Self Sabotage

Why is it that many of us practice self sabotage, I have, I continue to do so. It usually arises through fear, an innate fear associated with past experience, usually from childhood. I remain stuck in the familiar because I’m afraid of the unknown or I don’t believe myself to be worthy of success or not able to manage it in the long run.

There is an argument that goes on inside of me, I can, I will, I am and then I can’t, I won’t and I’m not, this argument needs resolving once and for all because it’s holding me up. I want to believe in the possibility of everything turning out okay, I’m getting better at it but I can still dilly dally and occasionally miss the boat.

I always sabotaged my birthday’s as an adult, I had such wonderful birthdays as a child, they could never match up so unconsciously I sabotaged them. I was ill, people let me down for some reason or it rained, there was always an excuse, I couldn’t just relax and enjoy the day for what it was. This changed after the death of my mother, in a strange way she wasn’t around to give me the perfect birthday of my childhood or birthdays just didn’t seem important anymore. With loss, we tend to gain perspective, I did anyway, I’m sure it’s common.

I have often not felt worthy of success, because as a child I didn’t feel worthy. Not because I wasn’t loved more than any child on earth by my wonderful mother but because my father left. He didn’t leave me, he left my mother but I have always carried a feeling of not being good enough. It’s silly, I really was loved deeply by my mother and she showed me this in every way possible but the loss of my father took some of my self belief. I’m over that now but it’s taken a good part of my life and still impacts because when I go into that self sabotage mode, I don’t always recognise the trigger.

Somewhere along the way I looked at it for what it was eventually, saw my dad for who he was and realised he didn’t judge me half as much as I thought he did, in some areas he was proud. It was my own doubts and assumptions and if it wasn’t what does it matter what others think.

I can easily repeat the pattern of self sabotage if trying to do something new. It’s because I want to please all of the people, all of the time and this simply won’t happen in a million years. I worry about what others will think and say, I fret over possible failure so much that it can prevent me from ever beginning. I have to move away from being a people pleaser and start to ask myself if I make myself happy, because bottom line, that’s what it’s about, living a life of authenticity. Living the life that makes us happy, living passionately doing what we love and not what is expected of us.

Truth is, I believe we have everything we will ever need inside, we just can’t always see it, we are capable of great things but lack the belief in ourselves and until we find that self belief we will always fail to reach our full potential.

I sometimes wonder if it is fear of success and how we might manage that holds us back. Our humanness or those self imposed restrictions we put on ourselves.

We are capable of almost anything but that is if we trust, see beyond the human experience somehow, beyond failure, beyond history. We are quite remarkable, we are capable of so much more than we know or give ourselves credit for, we just need to get outside of the mould, get away from who we think we are and start to work from a state of being. It’s the human that sabotages, who is programmed not to believe in possibilities, we need to step out of the human and into possibilities.

I’ve taken to asking myself if I’m attempting to sabotage in some way, I won’t say how I answer but it’s an interesting exercise!

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