Hi! Today's post is extremely long, probably as long as the questionnaire, so I'm not even going to bother with small talk today; let's just get into it. Self-sabotage. This was actually the post I was intending to put out last week, but I saw the tag video while I was prepping this post and immediately put this one off for today. I'm glad I did, because I realized there was a lot to say about it and I wanted to include as much as I could. Self-sabotage is a very layered and complex subject but something I've noticed of late is how many people actively sabotage themselves and how many different reasons there are when it's being done. Through the conversations I've had and reading the other posts from people talking about self-sabotage, I was able to put together a small list of common reasons why people typically stand in their own way.
A number of expressions are often used to describe self-sabotage, but they all come back to the same concept. Again, I've noticed this topic coming up repeatedly over the past week since I initially decided to do it and when I see the path I'm on mirrored with so many other people, not only does it kind of give me this relief that I'm not the only one talking about something, but it also helps me when I'm trying to articulate my thoughts on a subject and don't really know how.
Now don't get me wrong--I'm not saying that if you sabotage yourself, it automatically means you don't love yourself. You can simultaneously love and sabotage yourself. But when you don't love yourself, there's typically a reason. That reason has a lot to do with the opportunities you allow in your life, the chances that you allow yourself to take, and for a lot of people, they don't realize their self-view has bled into other areas of their lives. The self-love journey is sometimes an ugly one, like I said last week. This is one of those ugly times where we have to take stock of ourselves and what we've allowed in or out, and resolve to get out of our own way. When you love yourself, you're aware of yourself. And when you're aware of yourself, you have to be willing to work on and improve yourself, which means no longer sabotaging yourself. Play the drinking game for every time I've said 'yourself' since the start of this post. You'd be drunk already. LOL Anyway, here are 6 of the more common reasons I've noticed for self-sabotage:
This is far and wide the most common reason I've seen from people in my life, people I hear about in others' stories, hell even fictional characters in books I read have this struggle. When you've either convinced yourself or allowed someone else to convince you that your lot in life is all you deserve, you gain an unlimited amount of tolerance to fuckery. I have a relative whose mother poisoned her mind almost entirely for decades. Made her feel terribly about herself, made her feel as though she wasn't enough. And that mentality followed her into adulthood, when she took over from her mother in sabotaging herself, both through the people she allowed into her life and the poison she put in her own mind about herself. This person is educated, well-liked, respected, and has done a lot for her family. In my eyes, she's so much better than those negative thoughts and deserved much better from the people in her life, but because of the mentality she's had ingrained in her for so long, she still battles with Not Enough Syndrome.
It's one thing for others to tell you you don't deserve better than what you have but when you start believing it, that's when the real sabotage starts. And that's what you have to conquer on your own. You have to know that you're better than the negative situations in your life, that you deserve better than the toxic people you surround yourself with. But with situations that mention what one 'deserves,' its equally important to remain in check about it. It is completely fine to understand, know and walk in the knowledge that you deserve more out of your life. It is also okay to walk away from things or people who are giving you less than you know you deserve.
But don't work in extremes, which I have seen happen with a few people. By that I mean don't go from thinking you deserve nothing to expecting the entire world to bend the knee, kiss your toes and suckle from your divine breasts of holiness. Don't let 'deserve' become confused with 'entitled.' Learn some balance is all I'm saying. lol But be honest with yourself. Are you actively putting out behavior that warrants better treatment (obviously this doesn't apply to serious situations like abuse--if you're being abused, there is no answer but to get out, as quickly as you can)? If the answer is yes, then proceed with getting your shit straight. But if you're not being so good to people in your life and not giving them your best while expecting it from them, then between you and I, no, you don't deserve better yet. You deserve to know that THEY deserve better from you before you go clomping around making demands. THEN you can work on what you need in your life to make things better for you.
Anyway, off my soapbox. You sabotage yourself both when you're not treating others the way you'd like to be treated and when you are willingly dealing with treatment you don't like or deserve. No, you can't change people and some folks are just built that way. They'll always treat people like shit regardless of whether you tell them about themselves or not. But if you don't do better for yourself by way of distancing yourself from them or the narrative they've put in your mind, you're just as culpable as they are of sabotage.
I remember being younger and hearing that someone was afraid of succeeding, and I remember thinking it was the dumbest fear in the world. I now have the unlimited joy 😒 of now being afraid of both succeeding and failing, so thanks karma. Fear is a big one for me, and it's still one that I face on a regular basis. Anxiety notwithstanding, I'm deathly afraid of failing. Because I already struggle with feeling like a failure, I feel like I only have so many chances before I've ruined my life and wasted too much time. Which I know sounds apocalyptic as hell, but welcome to my brain. But on the flip, I've never succeeded to a significant degree before. I've spent my life dirt poor and I'm already afraid to be more poor than I am now because I remember exactly what that was like, but reaching a point of success scares me because it's a further distance to fall from. Because I know nothing, even success, is permanent, it scares me to think about being successful one day and failing at something major the next.
I don't want to be one of those people who changes with success. What makes that scary is that it seems like many of those people who change don't even realize it because it's that sneaky, that subtle. At first. So if it were to happen to me, would I realize I'd changed, or would I convince myself that I'm just 'growing?' I have what I call Other Shoe to Drop Syndrome, which basically means that I live my life just waiting for the other shoe to drop because that's been a repeating pattern throughout my life. So I don't want to succeed and become accustomed to that, then fail. Being an entrepreneur means accepting the possibility of failure as a feasible outcome and recovering from it. For me, because I already feel as though I'm on borrowed time and only have finite chances to succeed, I struggle to adapt the 'entrepreneurial' mentality, which really just sabotages any chances I'd have anyway. It affects my mindset, which in turn obliterates any ambition or motivation I'd have, which overall affects how people could perceive me and the opportunities I'm able to take. It also affects the opportunities I am presented with because if I'm afraid to fail but equally afraid to succeed, it causes me to choke. I freeze. That lack of movement is sabotage.
Doubt is a sneaky little bitch. I'd written a post on this before but never published it because it was so long. The irony, right? lol This is one of the largest ways in which I still sabotage myself. I have a lot of doubt in myself, and when I allow it to take precedence over other emotions, it does eventually affect how I feel about myself overall. Here's an example. I've been blogging for nearly a decade now, and I've never seen the numbers I would have liked to see from it, never been able to take my blogs to that oft-mentioned 'next level.' Not because I don't think I can handle it and not because I don't think I put out good reviews, because I know I can handle it and I like my reviews. Operative word being I.
But I'd hoped for more of a core audience by this point and to not have it no matter what I do or post makes me extremely doubtful of my content and by extension, myself. I may like something I'm working on, like this Self-Love series for example, but when I put it out, promote it and encourage others to read it, it never quite pays off the way I intended, from either additional clicks on the link or engagement on the social media posts I make.
Even though I like and am proud of the content, the lack of growth makes me feel like I'm the only one feeling positively about it, which makes me doubt whether or not it's really any good. I guess you could say in this respect I'm looking for validation from others, but I'm a blogger. I put out reviews for consumers so outside validation in this context is literally my job. lol
When I'm feeling particularly negative about myself, I'll stall to put something out, which takes a post I could have completed on time and makes it days, sometimes weeks, later than I intended, which also makes me doubt myself. I think in this same token, some of my real-life business plans also take a hit because I stall to bring them to fruition, which is sabotaging any opportunities I'd have with the business. Doubt and not having faith in yourself can cause you to completely freeze in your tracks (like I mentioned above), and again, the failure to move all is just as harmful to your growth as moving backward.
I hadn't thought of guilt until I was watching Anna Akana's Why we self-sabotage video yesterday and she mentioned not wanting to do better for herself after losing her sister and dealing with survivor's guilt. At first I assumed I couldn't relate, but then I realized I have a permanent case of survivor's guilt, even in situations in which it makes no sense. Over the years, there were tons of situations in my past in which I felt guilty for one reason or another and either denied myself something or didn't allow myself to fully enjoy it out of guilt. A few years ago, I was newly single and my health was better (once winter was over lol), so I was out doing a lot more living, which was a new one for me.
Even though this was my first go at finally being able to experience things others in my age group were experiencing, I still felt bad because while I was out doing that, my mom was at home taking care of my siblings by herself. I felt like I was out living it up and leaving them to suffer. I wasn't, they were fine, but I wasn't used to being able to think for just myself and I let the guilt overcome me more than once. I've passed up opportunities and did my part in ruining opportunities in my relationships because I felt guilty for leaving my family behind, even though my family did nothing at all to ever make me feel that way. I just felt guilty, so I wouldn't go through with it. Jobs, moving in with partners or even roommates, all got passed up partially out of guilt.
The natural goal of a parent is to have children who do better than them and my mom is no different, but even as I want to do better so I can pull her out of the fire, I feel terrible when I have the opportunity to do better and I can't immediately take her with me. Anytime a natural disaster happens, I won't work on anything, won't do anything at all, for a few days because I feel so bad for the people experiencing it. I feel bad that this tragedy happened to them instead of me and my guilt about it keeps me from resuming my normal activities. A lot of times, the help required to recover disaster areas is monetary and I don't have that so I feel helpless to do anything, which makes me feel worse. In case it's not already apparent, I have a lot of issues. lol
When you're early on in your self-love/discovery journey, it makes sense that you're probably unaware of your more self-destructive behaviors. I've noticed this more in people who've been through shit in their lives or didn't have the most stable upbringing. There are a few people in my life who have a habit of sabotaging relationships once they feel themselves falling too deep. They become irritated by small, almost microscopic things that they surely wouldn't have noticed had they liked the men in question less, but the more they fell, the more critical they got. Basically, they find reasons to end the relationship, then not understand why it failed.
I noticed that a couple of them do this partially because they feel that their situations are better than they deserved, for a couple of them it was their fear to embrace happiness and potentially get hurt, but for a couple of them their inability to realize this as a self-destructive behavior is at least half of the reason. This is one of the reasons that is usually intertwined with another reason, like doubt or fear. It's more subtle than the signature self-destructive behaviors like risky sex, drug/alcohol abuse or gambling, which makes it a bit more dangerous because it's harder to detect without help.
When you become self-aware (you're not a robot but you know what I mean lol) it's a lot easier to recognize when you're being destructive to yourself. Your work from then becomes recognizing and striking down those self-destructive behaviors preventing you from being a better person, having a more positive outlook or living a better life.
If you don't have a proper view of yourself, you end up doing a lot to stand in your own way, sometimes without realizing it. I see this a lot in people who currently beat themselves up over previous mistakes. For months and sometimes years afterward, their view of themselves doesn't expand beyond this mistake and stunts any growth they may have made because they still see themselves as the person who made this mistake. It's not always a situation in which they don't think they deserve any better, but they actively aren't working to ensure that they receive any better because of their view of themselves. When they approach things, they approach it as the person they believe themselves to be, which is always worse than the person they actually are. They don't believe themselves to be as capable as they actually are, don't ever see themselves as being better than the person they believe they are, and treat themselves as such.
This could also be parlayed into a lack of self-love, which I'm going to talk about next week, because often a destructive view of self prevents you from loving yourself. It's cyclical, which is why I separated them rather than combining them. When you don't love yourself you often have a self-defeating view of yourself, which is sabotage, and when you go into things with a destructive and untrue view of yourself you're less prone to actually love and believe in that version of yourself, which is also sabotage.
If you've gotten this far, just know that I love you. I love you and I wish heaven's blessings upon your face. lol I know this was long and very rambly, but I really wanted to be thorough with the explanations behind these reasons. If you're not ready to quit on me yet, the other half of these reasons will be up next week. See you then!
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