You and Your Self-Sabotaging You

What do you need to be you? This and subsequent posts will focus on a set of mental processes that play a crucial role in human suffering and diminish our possibility for growing and flourishing.

What Do You Need to Be You?

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Our mind is our most powerful, our most vulnerable and our most unknown resource. We live on an extraordinary planet in an astonishing universe, and yet, chronic stress, sleeping disorders, and fear have reached epidemic proportions. The biggest health threats facing the world are depression and burnout. Our attention is permanently disrupted and is characterized by an unparalleled volatility.

Self-sabotage refers to a wide category of psychodynamics that increases our actual suffering and makes us much more vulnerable to future suffering. Being able to regulate or minimize self-sabotaging forces plays a very important role in our well-being and mental health but is also very relevant for the health of our society and environment. The choices and actions made by a suffering mind affect all the interactions made with others and the world. Therefore, it is crucial to pay attention to the pain and misery self-sabotage causes.

Self-Sabotage Blocks What You Need to Be You

You are probably familiar with the famous quote attributed to the French writer Marcel Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." This quotation is the summarized, popularized version that comes from The Prisoner, originally published in 1923. Later, I will enter the full text.

Having new eyes is about our journey toward a life lived with freedom, curiosity, and awe, and it involves the need to reframe our perception of the world. The resulting fresh perception can guide us to discover what we need to become the best version of ourselves and express this as the blossoming and fruitful life we seek.

Self-sabotage is any action that gets in the way of achieving this goal toward a fulfilling life. It is what constricts or obstructs our view, prevents us from seeing or applying possible solutions. Self-sabotage comprises the mental dynamics that makes us crawl through life: We lose our ability to see who we are and what we need. We start to live in a mental cave and stare paralysed at the darkness. It is the tragedy of a mind that becomes locked up in its own mental habits, unable to stop and reframe their direction. Unable to dare to believe in possibilities, to live from the state of freedom and to see the world from an open perspective—with new eyes.

This process can be very dramatic and damaging, but mostly it exists as a very subtle play of recurrent and inextricably intertwined thoughts and emotions that colonize our mind in the background of everything we perceive. We lose the capacity to see the world from a perspective of curiosity and wonder. We fail to see our extraordinary planet in an astonishing universe. This dynamic is the central topic of my new book Entering Our Highest Possibility.

A Failure to Regulate Our Thoughts and Emotions?

Self-sabotage, is a dysregulation of everything we do, feel, think, and become. It is often a deeply hidden mental dynamics that has its roots in unconscious fears, habitual thoughts, unrealistic beliefs, and destructive emotions.

Why are human beings carrying this potential of devastation within? Why do we inevitably find ways to damage or destroy ourselves physically, mentally, or emotionally and ruin, disturb, block, and undermine our personal, relational, and professional lives? We deliberately prevent our own success and overall well-being, sometimes in remarkably effective ways. The most common and visible expressions of self-sabotage are procrastination, self-harm, self-medication with drugs or alcohol, stress eating, interpersonal conflict, and suicide.

How can our mind create such a self-damaging and self-destructive prison?

I spent the last 25 years researching this question. In my next post I will focus on the subtle dynamics that are always at play in the human mind and can become reinforced and amplified by ourselves and our environment: how those subtle tendencies in our mind can grow into nonconscious, destructive patterns. Our emotional vulnerability grows slowly, unnoticed and deeply hidden.