Sabotaging our own success

Holding ourselves back from progress, leaning away from our strengths, freezing in the face of fear and self-doubt, reclaiming our worth, and taking ownership over our lives.

Nov 27, 2023

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There’s an interesting thing that can happen when we set a goal for ourselves and start taking the steps necessary to achieve it.

Sometimes, whether consciously or not, we halt our progress by leaning into our fears, reinforcing the worst case scenario, and participating in our own downfall. Sometimes we do things that ensure the change we want doesn’t occur. This is self-sabotage.

When habits are new, it’s normal to experience early setbacks and even fall into old routines when the new ones feel challenging. This is our brain’s way of adjusting to newness and unfamiliarity. It puts forth these checks and balances that ensure the change is something that’s safe and achievable. Sometimes those checks and balances are helpful and other times they prevent real change from occurring.

This is a note about the actions we take that hold us back from making the change we wish to make. Personally, I think the use of the term self-sabotage can sometimes be used to shame or blame ourselves for our shortcomings. It is often used as a way to highlight our weaknesses and spotlight our mistakes.

How do I…?

Together I hope we can hold the nuance of this terminology. Here’s the nuance as I see it: Most of the time, our shortcomings are not due to something we choose, but we do have a role to play in moving through the heavy and hard so we can feel lighter.

I do think it’s possible for us to name our challenges and accept where we’re at without becoming consumed by shame, self-blame, and failure. One of the most common lead-ups I get when someone asks me how to make a change is “How do I…?” In a way, the framing of this question already assumes some level of personal responsibility for making a change (unless, of course, the question is “How do I get someone else in my life to change?”).

This isn’t to say that we are always the cause of our shortcomings. There are many things that happen to us or impact us that are beyond our control and beyond our choosing. This isn’t about those things. This is a discussion about the times when we inevitably participate in our own downfalls and hinder our own progress.

Self-sabotage is common. We all do it to some degree. In order to illustrate what this looks like, I have a vignette I want to share which illustrates how self-sabotage hides beneath the surface and may often go unnoticed in a process of change.

Meet Stephanie

Stephanie is a 35 year old finance professional. She works overtime, but not just at work. She works overtime to be liked by others at all costs. She goes above and beyond when her boss asks her to do something. She helps her friends whenever they need a hand. She does everything her mom asks of her. She’s the one people call whenever they need someone to talk to and she’s the one that keeps giving, even when she doesn’t have much to give. She does everything she’s told to do but she’s noticing that it isn’t making her feel good.

Stephanie wants to make a change. “People always tell me what to do, but I need to start prioritizing myself. It’s like I never have any time for myself because I’ always giving to others!” All in all, Stephanie wants to feel less stressed and more in control.

Stephanie sets clear goals in therapy. When her boss tells her to do something, she wants to check her calendar before saying yes. When her mom tells her to do something, she wants to check in with her body to see if she has the bandwidth to take it on. When her friends tells her to do something, she wants to collaborate with them and see how they can work together.

As you might imagine, these goals may be challenging for a person whose identity is wrapped up in being helpful and purposeful to others. It is hard to prioritize yourself when you’ve spent a long time prioritizing others. Stephanie’s old patterns may begin to surface in this scenario and her goals may prove to be in conflict with her known way of doing things.

Here’s how self-sabotage comes into play with Stephanie. In her pursuit of being more self-assured and her insistent desire to be less stressed, she starts to set rigid boundaries with others. She starts saying “no!” to her boss every time he asks if she can help him with something. She checks in with herself and becomes more angry and firm with her mom when she’s told what to do. And she notices a new pattern with her friend— she’s trying to be more collaborative but her friend starts to pull away from the friendship. She notices that if she’s not giving everything to this friend, her friend becomes less interested.

Stephanie starts to feel uneasy about these changes and notices that her own intentional changes, which she thought were positive, have had a ripple effect on her relationships. She is passed up for a promotion at work. Her relationship with her mom becomes strained. And her friend starts to pull back even more. This isn’t what Stephanie originally set out to do. This isn’t what she wanted. A new stress begins to emerge.

She starts to develop a new set of thoughts and feelings that she hasn’t experienced before. Doubt starts to set in. Guilt takes over. She begins to think she’s doing something wrong. She starts to believe that bad things happen and people turn against her when she prioritizes herself. She also defaults back to a pleasing pattern as a way to not rock the boat any further. Unable to tolerate the stress of change, she scraps her goal altogether and slips into old patterns so she can restore the peace that she feels like she disrupted. She goes back to feeling depleted and depressed and becomes convinced that there’s nothing she can do to improve her situation.

While she didn’t choose to sabotage her goal in this way, Stephanie felt that it was easier to go back to the way things were rather than move through the discomfort and clarify a new way forward. In therapy, her and I take a compassionate look at how she came to the point where stopping the goal altogether became a better option than continuing to pursue it.

We dig a bit deeper

In therapy, Stephanie shares that she thought she was doing something wrong and making things worse, so she decided her goal was no longer worth pursuing. She felt like a burden. She felt like her boundaries were too much. And she felt like she wanted to be seen differently than the way she was being perceived. In truth, Stephanie just needed some support in resetting her vision and needed some strategies for managing the pain, discomfort, and grief it caused her. Unaware of what might be getting in her way, we talk about how she’s come to feel stuck and hopeless and, at the same time, deals with a high volume of stress that builds up throughout the day.

She starts to be more emotionally honest with herself about how she’s feeling. Together, we work through the patterns she’s learned in order to keep herself safe and explore how she’s come to learn that it’s her responsibility to manage everyone’s emotional reactions. We started to identify how these patterns have served her in the past and why she shows up this way in her relationships.

In addition to the explorative work, we can also look at her current way of handling the situation. Upon reflection, she noted that she took an intense, rigid, and pragmatic approach to achieving her goal of feeling better rather than a relational one. Her goal was to put herself first, but she never set out to dismiss or displease anyone. For Stephanie, the intense desire for change made for a robotic application of the plan she created. She noticed that her own fears, worries, and anxiety got in the way of her clear thinking and delivery. Her worst fears were coming true, not by way of choice, but through unintentional actions and ripple effects.

So, how did this happen?

Stephanie really wanted things to be different but she couldn’t find a sustainable way to reach her goal. Desperate for things to be different, she started telling herself what to do— just like her mom did. In pursuit of this new goal, she started to create strong expectations for herself, void of any compassion or grace for being in this situation— just like her mom had. She wanted so bad for things to be different, but instead she recreated the scene that was most familiar to her; a situation where only one person’s needs matter and she built relationships where one person’s feelings are at the center. “I’ve become my mother!” she stated.

Now, this isn’t what Stephanie set out to do. She certainly didn’t choose to recreate a scene from her past. She came to therapy wi th a vision for her life where her needs could be considered as valid and just as important as those around her. In therapy, we revisit the vision and start exploring her sense of self so that she can craft a more intentional approach; one that doesn’t require her to abandon ship and throw her progress in the trash when she doesn’t see the results she’s hoping for.

Like I mentioned, she didn’t choose this position, but her desire for change was so great and her disbelief in her capacity for achievement kept her in a cycle of repeating the same pattern, sabotaging all progress, and then calling that her fate and destiny.

With that, slowing things down, engaging in a more intentional approach, and building our therapeutic alliance helped Stephanie see that her goals were never wrong. It was the recreation of a familiar scene and the fear of not being worthy of change that held her back. When she couldn’t find enough evidence of her progress, she aborted the mission and fell into her old ways. Since there was no foundation in place to support the changes she wanted to make, she stayed stuck in a cycle of repeating the strategies that once served her at a different point in her life. A time when she had to please others and take care of their feelings.

In therapy, Stephanie had an “aha!” moment. Her behaviour taught her that she felt so controlled by others that sabotaging her own success was the only way that she could gain control of it. She also discovered that when others told her what to do, she didn’t just hear people’s requests, she heard them as rules for who they wanted her to be. Her new sense of self, a compassionate understanding for her position, and a thoughtful approach to action allowed her to replace her self-sabotage with self-generated solutions. With that, Stephanie built a new awareness of her tendency to sabotage her own success. She’s learning how to get out of her own way.

And I guess it’s true what they say. Old habits do die hard. But new patterns prevent us from being controlled by them.

Take care this week,

Jake