Freedom from Self-Sabotage:
How to Stop Being Our Own Worst Enemy (Second Edition)
Peter Michaelson
Copyright © 1999, 2015 Peter Michaelson
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for inclusions of brief quotations in a review. All Rights Reserved.
About the author
Peter Michaelson is a psychotherapist with a practice in Plymouth, Michigan. He does telephone sessions with clients throughout the United States and the world. He can be reached at [email protected].
Also by the Author:
Psyched Up: The Deep Knowledge that Liberates the Self
Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness
Democracy’s Little Self-Help Book
The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity
See Your Way to Self-Esteem: An In-Depth Study of the Causes and Cures of Low Self-Esteem
Secret Attachments: Exposing the Roots of Addictions and Compulsions
Books by Sandra Michaelson (1944-1999):
The Emotional Catering Service: The Quest for Emotional Independence
LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships
Is Anyone Listening? Repairing Broken Lines in Couples Communication
To order these books, visit Amazon.com or the author’s website, WhyWeSuffer.com.
Table of Contents
Foreword to the Second Edition
Chapter 1
The Secret World of Self-Sabotage
Chapter 2
Why it’s Hard to Act in Our Best Interests
Chapter 3
Transcending Our Old Mentality
Chapter 4
The Nature of Passivity
Chapter 5
Victims of Ourselves
Chapter 6
Sabotage in the Workplace
Chapter 7
Mastering Inner Dynamics
Chapter 8
Inner Passivity Produces National Sabotage
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Appendix
Endnotes
Foreword to the Second Edition
Self-sabotage is a peculiarity of human nature that oppresses the entire world. Many millions of us are under the influence of a mysterious psychological process that causes us to operate at subpar levels. Self-sabotage is the consequence of unresolved emotional issues and psychological conflicts. These inner dynamics cloud our intelligence and impair our common sense, while stranding us in self-absorption and negative outlooks.
Self-sabotage occurs on a personal level when we are jeopardizing our relationships and careers, ruining our finances, ignoring our health, failing at behavioral and emotional self-regulation, and making various unwise decisions. Self-sabotage on a national level occurs when society’s complex processes are swamped by collective mediocrity, incompetence, stupidity, malice, self-serving ambition, appetite for risk, and indifference.
We haven’t been insightful enough to understand why bad things happen to good people. Our self-knowledge is lacking. We haven’t clearly understood our inherent psychological weaknesses. For starters, we have failed to recognize and overcome the human temptation to repeat and recycle unresolved negative emotions lingering in our psyche.
We can get to the roots of self-sabotage by examining the problem intimately—at the level of personal self-defeat. This is where we resist acting on our own behalf, feel and act like a victim, hesitate to make life easier for others, react negatively out of proportion to events, and produce failure and unhappiness. Most of this book is devoted to personal self-sabotage, though I do, in addition, write on national self-sabotage in Chapter 8.
Each of us grows in our humanity when we expose how, in our psyche’s operating system, we unwittingly produce some variation and degree of self-sabotage. The nation and the world become more civilized as each of us becomes more insightful, healthier, and wiser. In this process of becoming less conflicted and more conscious, we free ourselves from negative emotions such as anger, greed, envy, fear, indecision, passivity, and hatred. We find a natural balance where our pursuit of fulfillment and happiness is in harmony with the greater good.
Self-sabotage occurs on both personal and national levels as a result of weak self-regulation, negative reactions, and compulsive patterns of behavior that have their source in our psyche. This sabotage is the end result of a mysterious configuration of drives, conflicts, and attachments that toil unremittingly against our best interest. If we don’t succeed in identifying and neutralizing these inner dynamics, we may never break free of some measure of self-inflicted failure.
Self-sabotage has been called the enemy within, the shadow, the dark side, and the inner saboteur. It is a universal condition of humankind. At its worst, it has been identified diagnostically as Self-Defeating Personality Disorder.[i] It comes in many guises, stalking us at times in the form of self-denial, self-doubt, self-disapproval, and self-condemnation.
I reveal in this book the configuration of this secret part of us, and I show how we can liberate ourselves from it. Readers will learn why this knowledge has not been assimilated by the public, and why even mental health professionals aren’t conversant with it. This book illustrates self-sabotage on a personal level and provides numerous exercises for freeing ourselves from its invisible shackles. The book contends that personal self-sabotage is so common and pervasive that it puts our nation and even our species at risk. Through our psychological dysfunction, we contaminate society, culture, and the political process with a failure of intelligence and integrity.
Human consciousness sometimes moves at a glacial pace. Then breakthroughs happen, as with the rapid progress that occurred in America in civil rights and women’s rights in the second half of the 20th Century. Now our global village is digitally entwined, and consciousness moves, figuratively at least, at the speed of light. A new sense of human rights is sweeping across the globe as restive populations clamor for more freedom and an end to corruption, privilege, and tyranny. The knowledge in this book contributes to this growing hunger for evolvement by exposing the unconscious dynamics in our psyche that have been limiting our sense of value and obstructing our freedom and creativity.
Human resistance is the biggest obstacle to personal and national progress and development. Learning deep knowledge about our psyche brings up resistance in the form of fear and denial. Self-knowledge is powerful. It can change us dramatically. Through the mysterious process of resistance, we often hesitate to move forward into a more open, liberated sense of self. We’re afraid that self-knowledge will erode our identity, limited though it may be. Hence, we instinctively deny the importance of this knowledge.
Some of the smartest people fall prey to self-sabotage. A person can be smart about many things, while being quite dumb about the inner dynamics that are targeting him or her for self-defeat. Being smart doesn’t help much if unconscious content remains hidden from our intelligence. We’re in the same boat as a government agent who, though clever and alert, nonetheless fails to stop a terrorist attack because the intelligence—meaning in this case the necessary facts about when and how the attack is to be launched—is missing.
Self-sabotage becomes blatant when it surfaces as sexual misconduct on the part of powerful men. Those damaged by such exposure include Tiger Woods, Arnold Weiner, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Celebrity missteps get all the headlines, while the missteps among everyday people, sexual or otherwise, go unreported. Our missteps don’t have to be spectacular blow-ups—they can consist,
for instance, simply of the cumulative effects of passivity, procrastination, and stubbornness that produce mediocrity along with a lack of initiative and vision.
Self-sabotage through sexual acting-out is just one small facet of a huge problem. On a personal level, self-sabotage gets acted out in all kinds of ways, including in relationships, in our careers, in our problems of self-regulation, and in the ways we think and feel about ourselves. For the purposes of this book, the terms self-sabotage and self-defeat are used interchangeably. The former term, perhaps, conveys a more gruesome sense of stabbing oneself in the back.
This new edition of my book, first published in 1999, is a substantial revision, which includes a new subtitle. While most of the content by far is about our personal issues, I devote some attention to the vital connection between personal dysfunction and national dysfunction. Sadly, I have watched America in the past dozen years slip deeper into dysfunction and decline. During this time, the unconscious processes of self-sabotage were not addressed in the national debate, at least not in any depth. Nor were these processes understood and taught by academics and experts. Those of us not in denial knew that Americans were acting as their own worst enemy, but no consensus appeared on the mechanisms or operating system of this inner process. This book attempts to illuminate that blind spot.
More than ever, we desperately need to be operating at a high level of intelligence. The repercussions of self-sabotage have approached the scale of human survival. The inaction on global warming is a deadly symptom of our collective dysfunction. We have to be making the best possible decisions going forward, including matters involving the protection of the environment and natural resources, the economy, military funding and interventions, international relations, medical care, tax policies, deficit spending, legal processes, and education policies. The margin for error is tightening considerably.
Plymouth, Michigan, September 2015
Chapter 1
The Secret World of Self-Sabotage
Just about every one of us has a story of woe, a personal drama of being defeated by our enemies, our friends, our parents, our situations in life, and, most agonizingly, by ourselves. We suspect that behind our defeat and our behavioral and emotional disruptions is some invisible saboteur. Often we fail to expose, apprehend, or vanquish this culprit.
This sabotaging aspect can be the primary cause of our addictions, compulsions, obsessions, and phobias. It is a major ingredient in depression, low self-esteem, lack of purpose, failure, and loss of spirit and heart. It seems to be the fuel for an inner combustion chamber that pumps out negative emotions such as anger, greed, envy, jealousy, loneliness, apathy, and the wish for revenge.
There are thousands of variations on personal self-sabotage. Here are just a few examples of how it has affected some people I have known:
* An attractive and intelligent woman chooses a man who she clearly sees has a drinking problem. Soon she finds herself feeling neglected and bitterly disappointed.
* A young professional has everything in place to prosper with his career. But he sits around in uncertainty and doubt, all his potential and talent going to waste.
* A housewife charges $7,000 on her credit card and gambles away all her savings at a casino. Her husband finds out and wants a divorce.
* A businessman’s tennis game is solid and superb when he plays socially with his friends. But when he steps out to play in a tournament, all his skills desert him.
* An overweight woman loses sixty pounds in a heroic effort to look better and protect her health. Three months later, she’s put the weight back on.
* A man has a lovely wife and three bright children, yet he can’t resist risking it all in his dalliances with other women.
When we’re under the influence of self-sabotage, we can be defeating ourselves on several fronts at once. For example, a man’s tendency to resist a controlling boss by being late to work and tardy with his assignments is hurting his career, at the same time that his marriage is being undermined by his desire to control and restrict his wife.
Often self-sabotage involves the predicament of having one’s life become dissatisfying or miserable for no apparent reason. We just can’t figure out what is happening. Things are obviously going badly, and we feel we would be willing to do almost anything to rectify our situation. But nothing we try works. We just keep sinking deeper into the mire. We can’t clearly see the source of our suffering and self-sabotage.
Our psychological defenses are one of our biggest hindrances to insight. Our defenses, which operate mostly unconsciously, hide the truth of our unconscious collusion in self-defeat and suffering. Our elaborate system of defenses is designed to repel, deny, and hide any facts and insight that would expose how we can operate as our own worst enemy. We are more interested in protecting our self-image than in knowing the truth about our affinity for suffering and our penchant for self-defeat.
We need to penetrate our defenses and expose the unconscious dynamics that imprison us in cycles of frustration and futility. As we penetrate these defenses, we begin to see the evidence of our unconscious collusion in our misfortunes. We learn the inner operating system that makes us secret collaborators in our own self-defeat.
To avoid self-damaging tendencies, we also need to overcome our separation from ourselves and our tendency to identify with a limited sense of who we are. To do this, we start by examining the unresolved negative emotions in our psyche that produce self-sabotage.
When we don’t know what is going on inside us, we often blame others or circumstances for our frustrations and failures. We proclaim our innocence, perhaps blaming “toxic parents” or an inherent or genetic weakness in us. We are also quick to blame our unhappiness and lack of success on “the cold, cruel world” or on a chemical imbalance in our brain. Or we blame ourselves for laziness, or lack of personality, or selfishness, lack of will power, and so on, which only makes us feel more helpless, defective, and dispirited. Often we slip into self-pity, proclaiming, “What’s the use, it’s hopeless—I’d be better off dead.”
Scores of competing theories profess to know how we can best live. In the marketplace of ideas, we can choose from stacks of psychology books offering hundreds of variations— each earnestly endorsed—on the requirements for growth and positive change. Ask all the experts how to eliminate self-sabotage—they include personality researchers, behaviorists, primal theorists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, dynamic psychotherapists, clergymen, and doctors—and we get enough different answers to overwhelm the latest supercomputer.
Many people believe that self-destructive behaviors are often the consequence of childhood mistreatment or the provocation of social injustices. But our dysfunction involves much more than this. Yes, we humans are basically good, and often we do bad things because of negative influences acting upon us from outside. Nonetheless, we have to take some responsibility for our contribution to what is not going right for us. Otherwise, we will be childish, immature, fearful, defensive, and passive.
Simplistic views of our human nature have been blended into a psychological hash and dished out as fast food of the psyche in most of the country’s mental-health facilities. This bland, processed knowledge consists of behavioral advice, positive thinking, cheerleading platitudes, and rational reinforcement. Since this diluted knowledge doesn’t get to the heart of our issues, it’s just a matter of time before we are passed on to the pharmaceutical industry for the antidepressants and mood stabilizers that we are willing to ingest because nothing else has worked.
Popular jargon tells us we can be happier by being nice to people so they will be nice to us. Or we are told, “Appreciate what you have, look how lucky you are.” When we are trying to resolve a dispute, we might be encouraged to react negatively: “Don’t put up with that nonsense. Get even—or else sue them!” Or a generic favorite for almost any ailment, “Think positive! Don’t think negative, just think positive!”
Positi
ve thinking has long been touted as a psychological antidote. Although it can be helpful, it does not address deeper issues. If it did work, we would see a lot more happy people coasting through life. Throwing positive affirmations at self-sabotaging programming is like trying to kill a dragon with darts. Core questions have to be addressed: Why is the negative there in the first place? Why is it so difficult to do what’s in our best interest? Why don’t we exercise more, eat better, stay focused, worry less, remain positive, keep friends, save money, hold on to love, and achieve more with our creativity and skills?
The problem of self-sabotage hinges on a formidable configuration in the psyche, what I call negative emotional attachments. These attachments are a result of unresolved conflicts from childhood that ultimately determine how we feel about ourselves. They arise out of the subjective impressions we take on from childhood of being deprived, refused, controlled, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and unloved. We have an unconscious, emotional willingness to continue to experience, and even to indulge in, feelings associated with the repressed pain and hurts of childhood.
My belief in the existence of these unconscious emotional attachments is based on my clinical experiences with thousands of individuals, as well as on the discoveries and writings of Edmund Bergler, M.D., a psychiatric psychoanalyst who died in New York City in 1962. His theories, which evolved from Freudian principles, are described in some detail in Chapter 7.
Here is how such emotional attachments affect us. A man who felt that, as a child, he wasn’t loved by his mother will say he wants love in his life. Yet he will continue to be attached emotionally to the feeling of being unloved. On the surface of his awareness, he sincerely feels he wants to find love. He might even be desperate to find it. Deep in his psyche, though, he expects to be unloved by the woman (or women) in his life. He defends against his collusion in this self-sabotage by covering up his attachment to feeling unloved with various defenses, such as claiming that he is an innocent victim of the coldness of women.
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