Self Sabotage — The origin and Rising above self destruction.
“Destruction can be beautiful to some people. Don’t ask me why. It just is. And if they can’t find anything to destroy, they destroy themselves .” — John Knowles
Where it must have begun?
The concept of self sabotage is closely related to the “fear of success”.The origins are social rather than biological in nature. Individuals with a fear of success have heard societal messages that they will not succeed in certain realms. For example, women hear the message, you can’t succeed in a “man’s world.” People find it easier to stick to familiar situation and not going out for any new or unfamiliar challenging direction. Although a person strives to break through a societal or psychological barrier to be more than their parents or society told them they could be, they may experience a psychological “tug-of-war” between striving for success and secretly believing the societal impositions against success one heard while growing up.
Behavior is said to be self sabotaging when it creates problems and interferes with long-standing goals. Self — destructive behavior is a widely used phrase that conceptualizes certain kinds of destructive/sabotaging acts as belonging to self, wherein all apparent self-inflicted harm or abuse towards oneself is treated as a collection of actions, and therefore as a pattern of behavior.
Psychoanalyst Jacques Arenes has identified three of the most common traps that lead us to self-sabotage: Brooding, Blaming self, Defensiveness, Procrastination and Dodging emotions.
Oh! this might not go well (Fear and anticipation)- When people are faced with challenges, whether at work, school, or at home, uncertainty can create anticipatory anxiety. Of course, people often feel anxious before an important presentation or job interview, but they can work through their apprehension and accept it as this type of stress and a minor part of life. Other times, the “Anxious Mind” intensifies uncertainty and doubt, creating enormous levels of anticipatory anxiety and causing the person to feel overwhelmed. When this happens, it turns every day into a perceived challenge. As a result, the feared event comes to the “Anxious Mind” and causes the person to experience such intense anticipatory anxiety that they have the tendency to bail out and avoid the situation at all cost.
For some of us, the familiarity of failure is a painful, somewhat predictable experience. In order to avoid that pain and the unwantedness, we tend to find an escapism not thinking right and left .We may go through our world anticipating loss, or anticipating when something good, something we enjoy, is going to switch, fall, end, or fail.
Why do people self sabotage?
No one wants to self sabotage, yet most of us will engage in this behavioral pattern at some point in our lives.
Consider the following scenario : It involves a range of behaviors, including refusal to commit to goals, identifying goals that are so lofty that we are sure to fail , not planning or problem-solving appropriately, engaging in self-defeating actions that go against a goal we have set, not committing to a goal or plan fully. Criticism cannot hurt us without our consent. We cannot be hurt when we know that we are the master of our thoughts, reactions and emotions.
It takes time for us to realize that the cause and the starting point of such an event lies within us. Our perception of ourselves and the value we put to it determines self sabotaging behaviors.
Reasons for self-sabotage are always deep psychological issues of inadequacy and a feeling that you don’t deserve it.
1. The things we tell us , matters and directly affects how we present ourselves to the world. We lack self worth because we choose not to believe ourselves , hence end up missing the goals.
2. Human beings have a tendency to burden themselves and run for success. Likewise, we also fear failure as we fear success. This fear pulls us back in even attempting things and then find a way ways and reasons of the failure leading to self sabotaging.
Self sabotaging sentences may seem like -
· You hold back from doing the things you want due to erroneous “I can’t….” thoughts. For example, you think “I can’t take a dance class until I’ve lost weight.”
· You create self-imposed rules that trigger and support procrastination. For example, you think, “If I don’t have time to vacuum the whole house, I won’t do any housework.”
SELF criticism cannot happen without your consent- Role of forgiveness:
When we continuously push and beat ourselves up for doing or not doing something , the first experience is generally thought of as guilt while the second is considered to be shame. Shame and guilt can feel very similar — in both experiences we feel bad about ourselves.
Self-sabotage comes in when people do not recognize that forgiveness will open the pathway to life. The best way to overcome self-sabotage is to forgive.
Forgiveness is about healing inside from the hurt that was caused at the time. We may harbor resentment, anger, and other feelings toward someone else or towards self, but the hurt and pain are carried within us.
There is nothing that anyone else can do for us except tell us the obvious- forgive. When we don’t, we are allowing the sin and pain caused by others (and yourself) to be what we live in. The bitterness, resentment, anger, broken relationships, strife, impatience and more are all what hurt those who don’t forgive. People not living in that aren’t hurt. So if we want healing forgive. There is nothing greater because that hindrance of unforgiveness keeps us living less than. It keeps us from our spiritual gifts.
Self forgiveness is the most powerful step to take to cease sabotaging ourselves. Our relationships with others will change and deepen and most importantly, relationship with ourselves will improve. Forgiveness is to forgive ourselves. Forgiveness is getting our thoughts in line with the divine law of harmony. Self condemnation is called hell, forgiveness is called heaven.
The pleasure experience- A study designed by researchers Stephen Berglas and Edward Jones in a 1978 study that involved randomly assigning students to complete anagrams, some of which were solvable and some of which were not. The feedback was clearly unsettling and confusing to the participants who had been given the unsolvable anagrams. The volunteers were given a choice either to take a performance-enhancing or performance-inhibiting drug before they took another test. Of the participants, a whopping 70 percent of those who had been given the unsolvable anagrams opted to take the performance-inhibiting drug, compared to just 13 percent of those who had been given the solvable anagrams. These results suggest that when people are confident in their abilities to perform a task, they would prefer to be given something that would help them perform even better.
The purpose of all this self-sabotage is to protect the ego and self-esteem, and experts have found that it does actually work. We come up with excuses for failure before we’ve even tried, but we often do so unconsciously
Rising above Sabotaging Behaviors: Diminishing self sabotaging requires to identify patterns and overcome with strategies. Managing requires a lot of self analysis and introspection . The best thing we can do is understand where those feelings are coming from — and fight back against the tendency to spend a lot of time in your head, making a case against change. Getting an awareness of the time required, things that holds us back, the re-establish goals that we actually desire to achieve and work towards it.
Writing all the steps down helps. Prioritize them. Go back to the first item on your list and find the smallest possible action we can take to advance your goals. Aim for baby steps. Focus on small wins. The idea is to take even the smallest action towards the bigger goal.
Consider the cost and consequences of self sabotaging and focus on long term rather than short term goals and gratification.
References:
1. https://biomedres.us/pdfs/BJSTR.MS.ID.002021.pdf
3. https://harmonyfoundationinc.com/self-sabotage-significance-strategies/