Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  In varying degrees, we felt dominated in childhood. We were forced to submit to the will of someone else, initially our parents. Toddlers first experience control during early childhood socialization and toilet training, and the tantrums of the “terrible twos” are their way of rebelling against the feeling of being forced to comply with someone’s agenda. Some of us adjust better than others, making appropriate emotional and rational compromises to accommodate this experience.

  For years after joining the work force as a young adult, I felt controlled when asked to work overtime or do anything that seemed outside my job description. I often sat in the office working on tasks of my choosing rather than do what supervisors wanted done. To respond with enthusiasm to a request from them left me feeling passive, as if I were surrendering my will to them. To cover up my attachment to feeling controlled, I claimed through my defense, “They can’t make me do anything! I’ll do what I want!” I had no idea of my secret propensity to exacerbate feelings of being controlled and oppressed. I had no clue that I was unconsciously determined to feel this way. And when my supervisors reacted with annoyance to my feisty lack of cooperation, I believed that my defiance was in my best interests, reflecting my power and autonomy, rather than being self-sabotaging.

  Sometimes we believe that our negative feelings and reactions toward work are justified by our boss’s insensitive behavior or by the overwhelming requirements of the job. A client with this problem asked me, “What am I supposed to do when I experience my stressful, blatantly unfair job situation—just lay back and say nothing?”

  “Before you decide what to do,” I answered, “it’s more important to be clear why you feel the way you do. Are you seeing all the elements in why you’re feeling so oppressed at work? In your situation, your inner passivity prevents you from being objective. The passivity causes you to feel oppressed by your boss and by the circumstances of your workplace. Your situation is challenging but not oppressive. For emotional reasons, however, you experience it as oppressive. The more you catch yourself in the act of creating that negative impression and holding on to it, the sooner you’ll dispel that unnecessary suffering and self-defeat. True, your boss may be insensitive and the work may be burdensome. Nonetheless, you have your emotional participation in the experience, so you have to see what you bring to the table from your own past.”

  Some of us feel controlled simply by life’s daily requirements. We view having to work and support ourselves as something we are forced to do, rather than a meaningful or fulfilling life challenge. Low productivity and lack of creativity can result, caused by conscious or unconscious rebellion against this feeling of being forced and restricted. The emotional conflicts waste our energy, leaving us depleted, and give us, we are convinced, even more justification for our grievances. Sometimes we feel controlled or oppressed even in ideal work environments.

  Often we rebel against our parents’ high expectations for us because we feel so controlled by those expectations. Thus, unconsciously, we defeat ourselves in order to avoid the sense of being controlled and defeated by others. To succeed feels like giving in to someone else’s expectations and requirements. Or, in order to hold our parents accountable for our failures, we may unconsciously act on the assumption that, “If I succeed, that lets mom and dad off the hook. It means they weren’t such bad parents after all.”

  The problem is not with our parents or others but with our own propensity to take on feelings of being passive and controlled. Signs of this type of passivity in the workplace include:

  -- Frequent confrontations with authority figures; feeling bossed, pushed around, or forced to submit;

  -- Strong urges to get away from the office or fantasies of quitting; frequent daydreaming;

  -- Difficulty making decisions and passively letting others infringe on one’s delegated authority;

  -- Missing deadlines, coming to work late, and procrastinating as a passive-aggressive reaction to feeling forced or dominated;

  -- Feeling sorry for oneself and feeling that the world is unfair;

  -- Not being motivated with work and career because of feelings of powerlessness and helplessness;

  -- An inability to be firm with clients and customers.

  Other expressions of self-sabotage involving work and career include:

  A. Missing the boat. Another way to torment ourselves and experience self-defeat is through the feeling of “missing the boat.” This experience is a consequence of indulging in feeling deprived and refused. Signs of this emotional difficulty include high levels of impatience, frequent dissatisfaction, and the inability or unwillingness to commit to our endeavors or projects and carry them through to completion. We always have excuses for our dissatisfaction, such as claims that our job is going nowhere, that we are not being adequately rewarded, or that we are not appreciated. But usually our problems are deeper than that.

  The preoccupation with missing the boat sometimes compels us to try to make things happen quickly, other times to procrastinate. Behind our anxiety is the emotional conviction that not much good occurs in our life, or that we are not meant for success, or that whatever we produce will be discounted or ignored. Consequently, we become our own worst critics, lack motivation and purpose, and experience all efforts as unpleasant.

  When we become conscious of this self-sabotaging aspect, namely our secret willingness to cultivate the feeling of missing out on something, our feelings and perspectives change dramatically. It’s like facing your enemy in the light where he can be defeated, instead of in the dark where you can’t see what you’re up against.

  B. Procrastination. Procrastinating is a way we passively resist our highest good. Procrastinators have different emotional reasons for their passivity. One may be a perfectionist ready to find fault with whatever he or she tries to accomplish. To cover up this affinity for feeling criticized, the person does nothing. But such individuals can’t win—now they criticize themselves for accomplishing nothing or for not living up to their potential.

  Procrastinators may hold back because they feel forced or pushed into taking care of the tasks at hand. Instead of enjoying the work, they feel that they are submitting to someone else’s will or agenda, or they feel helpless and overwhelmed by life’s requirements. Their procrastination, then, becomes a passive-aggressive reaction to the feeling of being forced to submit to authority or situations that require their cooperation. Or the procrastinator is simply determined to go on feeling his or her attachment to inner passivity. Procrastination may also cover up fear of success, as happens when we procrastinate to block our progress because we feel we don’t deserve success. Or we may feel passive to the many demands and responsibilities that success will require of us.

  Other procrastinators are plagued by ambivalence. As soon as they try to move in one direction, they begin to doubt themselves, wondering whether another procedure or method is preferable. If they shift to that alternate course of action, they begin to doubt that choice, too. They carry within an emotional conviction that whatever they try to do, whatever choices they make, aren’t going to work. Inner messages of self-doubt (e.g., “Are you really sure you’re doing the right thing?”) are less harsh than self-criticism and self-reproach. Nonetheless, this voice of inner passivity can just as thoroughly sabotage us and cause us to suffer.

  Some of us make little progress because we are convinced we will never match the accomplishments of our parents. The main blocks, in this case, are our tendencies to compare ourselves unfavorably to others and to keep ourselves in a passivity which consists of our inner willingness to harbor feelings of being inadequate, overwhelmed, or defeated.

  C. Workaholics. These individuals are compulsively dedicated to work. They sacrifice their health, pleasure, and the love of family members because they are so desperate to neutralize inner accusations of their unworthiness. They use work to prove their worth. We can get some sense of value from work, of course, but workaholics make it an all-or-nothing deal:
Take away their work and they feel empty, as if they have no substance.

  Thus, the workaholic is likely to be dependent on flattering approval from coworkers, supervisors, and others. Even after an exhausting twelve-hour day, such individuals may continue to be absorbed with business worries and doubts about their performance. Meanwhile, they look down with scorn on those they feel don’t share their ambition or zeal for work. They do this because they unconsciously see their own weakness and failure in others. To counteract the accusation of their own lack of value, workaholics, in projection, scorn or strike down the perceived weakling.

  As a defense, workaholics sometimes employ a pseudo-moral connotation (as opposed to the negative pseudo-moral connotation mentioned earlier in this chapter) which goes like this: “There’s no ulterior motive for my hard work. What I’m doing is appropriate. Didn’t my mom and dad always tell me it’s important to work hard to get ahead?” The pseudo-moral defense represents the misuse of an educational precept, cunningly misinterpreted to sanction one’s indulgence in negative emotions, to one’s ultimate detriment.

  D. Blocked Creativity. Negative messages from the past about our capabilities can block our creative spirit. A man remembered feeling humiliated in his first year of high school when, in front of the art class, the assistant principal snorted with derision at an image he had drawn. Subsequent trepidation dogged his every attempt at this form of art. Artists abided in his family and he was sure, given time and training, he could have excelled.

  So fear of failure blocks creativity. We are afraid that any inkling of failure or possible failure will confirm what we are so ready to believe about ourselves, that we are inadequate and defective and can’t excel. As mentioned, we often associate our labors with the very essence of ourselves. With this belief, our work either has to be perfect or it is judged to be worthless. And if one’s work is rejected by others, the individual takes it personally: Registered unconsciously, the feeling is, “If my work is not good, then I’m no good.” Or the individual might believe that, “Since I’m no good, I surely can’t produce anything worthwhile.” Also, when we are evaluated or criticized for performance or behavior, we can be tempted to feel, through the emptiness or lack of value to which we are emotionally attached, that our whole self is being negated.

  Even when we are successful, we carry within ourselves an element that devalues our success. One client of mine, an artist, was making more money and acquiring more recognition than he had ever imagined. Yet the pleasure of his success was undermined by his doubts about the continuing flow of his creativity. Despite his success, he still bought into inner accusations of his flaws and inadequacies. In time, he learned to deflect the negative insinuations of his inner critic, primarily by observing the accusations with some detachment, as he resisted defending against them from his old default position of inner passivity. He was finally able to enjoy his success without being nagged by self-doubt.

  E. Not Supporting One’s Self Emotionally. We can abandon ourselves, or betray ourselves, even as success eagerly reaches out to be embraced. This is more likely to happen when we had parents who we feel were not supportive and who we believe withheld attention and love. If they didn’t acknowledge our qualities, and didn’t let us know in word and deed that they believed in us, we can be left with a deficiency of confidence and self-trust. We will overlook ourselves and our finer aspects, thereby doing to ourselves what we felt was done to us in childhood.

  Or we may reverse this and overrate our abilities, which can also be self-sabotaging. Parents sometimes exaggerate their child’s abilities, though in their body language, tone of voice, facial expression, and innuendo they can simultaneously exude doubts of future success. We grow up and overrate our abilities in order to compensate for our emotional uncertainty and our inability to confirm our value in a more intrinsic manner. We are first in line to undermine ourselves because we are prepared, especially when the stakes are high, to reactivate the old feeling that we are going to be a disappointment to others and seen as not having what it takes to live up to our billing.

  F. Suffering for Nothing. We need to watch out for our willingness to take on some form of suffering (headaches, anxiety, and worries) in the attempt to “prove” that we are truly sincere about wanting to succeed, prove our worth, or feel fulfilled. The ironic consequence is that we create more pain and suffering to make it look as if we are trying to avoid pain and suffering. For instance, Jack, a golfer, persistently “chokes” or fails to perform at his best in competition, much to his chagrin and embarrassment. When Jack was younger, his father often praised his golf skills, but Jack felt that beneath his father’s words was the expectation his son would never do very well. “Too bad you don’t get enough time to practice more,” his father often remarked after Jack had lost another match.

  Jack is emotionally attached to the feeling of losing and being a disappointment. In his unconscious mind, he is accused by the inner critic of liking this feeling, that he secretly “gets off ” on the old unresolved feeling of looking bad in the eyes of his father and others. “No!” Jack says in his unconscious defense. “I want to look good and be seen as a winner. I’m trying my best. Look how anxious I get before a match. And if I lose as a result of playing badly, I really feel bad. Surely that proves how much I want to win.” Unfortunately, all it proves is how much Jack is willing to suffer with anxiety and shame to cover up, and thus maintain, his unconscious attachment to the feeling of looking bad and being seen as a loser.

  Middle-age can produce unnecessary suffering and self-sabotage, particularly in men. When we reach our forties and fifties, still struggling in careers and relationships, we see time running out and realize we may never achieve the goals of youth. Even for someone who has raised a family and held a good job, the feeling can be, “Is this all life has in store for me?” Now we are ready to sabotage our chance to live at peace with ourselves in old age. The inner critic rushes into the breach: “You see, you loser, you didn’t make it! Too bad—if you’d tried harder, you probably could have made it. It’s too late for you now, you’re all washed up!”

  We are reluctant to consider in this middle-age predicament that our unhappiness is due to the fact that we are the ones who berate ourselves mercilessly for no good reason. Hence, to account for our unhappiness, we blame the one who is closest to us—our partner. How do we know our partner is to blame? Because she is boring and she is getting old. She’s the one who hasn’t lived up to expectations; she’s the one who’s been a disappointment. We project on to our partner the disappointment we feel in ourselves, and we may convince ourselves that another partner is just the tonic we need to restore our vigor and our purpose.

  Some middle-aged rebels—again, mostly men—go through with plans to become involved with another woman in order to “prove” they are still young and attractive. Others retreat into discontent, passivity, and hypochondria, postponing all plans for a renewal on life. In either case, the current partner is blamed for the rebel’s discontent.

  If you believe your partner has let you down, consider taking a good look at yourself. What you are feeling about your partner may be a direct reflection of what you are feeling about yourself.

  Work-History Profile and Exercises

  This work-history profile and related exercises are designed to help you take responsibility for a lack of success in your career or for the feeling that work is a dreary necessity. It may take several hours to answer these questions thoughtfully, so find quiet time in order to collect the information. Or else do only twenty or thirty minutes of writing at a time. Keep your notes and answers in a notebook or journal so you can review them frequently as you look for more understanding of your limiting patterns. Some questions may appear to be repetitious, but I ask similar questions in different contexts to help you come up with new thoughts and feelings and to generate insight.

  Write down all the major jobs you have held. For each job answer the following questions: What mo
tivated you to take this job (career)? What did you hope to gain? Include emotional gains.

  What did you like about this job?

  Describe your positive skills or talents in this job.

  Describe your weaknesses in this job.

  What did you not like about the job?

  What feelings were triggered in you by this job?

  How did you get along with your boss and coworkers? Describe any interaction issues. How did you feel around them?

  Why did you leave this job or change your career?

  Did you work at your highest potential with this job?

  Look over all of your jobs. Pull out the common themes, feelings, or patterns that seem to persist. For example, boredom, anxiety, too skilled for the job, feelings of inadequacy, and so on.

  Describe your parents’ work history. How did each parent feel about his and her job? Were they happy or discontented? Do you see any parallels between your work history and your parents’ work history?

  How did your parents define success?

  Describe any negative messages that you may have received from your parents, either directly or indirectly, about your skills and ability to perform.

  Describe your present situation with regard to your work or career. How are you feeling about it?

  Do these feelings correlate with the feelings and patterns in your work-history profile?

  Do you feel this way about other areas of your life, such as your relationships with others or with yourself?