Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  As another example, a woman who felt controlled and dominated by her father when she was a child will choose either a man who dominates her or a man who she can dominate. Either way, control and domination remain emotional themes in her life. She interprets encounters with others in terms of control, even when control is in reality not an issue or is not the intention of the other person. On the surface, she claims to hate the feeling of being controlled and protests against it, all the while unconsciously being emotionally attached to feeling controlled.

  Negative emotional attachments have a life of their own and can be difficult to expose and understand. They reside in the psyche, hidden from sight like bugs or quirks in a computer system. Though we have all the ingredients to be happy and successful, these unconscious attachments can thoroughly mess up our lives.

  A negative emotional attachment is an unconscious psychological configuration that compels us to experience or to interpret events or situations in an unpleasant or painful manner. It produces the tendency to feel that we are being deprived, refused, controlled, dominated, criticized, rejected, abandoned, or betrayed, even when actual events or situations do not in themselves warrant these negative reactions. Unconsciously, we misinterpret situations in such a way as to rekindle these negative feelings, just as we have been doing since childhood.

  Above all, these attachments produce an unconscious investment in the continuance of a particular negative experience. Through our defenses, we do not want to see how strongly we remain invested in experiencing these negative emotions. This is a “big secret” about human nature. We are quick to cover up or deny that we unwittingly recreate and replay situations that reproduce and prolong self-sabotage, suffering, and unhappiness.

  Human progress is marked by the struggle to overcome emotional reactions and acquire enhanced rationality. Any student of history knows how our ancestors were steeped in superstition, hallucinatory states of mind, unwarranted fearfulness, magical thinking, self-destructive behaviors, hatred, violence, and war. Yet even today the most prominent, cultured, or educated individuals among us can flounder in fear, hatred, irrationality, addictions, and other forms of negativity that arise out of the unconscious mind to disturb our lives in a thousand different ways.

  Overcoming self-sabotage involves making conscious what has been unconscious. This book reveals the ways that self-sabotage lurks in the unconscious and strikes at us like an invisible virus. This knowledge disturbs us and threatens our self-image, even as it sets us free. As a psychotherapist who practices this method, I’m in the position of telling people what they, in a sense, hate to hear. Fortunately, like the painless dentist, I have my means to make it quite palatable. As we feel the benefits of assimilating this self-knowledge, we become willing and even eager to learn more.

  So be warned! As I expose this secret collusion in self-defeat, some readers might feel mortified or shamed as they consider, as many of my clients have said, that “this is really sick.” Seeing the extent of our own participation in self-defeat can produce disbelief, shock, sadness, and even horror. This is a normal reaction to having our self-image challenged and our egotism demoted. Sometimes we avoid assimilating this knowledge when we hear about it by “spacing out,” or slipping into a kind of pseudo-ignorance. Or we become incensed and indignantly deny that this could be true about us, proclaiming the absence of scientific proof.

  If we can push through this resistance, the rewards are considerable. The healthy individual, free from self-sabotage and unnecessary suffering, is able to live in the here and now, with a sense of having come home to the self. He or she becomes less self-centered, more compassionate, feels fulfilled in the process of learning and growing, and is aligned with activities that promote the well-being of all. A great deal of psychic energy that previously kept unconscious material repressed and defenses in place is now freed up for creative and productive pursuits.

  For this to happen, we want to see the sophisticated operating system in our psyche that, without our conscious intervention, can work against our well-being. This inner process can thwart our attempts to achieve success, and often it rides roughshod over our cognitive abilities. A person’s rational, conscious side is at a great disadvantage in regulating negative emotions when the rational side is not well enough informed about the unconscious dynamics that can be “plotting” self-defeat.

  In other words, our unconscious, irrational side is much more powerful an influence than we realize, and it manages through various defenses to hide from our awareness the nature and extent of self-sabotage. Indeed, as unpleasant as it is to accept, we are dealing with a formidable foe, a tyranny of the unconscious so well defended that most of us have not been able to recognize its existence, let alone understand its structure.

  It is an axiom of psychology that the greater the truth, the more we resist it—for emotional reasons. British playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” In other words, we have negative reactions to such truths. To the citizens of the 16th Century, Copernicus blasphemed when he revealed that the world is not at the center of the universe. How did these people experience this revelation? If the world wasn’t at the center, what did this say about them? They must have felt, “If we’re not at the center, does that mean we’re not as special as we think?”

  This was a crushing blow to their ego, their self-image. It felt like being reduced, humiliated, even to the point of feeling insignificant and unworthy. We have a powerful aversion to seeing how we resonate with this negative feeling. Many a criminal or warlord, claiming to be offended and insulted by someone’s opposition or belittling remarks, has killed people or started wars to avoid recognizing that this is how he constantly, secretly feels about himself.

  To 19th-Century men and women, Charles Darwin blasphemed when he wrote that humans have evolved from primitive forms of life through a process of natural selection. Again, self-image was drastically demoted. Cultivated people in the mid-1800s, who took such pride in their intellect’s creation of the Industrial Age, were not eager to be exposed as the descendants of apes. How dare this fellow Darwin imply such a thing! But soon Sigmund Freud followed Darwin to add insult to injury. Freud jolted the foundations of self-image when his discoveries revealed that we humans are not masters in our own house. Unconscious dynamics in our psyche, Freud wrote, determine many if not most of our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Our continuing ignorance of these dynamics, as they apply to us personally, strands us in the backwoods of consciousness, far from our potential.

  Of the three revelations, I believe Freud’s was the greatest blow to our pride. Even today, one hundred years after his first book was published, only a small percentage of the population have assimilated for their personal benefit his discoveries about the unconscious mind and the vital knowledge concerning transference, projection, displacement, repression, identification, narcissism, and self-aggression. To our enormous detriment, the vast majority of the world’s population has no inkling of how these dynamics operate within them.

  The Art of Self-Responsibility

  Self-sabotage is, in large measure, a result of our deficiency in the art of self-responsibility. We can’t see the configuration of our self-sabotage until we are able, at a deeper level, to become responsible for our negative emotions and behaviors. This statement requires some explanation. The concept of self-responsibility described in this book is more advanced than the traditional sense of being responsible. The traditional sense involves respecting others, obeying laws, taking care of our health, and contributing to the well-being of family, community, and nation.

  Self-responsibility, as described here, requires that we learn to become responsible not only for our obvious daily duties and moral obligations but for our negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors as well.

  In other words, we must begin to see our own participation in producing anger, greed, fear, paranoia, hatred, the lust for revenge, and weakness in self-regulation.
Blaming is no longer acceptable. The spotlight shifts from the actions or attitudes of others on to ourselves and how we are choosing (often unconsciously) to react negatively or in a self-defeating manner to everyday events or to challenging circumstances. Now we are able to see more clearly our role in producing negative outcomes and self-sabotage.

  Here is an example of the kind of insight I’m talking about. Jessica, a client in her mid-thirties, was returning to the same university she had attended seventeen years earlier. Only eighteen years old at that time, she started using cocaine, drank heavily, and dropped out of classes before the end of her first semester. Now, many years later, Jessica wanted to get a Master’s Degree in Business Administration and she felt considerable anxiety as she prepared to move to the city where the university was located. Despite having just successfully completed two years of community college, she kept asking, “Am I really graduate-school material? Or am I just fooling myself?” Jessica felt self-doubt and shame as she replayed the details of that failed semester again and again in her mind. “I don’t like the person I was back then,” she said, “and I don’t want to think about that time in my life. But I can’t shake the feelings of guilt and shame. Maybe I should go to a university somewhere else or just forget about it altogether.”

  I told her, “This time you have a chance to make it different because you’re going to expose and understand your sabotaging tendencies. You’re dredging up these memories from years ago, and obsessing on that earlier experience, because those memories serve a secret purpose. Despite your best conscious intentions, you remain emotionally attached to feeling wrong about yourself. Emotionally, you’re willing to take on feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism. Your unconscious is replaying those memories so you can continue to doubt yourself and even to berate yourself for allegedly being a failure. This inner consumption of self-doubt and self-criticism produces guilt, anxiety, and shame. It’s your way of wrestling with yourself and blocking your advance. If you were to go on dredging up those old feelings and soaking up the criticism, you could indeed undermine your present efforts and sabotage yourself going forward.

  “So,” I continued, “every time you catch yourself dwelling on that failed experience from years ago, flash on the realization of what you’re doing, how those painful memories are coming up because you are emotionally attached to self-doubt and self-criticism. The problem is not your performance of years ago but your unconscious determination in the present to use those memories to condemn yourself and to feel passive or helpless. The more clearly you see this inner game of self-sabotage, the easier it becomes not to play it.”

  In another example, a middle-aged man I met was wandering from town to town, unable to settle down and establish roots in any one place. He was miserable and professed how much he wanted to establish new friendships and settle in one community. But he couldn’t make a choice on where to stay. Whenever he thought about choosing a particular town, he began to generate reasons why the place was unsatisfactory.

  In the one session I had with him, he told me stories of friends he had made in various locales who had proven to be disappointing. He felt he wasn’t finding the kind of quality friends he expected or deserved. After he disclosed some of his childhood history, which was filled with the feeling that he and his father had been a disappointment to his mother, I understood his self-sabotage.

  “You can’t make a choice of where to settle down,” I said, “because of your emotional attachment to disappointment. You experience again and again the feeling of being let down and disappointed by new friends and situations. You’re convinced the problem is external, that this town or those people don’t offer you enough, when the problem is your own emotional inclination to feel disappointed and dissatisfied in yourself. You remain entangled in that old feeling of disappointment you had in childhood and direct it now toward yourself and others. You’re fated to recreate it and act it out in the various contexts of your life as long as this form of self-defeat remains unconscious.

  “In childhood, you felt you were a disappointment to your mother. Now you’ve reversed the emotional conflict and you have become like your mother, disappointed in yourself. As a defense, you project this inner feeling of disappointment on to others. One way or the other—whether you feel you’re the source of disappointment or that others are disappointing you—that feeling still haunts you.”

  This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “No, no,” he said. “I know that’s not it! It’s either the fact that my new friends let me down, or it’s something to do with my indecision, how I make poor choices in where to go.” And thus he left, not to return, disappointed again by his latest encounter and confirming what the sages have always known, that the secret intent and major life choice of many people is to take their suffering to the grave.

  Liberation from self-sabotage requires an understanding of how we co-create the life we experience. We are not innocent victims suffering at the cruel hands of fate. Rather, we participate in the circumstances of our lives by giving consent, consciously or unconsciously, to much of the pleasure or the pain we experience. The notion of self-responsibility also requires us to consider our own passivity—how we may be allowing ourselves to be manipulated and controlled, how we may secretly expect to live under the rule of others, how we may be indulging in negative emotions that rob us of initiative, and ultimately how we are identified with a limited sense of who we are rather than with our powerful authentic self.

  I used to be a classic injustice collector, determined to feast on alleged injustices and using them to account for my unhappiness. In my first career as a journalist, I was a pain in the neck for city editors and bureau chiefs. Like the typical disgruntled employee, I was convinced that my ill feelings toward my work and my supervisors were validated by external circumstances. I had emotional conflicts that I didn’t understand and wasn’t facing. I didn’t want to see that I was the one with the problem. Looking back, I realize that my bosses were mostly fair and reasonable. Even if I’d had a tyrant for a boss and had worked in a grimy sweatshop, the healthy response would have been either to leave with grace and dignity or, if I chose to stay, to conduct myself in a positive manner, possibly looking for ways to reform the situation. No whiner or complainer, nor someone aligned with feelings of defeat and convictions of inadequacy, is likely to achieve workplace reform.

  Nowhere is the unwillingness to take responsibility for disharmony and suffering more evident than in romantic relationships. When a couple isn’t getting along, each is more likely to focus on the flaws and deficiencies in the partner, to blame the partner, rather than to turn the spotlight on oneself. (Usually when people do turn the spotlight on themselves, they tend to blame themselves or to identify the problem incorrectly.)

  Typically, each partner is reluctant to see his or her role in a deteriorating situation. A man’s role may be, for instance, his sensitivity to the feeling that he is being controlled by his partner. Even if his wife were attempting to control him, his sensitivity to the feeling is nonetheless the result of a lingering emotional attachment from childhood. Unaware of this connection to his past, he blames and resists his partner for controlling him when, in fact, based on his emotional memories of being controlled in childhood, he invites control by holding himself back, persistently forgetting, procrastinating, being unable to speak out his needs or make a decision, even as he protests how much he hates feeling controlled.

  We all want to blame our unhappiness on others. Or we blame the government, or the system, or our parents. Sometimes we blame ourselves, but invariably for the wrong reasons. For instance, we may say our problem is laziness or a lack of personality, when these are only symptoms. As we blame ourselves for the wrong reasons, the primary sabotage deep inside the psyche may be, in a typical situation, our emotional willingness to soak up feelings of being drained, depleted, and deprived.

  Most times we want to feel that our suffering is a valid experience, just what any normal pe
rson would feel in our shoes. We go around looking for evidence that we are entitled to suffer, that we have no choice in the matter, while we try to enlist sympathizers to vouch for the severity of our plight. Before we realize what is happening, we have become chronic complainers, injustice collectors, and jailers of our own free spirit.

  Self-responsibility means, on a personal level, that we learn to face our fears and to discover the true origins of our painful emotions and failures. For instance, if you are feeling shame after having been scolded by your boss, and torment yourself about it for hours and days, you are likely dredging up old feelings from childhood of being rejected or being seen as flawed and unworthy. You become conscious that you are choosing, unconsciously, to recycle those old feelings. You make conscious what was previously unconscious. Such feelings from childhood do indeed persist, yet with insight we realize that we are, in the present moment, choosing to replay and recycle them. This primary insight—that we are ready and willing to recycle old painful feelings from the past—is extremely powerful, especially when we “flash” on it in the moment that we are indulging in the old pain.

  In that moment, we are taking responsibility for our suffering. Often when we do this, we can feel the suffering ebb and fall away. That’s because, in exercising the power to see the truth of our indulgence in the suffering, we are actually making a conscious decision not to suffer. Through insight or self-knowledge, we are taking charge of the moment, rather than letting unconscious forces play out in a way that is self-defeating.

  Through self-responsibility, we understand that we cannot expect anyone else to make us feel better. If we are stuck in a dead-end job or marriage, we can’t blame anyone else. This doesn’t mean that others are innocent and exert no influence over us. But we are ultimately in charge of how we react to external situations. “Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it,” the saying goes. Maturity is the growing ability to be responsible for our behaviors, decisions, and feelings. We’re no longer children whose parents answer for us; we answer for ourselves.