I don’t believe in self sabotage

I don’t believe in self-sabotage. More specifically, I don’t believe it fosters self-trust or a solid relationship with oneself to take on the belief that there is some gremlin living inside of you, actively working to sabotage your efforts—and that gremlin is also you. How are you supposed to learn to trust yourself if you believe that, at any moment, you might become your own enemy?

Sometimes we just make mistakes. I think we’ve gotten way too deep into psychological terminology when it comes to self-reflection, when sometimes you can simply say: I made a mistake. And if it’s important to you to understand why you made that mistake, there are ways to investigate that without accepting the premise that you are forever doomed to get in your own way and foil your own efforts.

This doesn’t mean I never get in my own way. Of course I do. I’m simply against labeling that experience as an active sabotage arising from somewhere inside myself. I don’t need that kind of enemy in my own body.

What gets called self-sabotage could be a mistake, or it could be a pattern you don’t yet understand. It could be a part of you that doesn’t feel safe or comfortable with whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’m a big proponent of parts work, and one of the things I value most about it is the development of self-trust. To me, believing that some part of you is constantly plotting against you works directly in opposition to building self-trust.

Getting to know your parts requires time, energy, and slowness. You have to learn how they communicate, as that communication doesn’t always arrive as clear words popping in your head. Sometimes a part communicates by trying to take control and make decisions on your behalf. It wants to drive the car.

The work is learning how to remain in the driver’s seat as your present adult self while recognizing that other parts of you may still try to grab the wheel. They aren’t necessarily doing that because they want to sabotage you. Sometimes what you’re doing feels unsafe to them. Sometimes it isn’t even unfamiliar; it may be incredibly familiar in a way that brings them right back into something they have already survived.

Your job as the adult in the room—or the person driving the car—is to help those parts move through what they’re feeling while still making decisions from your present reality.

In that way, parts work can look a lot like parenting. When a kid doesn’t want to do something, they may try to stop it from happening, get out of the situation, undo it, or find some kind of relief. Sometimes, as the adult, you have to stand firm and say: we cannot leave right now. This is what we’re doing right now, and we will be done when we’re done.

That doesn’t require downplaying, dismissing, shaming, or belittling their feelings. Your job is to provide solidity and regulation—to be the tree, to stay rooted, to hold your own convictions even while somebody else is having a hard time with them.

The same thing can be true internally. What you call self-sabotage might be a part of you saying, I don’t like this. I don’t feel comfortable here. I want to leave.

And sometimes you should listen.

Safety comes first. Sometimes a child wants to leave and the appropriate response is to fucking leave. Sometimes you actually are unsafe, and getting in your own way is not the problem. You may be trying to stop yourself from being harmed or (re-)traumatized.

But there are also times when current, present you wants to remain in the situation. You want to finish something. You want to keep going. You want to complete anything, for once. You know you can survive the discomfort, while some younger part of you may not know that yet.

Then it becomes your job to tell them. You can remind them of what they (and you) have already survived. You can show them that you are capable of getting everybody through whatever is happening now. They don’t need to be silenced or defeated; they just need to be able to trust that someone competent is driving the car.

This is one of my biggest problems with the idea of self-sabotage: it ends the investigation too early.

At first, calling something self-sabotage can feel like you’ve unlocked a mystery about yourself. You finally have an explanation for why you keep doing this thing you don’t want to do. But once “I sabotage myself” becomes the explanation for your behavioral patterns, you can stop being curious about why you actually find yourself getting in your own way.

There’s no more exploring. There’s no more wondering what happened, what you were responding to, what you wanted, what you feared, or what some part of you was trying to accomplish. You just keep returning to the same answer: I sabotage myself.

And because the explanation begins and ends with you, it also puts everything on you to fix everything about yourself.

That’s part of why I think the concept fits so neatly within neoliberalism and its obsession with individual choice. If everything comes down to your personal choices, then finding yourself unable to simply make different choices becomes another personal failure. If you keep doing something you consciously don’t want to do, the “obvious” conclusion becomes that you must be undermining yourself.

Then comes the shame.

Shame creates its own negative feedback loop because shame freezes you. You’re already struggling to do the things you want to do, and now you’ve added the belief that the reason you aren’t doing them is that there’s something inside of you deliberately working against your own interests. So you feel even less in control of your life. You do even less. Your life starts to feel like something you are observing rather than actively participating in.

Meanwhile, the parts of you that already feel unseen or unheard don’t disappear because you labeled them as saboteurs. They may keep reaching for control, or at the very least visibility, precisely because they still haven’t been listened to.

I keep coming back to the parenting metaphor here because children want autonomy and agency over the situations they’re in, just like adults do. For a lot of traumatized children, that autonomy and agency was taken away from them. Of course they want control; they’re humans. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting control over what happens to you.

The question is what you do with that need now.

I love a reframe, so here’s mine: maybe you’re not sabotaging yourself. Maybe you need to listen to yourself more deeply.

Part of that is learning how to tell the difference between a part of you trying to stop something because you are actually unsafe and a part of you trying to stop something because it doesn’t yet know that discomfort is survivable. Part of it is learning when to leave and when to stay. And part of it is developing the capacity to lead yourself from within—to be brave, calm, confident, and rooted enough that every part of you does not have to agree with the decision in order for you to keep driving the car.