doing that anytime I feel like that.”

Fast forward a few years…

You’re now in an adult situation, but your mind recognises the feeling from away back inn the past.And it’s cool ‘cos it’s got a strategy. It worked when you were 9 years old so let’s do that again….

Only now we have a problem. In the adult world your old childhood strategy looks like:

• Avoiding great opportunities

• Procrastinating when something really matters

• Pulling back in relationships when people get too close

• Overthinking everything before you act

From loads of perspectives it looks like self sabotage.But on the inside, it’s protection. And it always has been.

Adult problems, childhood solutions

Let’s make that even clearer.

A lot of what people call self sabotage is just old childhood strategies being used in new adult situations.And those old strategies don’t fit anymore.But very few people ever make the link between what’s happening now and what happened then.

They simply fall into self criticism and the thought they might be broken.But they’re not broken.They’re simply using children’s tools to deal with adult life.

You’re not broken. You’re just stuck.

Why can’t we just change it?

Because most people simply try and force themselves out of doing the old strategy.

“Right, I just need to be more disciplined.”

“I need to stop overthinking.”

“I need to get on with it and stop complaining.”

And for a while, that can work but it’s tiring as f**k. You won’t be long before your mind defaults back to it’s old way of doing things because the thing you’re doing isn’t the real issue. It’s what sits behind it. You need to change what’s driving the behaviour.

A better way to change

Let me give you tip, instead of asking “Why do I keep sabotaging myself?”.

Try either:

“What is this trying to protect me from?”

Or

“What is this thing trying to achieve?”

Simply be asking these types of inquisitive questions and analysing your motivation you’ll begin to really get somewhere.

I promise, if you take the time to do this on any sabotaging behaviour, you’ll always find something like:

• Fear of failure

• Fear of rejection

• Fear of getting it wrong

• Fear of being judged

• Or something like that

And once you know what the problem really is, your crazy sabotaging behaviour starts to make a lot more sense.

A quick example

I worked with someone who kept pulling out of interviews just before they happened.On paper, they were ready for the next step.They had everything they needed.Experience, knowledge, maturity, a willingness to learn. It seemed it was all there but every time it got close, something would shift in their head and it would all go wrong.

They’d suddenly lose the confidence and say they weren’t experienced enough.They’d convince themselves it wasn’t the right time because of a number of random excuses. It genuinely looked like they were searching for any reason to step back.

But then we took some time and looked at it properly.Guess what…it wasn’t random at all.

The closer these opportunities got, the louder the internal thought became:“What if I can’t actually do this?”.The anxiety that thought caused was the kickstart to the search for the excuse.

And where did it come from?A wee bit more investigation uncovered their early struggles with undiagnosed dyslexia and years of feeling that, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t do what everyone else in their class at school was doing.

It didn’t matter about their subsequent success.The diagnosis wasn’t a factor.Their mind remembered the anxiety of the ‘step up’ and did what it always did.

It shut down and protected them from shame.

So pulling out was never sabotage. It was always protection.

And once we dealt with that.Once we allowed that thought to leave, to mature, to realise it wasn’t required anymore…everything changed.

And that’s why therapy changes lives.

A final thought

If this is something you recognise, please know this is about you. You might sit there and think ‘I’ve not got that in my childhood’ and there is a good chance you are right.But somethings happened.

As I said at the start, your mind does nothing to harm you and never will.When you think it is harming you, it’s a translation problem. You’re judging a behaviour without considering the life experiences that created that behaviour.

And that’s OK.‘Cos we’ve never been taught that.We’ve been taught to get on with it.

But once you understand the pattern, I promise you’ll never be stuck in it again.

If you want help working that out, you’re welcome to reach out to us at HeadStrong for a chat about therapy. Sometimes having someone help you map it out properly makes all the difference.