e caused it to fail).
- Feeling unworthy. Low self-esteem may drive people to feel they 'don't deserve' success or happiness. (See "7 Steps to Self-Belief".)
- Bad habits such as excessive drinking, smoking, or uncontrolled anger.
- Need for excitement. It might be an otherwise perfect sunny afternoon and seemingly out of the blue, Joe picks a fight, goes into a silent mood, or drags up some unrelated contentious issue from the past. Suddenly, the afternoon turns into a battleground. The desire for 'excitement' can take different forms, not all of them constructive.
But surely if people know they are doing this, they wouldn't do it!
So is sabotaging ourselves an unconscious affliction?
People seldom mean to sabotage themselves. It's not generally a conscious decision to spoil things - and that's a problem. We can be left with the feeling: "Why did I do that?!" Many of our emotional drivers remain unconscious, which is why chronic self-saboteurs will often use conscious justification (or what seem like excuses) to explain why they had to:
- Yell at their professor and get kicked off the course.
- Break off contact with a friend who was about to offer them a great job.
- End a promising relationship.
Early learning - or should I say mis-learning - can create the habit of self-sabotage and 'things going right' may seem like a scary and foreign country. If you feel you are prone to this sort of behaviour, then these tips may well help you (as long as you let them).
1) Observe yourself
Forget justifying why you did (or didn't do) this or that; just watch yourself. The adage "don't listen to what people say, but watch what they do" to see what they're really like can be applied to yourself equally well. Imagine you're someone else whose behaviour you're watching. Ask yourself: "What did I do there?" and "What was driving it?" Was it fear, spite, the need to be in control (even if that control is related to making things fail), the need for excitement through conflict, or the desire for attention through sympathy?
One client who did this realized that he had been unconsciously reluctant to earn more than his (bullying) father had done when he was alive: "As if I couldn't betray him by being better off than he had been." This realization helped him overcome this limiting belief once he had observed it operating within himself. He decided to actually ignore it until the old compulsion not to succeed became a faint whisper, then died away all together.
What do you sabotage and how? Get to 'know the machine'. Seeing your own behaviour more clearly has nothing to do with over-applied self-blame, but rather being more objective.
2) Remember that success isn't black or white
Strongly imagine (and get into the habit of strongly imagining) what true success will be like, because it may be different from what you'd been unconsciously assuming. Successful relationships, for example, don't work well all of the time; earning good money doesn't solve all problems. Success isn't black or white; it's all relative. So remember that becoming successful (in whatever way) won't feel so strange when it happens, because it is a natural part of being human - but the idea of success may feel strange.
3) Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
People often self-sabotage because of perfectionism - if it isn't perfect, then what's the point? You may have heard about recent research (1) which showed that people on strict diets, trying to lose weight, will more likely overeat if they feel they have veered off their diet even slightly: "What the hell, I've blown it now. I might as well completely binge!" People not on diets don't do this so much. So if you have a little setback or mini-failure, consciously stop yourself from throwing it all away and seeing the 'whole thing as just ruined' and then really ruining it.
4) Think beyond yourself
Most of us don't like to consider ourselves as selfish, but it is also true to say (not from a judgemental perspective; more of an observational one) that self-sabotage ruins stuff for others and is therefore a selfi