You’ll be surprised by how much of a burden you can be to yourself. You are literally self sabotaging. Most of the time, unconsciously. If you have a long history of failure, that could mean you managed to become your worst enemy. Stop it.
Easier said than done, I agree. Self sabotaging is really difficult to identify. I know it was difficult to identify for me. I didn’t even know I was self-sabotaging myself until I was able to see, after many years, some patterns.
For me, it was fear of success. I was so afraid of being successful that I was unconsciously sabotaging myself. For you, it may be anything else. But it’s happening more often than you think. Make peace with the fact that you may be your worse enemy and after that, make peace with this enemy.
Whenever you do something wrong in a context you’re usually doing great, you’re unconsciously self sabotaging.
How To Stop Self Sabotage
Self sabotage can grow from many sources. Myriads of causes. From upbringing to phobias, or from bad habits up to emotional imbalance. But if you try to find a common link between all these causes, eventually you’ll get to the ultimate one: a dissociation from your own nature.
It’s like you’re made of two different people: one is doing stuff and the other one is nagging about it. One is living and the other one is complaining.
The dynamic of this relationship is circular. Each persona is “feeding” the other one.
Now, which one is real? Which one is the real you? The one doing stuff? Or the one that is constantly unsatisfied?
There is a trick here, in this question. Do you see it?
No? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. The question in itself is not correct. The dichotomy, the separation implied by the question is wrong. Because no matter what you answer to it, you will hurt someone. No matter what part of you will find “unreal”, you will lose something. You will be hurt.
The healing comes not from finding the “guilty” one out of the two personas which are fighting inside you, but to realize they’re, in fact, just one. Depending on your perspective, one is always a projection, is not real. But, together, they’re one.
What I described so far is a microsecond long process. This fight between who’s doing stuff and who’s complaining is not even conscious. It’s something so deeply engrained in our behavior, that we’re not even sensing it anymore. What we do sense is the result: we’re not able to accomplish anything. The auto-pilot processes are working so fast and so silent, that we consider them to be the natural state of things.
Alas, things are completely different in their natural state.
Do you remember playing as kid? Do you remember that feeling of being totally immersed? Totally in the flow? And the deep conviction that what you’re doing is exactly what it should happen? Well, that is the natural state of things.
Between this deep feeling of immersion and the current state of things, in which nothing seems right, something happened. Inside of you there’s a fracture. As a kid, you had no fracture at all, you didn’t even know what a fracture is.
So, somewhere along the lines, you lost this sense of wholeness. You did acquire something very useful, that’s true, and that’s your analytical thinking. Your discrimination, or the ability to separate “right” from “wrong”. But you took this ability to areas where it shouldn’t go. It’s very useful to discriminate between “right” and “wrong” when there’s a survival situation. Or a very specific event. That’s where analytical thinking comes in very handy. Unfortunately, we impregnated this discrimination on parts of our lives where it shouldn’t be. Like our our own sense of identity. We cut ourselves in tiny fractions of “good” and “bad” and we started a silent battle between those fractions.
That’s how we are self sabotaging ourselves.
If we could just accept and integrate anything we are into one single person, just like a kid, while still maintaining the benefits of analytical thinking, well, this blog post wouldn’t exist at all. Self-sabotage wouldn’t exist at all.
further reading
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