“The barrier to our future is often the very plans that we’ve created to get there.”
—Craig D. Lounsbrough, counselor, minister, and coach.
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You will stop sabotaging yourself when you stop asking the same questions. This opens a door to a slew of related behaviors, none of which are simple. By considering these related behaviors we can clarify why self-sabotage is both hard to see and hard to stop.
It is tempting to see self-sabotage as a desire to be self-destructive, but that is facile and incorrect. Few people intend to destroy themselves even when their actions appear to cause them harm. Despite having a destructive effect, almost all of our actions are intended to improve our condition.
I must say “almost” because the logic of some actions is so lacking that it’s pathological. But even pathological people think there is going to be a benefit to actions that, when seen logically, have an overwhelming chance of causing harm.
Whether or not you’re thinking straight and your reasons are logical, you act to gain something. If you need something, you try to obtain it. If you feel unworthy, you act to redeem yourself. If you’re frightened, you protect yourself. Despite sabotaging yourself in every other way, you may still feel relieved, redeemed, or rewarded.
If your actions appear self-destructive when viewed from outside we’ll call it self-sabotage but, to you, your actions may have some positive result. This highlights another aspect of self-sabotage, which is that people are famously bad at judging the outcome of uncertain events.
Understanding Is Valuable, Awareness Is Critical
People are terrible at understanding complexity, and the more complexity we’re involved with, the greater the danger we’ll fail. This may be humanity’s greatest failing. It not only results in people’s endless losses in lotteries, but their poor intuitions, mistaken judgements, misplaced attention, and destructive actions. We use emotions to guide our decisions, and are poor masters of it.
This is partly a flaw in our ability to understand causes and weigh outcomes; these are logical skills. But our greater flaw lies in being oblivious to alternatives. We tend to be stubborn and narrow minded. We don’t see our ignorance and we are uncomfortable in exploring new ways of thinking.
On the whole, being stubborn and oblivious is a good strategy for humanity. It means all of our stupid and unsuccessful ideas will be thoroughly explored to the point where no one will follow these ideas again. Fighting pointless wars might, some day, convince people to stop fighting wars.
Surrender Leads to Success
Repeatedly trying a failed approach is an effective way to conclude that it will never succeed, but it is inefficient and, more importantly, it can go on for a long time. There are more ways to fail than there are to succeed, and they are easier to sell. It may be good to know that a million trials have all resulted in failure, but if your resources are limited, it’s a poor strategy.
Repeating failed strategies is usually the most attractive option. It allows you to blame one thing while retaining all your other wants, needs, thoughts, and feelings. It’s natural that if you’ve defined yourself and invested your resources in achieving something you cannot get, you’ll try another way to satisfy yourself that involves the least change and effort.
Repeating failed strategies cannot be done carelessly. Every failure should offer useful information. If many people’s resources are being used, then many people should be learning from each failure. All decision makers should be involved and informed. How often does this happen?
It could be that you’ll succeed if you just try hitting the problem from a slightly different angle, phrasing your demand in a different way, or making a small change to the situation. Thousands of people follow this brute force approach. But when you’re violent, belligerent, or avoidant the result will be self-sabotage, not success.
We live in a culture that celebrates brute force and simplistic thinking. Competitive sports endorses our fixation on a single goal. Compulsory education says the long out-of-date test is the only measure of success. We run businesses with short term thinking. We endorse gender stereotypes that create one-dimensional people. We elect Trumpian thinkers who sabotage national programs for personal gain.
Changing strategy can feel like surrender and defeat, but it’s more often a surrender to insight. There are some problems you will not solve, and you don’t want to waste resources for no gain. But there is much to be gained in appreciating the depth of an unsolvable problem, and there is much you can offer others when you understand unsolvable problems deeply.
How to create love in another person seems like an unsolvable problem, but it’s important to explore and whatever you discover will be of value. Understanding yourself is another unanswerable question, but all serious attempts yield valuable insights that can be used and taught.
Reasons Mean Nothing
Recognize these points. Reasoning is what you apply when you give a cause for something. Logic is what you apply when there is a cause and effect. Reason indicates you want something. Logic tells you what’s likely to succeed.
There is absolutely no connection between reason and logic. Just because someone tells you a reason, or you have a reason of your own, doesn’t mean these reasons are credible. Reasons need no basis. The only way to turn a reason into something logical is to test it or to refer to tests of it.
“To test” means “to do.” Inference, belief, hearsay, and other people’s endorsement are not tests. Evidence means experience. If you act without evidence or, what’s worse, you accept misleading evidence, then you will fail regardless of how many variations you try.
On the basis of evidence, it would seem easy to avoid repeated failures but there is a catch: not only don’t you want to change your behavior, you also don’t want to see the evidence that you should.
This is the Achilles Heel of the person who believes themself to be realistic and aware. The truth is if you’re experiencing frustration and a lack of progress, then you are not aware, not realistic, or both. Such people typically spend their lives repeating their failures until they stop trying.
The desire to satisfy your wants not only misdirects your efforts, it distorts your reality. Your wants are probably valid, but they don’t provide direction. Your wants are like a house of mirrors. You cannot simply pursue what you want, you must understand what you want. The self-saboteur is not honestly aware. It’s not your actions that are at fault, it’s your self-deception.
Answer These Questions
If you feel you’re sabotaging yourself, then question your goals and your resources. Ask yourself these questions:
- Are you expecting a field of work, a group of people, or a person to reward you when they never have in the past?
- Is what you’re trying to achieve going to take you to where you want to be?
- Do you know where you want to be?
- Have you ever been rewarded, endorsed, or affirmed by anyone in a stable, satisfying, and reciprocal relationship?
Here are answers to these questions.
- The only field, group, or person who will reward you is that which has from the start, and has done so honestly. If you find you have not been honestly treated in the past, then there is little hope that you ever will be.
- If you have not been inspired by your work or relationships, don’t expect your experience to improve. This does not mean you should expect success at every step, it means you should feel mutual commitment at every step.
- No one knows where they want to be, they only know if they’re content with where they are. The future is discovered and it should be treated as unexplored territory. You should ask yourself what you want, feel, need, and expect, and you should try to formulate answers. Don’t expect them to be right. They won’t be.
- What has rewarded, endorsed, or affirmed you in the past is your compass in navigating the present and the goal you should be heading for. To the extent that past guidance has been unrewarding, it’s been poor guidance. Replace it. If you have never found guidance then tell others you do not yet know where you’re going and you’re trying to find your way.
Making Corrections
When you make a unilateral change of plans you can expect everyone who is profiting from your old promises and behaviors to object. You will be discouraged and disparaged by those people in the system you have created for yourself and which you now question. There is little you can do about this other than to unplug yourself and start from scratch.
Of course, you will have accumulated resources of your own consisting of skills, intuition, and insights. In an unrewarding situation, your assets will go unrecognized and exploited. While unplugging yourself disconnects you from the system of meager rewards, it also removes you from toxic ground.
Your task is to find fertile ground because in that ground you will naturally prosper. In fertile ground you may still experience failure, but your failures will be rewarding and directing. They can boost your self esteem rather than undermine it.
Your progress may look like nothing to others. Your efforts might be poorly received or entirely ignored. Both of these receptions are to be expected and, if they come without good intentions, recognize them as unhelpful.
Ask only for help from people or systems that know you and whose engagement is trustworthy. You must have the self-respect to persevere in following your own direction. The lack of self-respect is the fundamental reason for self-sabotage.
Proving Yourself
I’ve found self-respect to come from demonstrations of virtue or achievement. It depends on what you feel you lack. If you feel you’re incapable, then achievement might convince you otherwise. If you feel unworthy, then an affirmation of your virtue might provide the support you need.
I write a lot, but writing has become easy. That is an accomplishment of sorts and it might be enough if I was a really good writer. I’ve created new and useful software, but that’s a commercial venture and, like all commercial ventures, it has little meaning. I’ve had many risky adventures. Those were valuable but I cannot explain exactly why.
I’ve made progress in physics, and this has been significant for me. Its significance lies partly in the importance of the ideas, and partly in the repudiation of the people who made me feel unworthy.
I went into physics feeling it was a worthy personal pursuit, but I discovered it was a community of hostile, egotistical people. It may not be unusual in that regard, but to gain insight despite this has provided me with a measure of achievement.
My relationships have been a struggle and I have not achieved what I wanted, but I have had inspiring, virtuous relationships. I have some idea of what love means. I believe in these ideals and I’ve seen them modeled by a few others.
Animals are pure sources of affirmation of one’s virtue. Many people could improve their self-respect if they deepened their relationships with bonding animals. People don’t take these relationships as seriously as they should. They develop attachments, but not the deep communication through which virtue can be affirmed.
Ideally, parents could develop this communication with their children who depend on them more than their animals. I know of few parents who have found virtue through their children and, as a therapist, I mostly hear from the children of those parents who failed.
To prove your ability you only need to achieve. That’s fairly easy to do if you commit yourself to an endeavor. You need to consider whether what you’re working on has value.
To prove your virtue be virtuous. Ideally, you want to be rewarded, as that makes it much easier to feel you’ve succeeded. But to be virtuous with difficult people, while harder to place yourself, may be more enduring.
In these cases, your self-respect is based on your belief in yourself and not on another person’s endorsement of you. It seems circular to base self-respect on one’s self opinion, and it does risk the delusion of virtue based on rank, religion, or authority. But if you can find self-respect based on service to others, then your self-respect has a solid foundation.
My approach to clients who sabotage themselves—and that includes all of us to some extent —is to develop self-respect at the deepest level. While this is largely a question of one’s virtue, many of us over achievers are still trying to demonstrate our value.
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