Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  Exercise in Self-Responsibility

  Exercises or techniques for identifying and resolving personal self-sabotage are offered throughout the text and also in the Appendix. Of course, readers need not do the exercises as they are reading the book. Just looking them over has value because they illustrate the process and content of psychological self-examination. Still, I encourage readers to return to these exercises and to do them at some point.

  Part I. Make a list of all the things that you feel realistically you should do or would like to accomplish. Here are some examples:

  a) I should lose weight;

  b) I need to exercise more;

  c) I want to clean out the garage;

  d) I would like to spend more time with the kids;

  e) I should be more intimate with my spouse;

  f) I want to change my career;

  g) I shouldn’t be so sensitive to others’ comments.

  When your list is done, note for each statement all your reasons or excuses for not doing what is on your list. Start each statement with, “I can’t (exercise, change my career, stop smoking, etc.) because . . .” Compare your reasons with the following list of creative excuses for not doing what is in your best interest:

  There isn’t enough time. This is a common excuse. Obviously, other things have more priority. Ask yourself, “Why are these other things more important?” Perhaps you are using this excuse so that you can continue to feel self-criticism for not achieving your potential. Or you might simply be compelled to experience the helplessness of inner passivity, an old emotional attachment that lingers from childhood. This sense of helplessness involves, among many other symptoms, the chronic feeling that time is “running out” or that one is beholding to the demands of time.

  There isn’t enough money. Some people make sure there isn’t enough money by spending it frivolously. That way they ensure they won’t have money for what’s important. What we spend our money on reveals a lot about how we value ourselves. Ask, “Am I using being short of funds as an excuse to feel deprived, both of money and of my goals for myself?”

  It takes up too much energy and effort. For any activity we’re enthused about, we usually have plenty of energy. Ask, “Am I secretly attached to feeling drained and depleted, or helpless and defeated?”

  I’ll have to give up too much. We can use the feeling of missing out on something potentially more interesting or pleasurable as a way to avoid doing what is best for us. Ask, “Am I so attached to feeling loss that even when I’m struggling for something valuable I find a way to experience the struggle as a loss and thereby can’t proceed?”

  I won’t be able to pull it off. This is the feeling that our effort will fail or not work, so why bother. This excuse is often effective because sometimes things don’t work out. If we don’t undertake something, then we do not have to deal with a sense of failure with respect to that endeavor. Ask, “Am I too tempted to remain mired in feelings of passivity, of being helpless and powerless, to proceed on my quest?”

  I’m under too much stress already. We might be tempted to put things off until we feel better. Just remember that this important task might never be easier to do than right now. Your procrastination will make it harder to do tomorrow, and harder still the day after.

  Part II. We use such rationalizations to hide the truth about our self-sabotage. To find the self-sabotage, go over your list again and for each statement answer, “I don’t want to (exercise, change career, stop smoking, etc.) because . . . (elaborate as fully and truthfully as possible).”

  As an example, here is how one man assessed his underlying motives for continuing his heavy drinking: “Stopping drinking will mean submission to my wife, who is demanding that I stop, and that will make her happy. She and others will control me. Drinking also keeps my emotions and negative feelings under wraps. When using alcohol, I don’t feel as much distress or discomfort. And I won’t have to see how much I hate myself. I won’t have to deal with how empty I feel inside.”

  As another example, someone who can’t lose weight might say: “If I lose weight, I won’t be able to say no to the opposite sex.” Or the feeling might be, “I’ll be rejected.” Or, “I’ll feel insubstantial, vulnerable. I will have to please others. I’ll feel deprived. I won’t know who I am if I lose weight.”

  When we look deeper into ourselves, we see that much of our resistance to doing what is in our best interest includes the following hidden motives: 1) to hide our unpleasant feelings, 2) to hide passivity and feelings of being forced to submit to others, 3) to mask our dependency on others for validation, 4) to keep us from falling apart, since we don’t know who we are without our self-defeating behaviors, 5) to validate our belief that we don’t deserve good in our lives, 6) to provoke rejection from others, 7) to give us a good excuse to disapprove of ourselves, 8) to keep us from having to change, and 9) to help us to avoid seeing our investment in loss, deprivation, and disappointment.

  Part III. Review your answers and decide which of these hidden motives apply to your procrastination in doing the things on your list.

  Ask yourself, “What role does a certain substance, feeling, or activity play in my life right now?” Suppose you are giving in to a recurring urge to binge on junk food. Ask yourself: “Am I putting on weight to act out an emotional attachment to rejection? Am I eating this food so that I end up feeling more defective and inadequate, and so that I can berate myself for being fat and ugly? Am I determined not to experience intimacy and love, and is this how I ensure I won’t get it? Am I emotionally attached to disapproval and even self-condemnation, so that eating this food becomes a setup to condemn myself afterward for having eaten it? I am I simply trapped in passivity, secretly wanting to feel my helplessness and lack of self-regulation?” The food won’t be so appealing when you taste the self-sabotage in the ingredients. Remember, too, that cravings for food and other substances can in themselves be a defense, a way that we are trying to “prove” we want to get to cover up our emotional attachment to feeling deprived or refused.

  Part IV. Compose a list of all the things you want. Here is an example of such a list: 1) I want to leave my spouse, 2) I want a loving, permanent relationship, 3) I want to help or to serve others, 4) I want to be happy, 5) I want more friends. Now, say why you want each item on your list. What will these things give you that you don’t already have? Keep asking why until you reach the final motive. Then for each statement, say, “I don’t want . . . because . . .” Dig up all the reasons and emotions. Can you begin to see more clearly how you sabotage yourself? What will happen if you don’t achieve what you want? What will happen if you do achieve what you want?

  The Challenge of Accepting Responsibility

  We all want to be absolved of responsibility for our failures and unhappiness. Why? We’re anxious to neutralize the inner accusations that hold us accountable for failure or lack of progress in our lives. We have an inner voice that assails us with accusations of our alleged wrongdoing or inadequacy. These are typical allegations: “What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you doing this right? You should be doing better. You’re always messing up.” It relieves an inner burden if we can say in our defense, “It’s not my fault; it’s those difficult circumstances that make my life so hard.”

  In medieval Europe, before our modern age of anxiety, ambivalence, and entitlement, everyone knew his or her place. If you were a serf or a peasant, not much was expected of you. You went out and tilled the fields, and you let the religious and political authorities decide what you were supposed to believe, who you were, and what you valued. Life was simple. Your fate depended on your status at birth, your ancestry, your blood lines. It is much different in modern America. Here you can create a great destiny for yourself, no matter what your blood lines. Now your success depends on skill, on personality, on your emotional strength and your own resources. In America, the message is, “You can be whatever you want to be.”

  That’s great, esp
ecially if you have a long string of credits and successes to your name. But suppose you are not succeeding as you think you should. Suppose you are doing badly, getting nowhere. Such a predicament can become very painful. The inner critic now comes at us: “Why aren’t you doing well? All those others are doing better than you. You must be inadequate and worthless!”

  We want to say: “No, it’s not my fault! I’m not responsible for my situation. Circumstances are too hard. I have the meanest boss in town. I had a bad childhood. My father drank too much.”

  Blaming others lets us off the hook—or so we think. Indeed, this line of thought may relieve some inner anxiety. But it is still just excuses. And it doesn’t cure the deep problem—our attachments to unresolved negative emotions. If we adopt the blaming excuse, we become keepers of a victim mentality—depressed, sour, cynical, and bitter. We may also become “dependees,” holding on to all sorts of infantile perceptions and believing we are entitled to be taken care of.

  The determination to avoid taking responsibility for the circumstances of one’s life can be seen especially in addictive personalities. Many of them want to believe their problem is caused by a chemical imbalance, or bad genes, or the “disease of addiction.”[ii] In making this claim, addictive individuals decline to see or take responsibility for their self-sabotage. This leaves them clinging to their identity as addicts and limited by it, even when they have become abstinent. They don’t want to see that their addictive behaviors are emotionally based. Every addictive personality is loaded with dissatisfaction, anxiety, and emotional pain, and he or she is mired in feeling helpless and ashamed. This individual typically experiences self-examination as self-criticism, as indications of being defective and unworthy. Such individuals have a hard time being objective because they feel any truth about the extent of their self-sabotage points at an inner corruption that deep down they believe is the ultimate, ugly truth about them. They are determined to hide or deny inner truth because they take it as an indictment of themselves, instead of the liberating knowledge that it can become.

  Most of us are hiding from ourselves to some degree. So the process of acquiring self-responsibility and self-awareness can raise our anxiety levels, at least temporarily. We may be afraid to make important life decisions, because if we accept responsibility for our decision we’ll feel self-criticism if things don’t work out. Sometimes a person in a troubled marriage wants the partner to make the choice whether or not to get a divorce. One man I counseled had been tormenting himself for months for having initiated a divorce. His unpleasant emotions had little to do with whether the choice had been a good or bad one, and much to do with his unconscious willingness to go on beating himself up internally because of his emotional attachment to feeling criticized. In other words, his emotional readiness to feel criticized left him with a chronic sense of having made an unwise choice. It’s a no-win situation: No matter what his decision, he would beat himself up. He “buys into” the inner accusation of wrongdoing, or “takes a hit” on it, whether the inner accusation is valid or not, and thereby experiences doubt, guilt, and shame. The core issue was his emotional attachment to feeling criticized, which he could feel through self-criticism or from the (real or imagined) criticism of others.

  That is why many individuals in similar situations are relieved when someone else makes a decision for them. They want to be spared the emotional challenge of being responsible and thus avoid being punished by their own appetite for doubt and criticism. I was told by a married woman in her late thirties who was ambivalent about having a baby: “Oh, I wish I were a Catholic. The choice would be made for me. It would just happen or it wouldn’t.” She felt guilt-ridden as she criticized herself for not wanting a baby, thinking she was a selfish person. But her guilt stemmed from the fact she was identifying with her imagined baby feeling unwanted and unloved. She had felt unwanted and unloved in childhood. Now, she was determined to recycle that feeling in herself by imagining her baby feeling that way. It was her emotional indulgence in those negative feelings that produced her guilt. She had pinned her guilt on the idea of being a selfish person (a defense called “pleading guilty to the lesser crime”), instead of seeing how the guilt originated from her lingering emotional attachment to feeling unloved.

  To avoid accepting responsibility, people sometimes do things en masse that are self-sabotaging. For instance, we turn our personal finances over to money managers, in part so that we won’t feel, quite so acutely, the inner repercussions of making unwise investment decisions. We also abdicate responsibility for the allocation of our financial resources to avoid dealing with moral or ethical principles involving slave labor, exploitation, pollution, armaments, political corruption, and life-threatening products such as tobacco and certain chemicals. Since it’s not their money, traders are more likely to be reckless and shameless with it, contributing to both financial chaos and capital misplacement.

  Repositioning Ourselves

  Adventure often evokes anxiety. Pioneers and explorers faced down their fears while discovering new horizons. We also deal with new horizons, along with anxiety and fear, when we look inward. Acquiring self-responsibility is an inner adventure, a learning process, and a dissolving of boundaries within ourselves. It means moving away from childish beliefs and feelings and into adult maturity and emotional independence. It also means seeing the hidden motives and secret intent in much of what we do.

  It takes fortitude and resolve to move into self-responsibility, just as the process develops inner strength and character. We are moving into a whole new territory of the mind, one that is expansive and liberating because it frees us from the idea that difficult circumstances and insensitive people are causing our failures and unhappiness. That thinking had been making us dependent on the behavior of others to feel good about ourselves. Emotionally, we are no longer at the mercy of what others think, do, or say.

  Suppose you are a person who rarely feels satisfied with career, friends, and relationships. You decide to become responsible for your discontent. You learn that your discontent is a product or symptom of your emotional attachment to an unconscious readiness to believe that you are going to be deprived, refused, or denied in some manner. You begin to see how convinced you have been that you will miss out and not get what you want or need. You observe yourself in the process of indulging in feelings that life isn’t sustaining or supporting you, while you become aware of being willing to see other people getting more than you. You recognize the chronic feeling: “Whatever I get, it’s never enough.” You see how you deny yourself, your feelings and needs, and realize that your overeating, drinking too much, overspending, miserliness, and so on are attempts to use food, objects, and money to fill your inner emptiness or emotional void. That void is the inner darkness we all must climb out of to avoid self-sabotage.

  The self-responsible, self-regulating person is not without doubts or guilt. Yet he or she is not stymied by such emotions. Such people know their own mind, make their own decisions, stand up for their values, and express themselves without fear of disapproval or rejection.

  He or she becomes a detached observer of life. This doesn’t mean, of course, that such people are withdrawn and cold. It means they no longer personalize situations or the behaviors of others. They are more patient, less frustrated and angry. They don’t fight against life, nor do they drift aimlessly. They take in the experiences of life, including the hardships, with trust and gratitude. They see not from self-centeredness but with appreciation, detachment, and discernment, knowing what they stand for and where to make their stand.

  Consequently, this individual is able to deal responsibly and creatively with the challenges of career and relationships. He or she is able to be intimate and express true feelings when appropriate. Self-reproach and guilt are gradually replaced by the development of creative capacities and the ability to trust an authentic self.

  On a social level, self-responsibility produces more people who are aligned with the c
ommon good. People function at a higher level and life is richer for all because we are able to experience gratifying pleasure in what we can do for others. There is less paranoia and violence, more interest in long-range planning and the well-being of future generations. A new spirit of cooperation and common purpose replaces the widespread emotional problems of isolation, narcissism, and alienation, the price we pay for separation from our self.

  In attaining this, we give up nothing except our inner conflicts and our suffering. That alone produces resistance in those who have to wean themselves from an emotional attachment to conflict, who can’t position themselves in the world without their internal miseries and external enemies.

  Chapter 2

  Why it’s Hard to Act in Our Best Interests

  In this chapter, we plunge deep into the unconscious to learn the essential elements of self-sabotage. It is scary at this depth, like descending in a reinforced-steel sphere into a six-mile-deep oceanic canyon to come face to face with spiked aquatic creatures as ghastly as we imagine our worst inner demons.

  Our submergible for this plunge is not a steel sphere but the story of one woman’s experience, presented in the opening pages of this chapter as a little monograph titled “The Emotional Secrets of Melinda.” Our heroine Melinda descends into the dark depths of her psyche to find the source of her unhappiness and self-sabotage. Courageously, she brings to the surface of her awareness emotional material that had been repressed and forgotten. Now, exposed on the surface, the material remains challenging for her to absorb because it flies in the face of her logic and common sense.