Have you ever wanted something, but negative self-talk or those nearly debilitation negative beliefs or feelings that percolate up telling you why you can’t or why you will be rejected if you try? This is self sabotaging behavior at work in your subconscious mind that links itself to a conscious event and does everything to squash your dreams.
Due to your negative subconscious beliefs, self sabotaging is safety mechanism in your mind that gives the illusion it is protecting you from a negative outcome, but in fact self sabotage will kill your dreams and subject you to a life of mediocrity. If sabotaging beliefs are so bad, then what is the Benefit of Self Sabotaging Behavior, and more important how do you overcome self sabotage and live the life of your dreams?
What is Self Sabotaging
Self sabotage is a negative behavior, action or belief system that is counter productive to your desired goal or self interest. So, if self sabotaging is such a destructive behavior, how can there be a benefit of self sabotage? The benefit of any negative or destructive behavior is the ‘illusion of safety’. You can learn to eliminate self sabotaging behavior.
The illusion of safety is in the subconscious negative beliefs, feelings and emotions that we developed since childhood, as a safety mechanism to prevent us from dealing with situations that can result in fear, failure, sadness or disappointment, for example. If you’re now an adult, that can mean 30 years or more of a live not lived to its’ fullest potential. Sabotaging beliefs or actions is nothing more than your subconscious mind using irrational imaginary beliefs to protect you from an irrational feeling of fear, failure, disappointment, or getting hurt by looking at a situation and directing you to sabotage your success, so you don’t suffer the failure, defeat or disappointment you already expect will happen, rather than expecting success.
Most Common Self Sabotaging Behavior:
- I can’t do that
- I am not good enough
- I’m not smart enough
- They won’t like me
- I’m too old
- I’m too young
- I won’t get it, so why even try
- I’m not like them
Watch a movie and you’ll see that the rich guy is always evil, scheming or cheating; while the poor guy who struggles to get by is noble. This is where beliefs that money is bad and rich people are evil usually comes from. How about music? The Rolling Stones sing about You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
Where Does Self Sabotage Come From?
People rarely set out to sabotage themselves. Self sabotage is not generally a conscious decision, rather it is usually rooted in negative subconscious beliefs, feelings or emotions that have developed over a period of time since childhood, that you don’t even know are there that spoiling all of your goals, plans and dreams.
Self sabotaging behaviors tends to linger in our lives from childhood into adulthood, in the form of energy blockages in the mind and body, because of an unresolved lack of self-esteem, self-worth, self-confidence, or self-belief that you are not good enough to have it, or that you somehow don’t deserve it.
The subconscious belief system that triggers self sabotage in your life may have been installed in your mind when you were a child by a trusted parent, teacher, sibling, family member or friend through negative words or actions. Such as watching a parent deal badly with the loss of business contract, losing out on that big promotion at work or watching how your parents dealt with divorce in a destructive way.
Or, you may have witnessed an event that didn’t actually happened to you, but as a safety mechanism against similar events that you witnessed, you subconsciously internalized it as fact.
Now as an adult, you replay these images over and over in your mind. Do you sabotage relationships because you believe it won’t last; do you only go for the ‘safe job’ and not the one with the big leap in pay or responsibility, because that little voice in your head tells you you won’t get it, or it won’t work out anyway so why try? Where did these negative beliefs come from? They have been in your subconscious mind, only to rear it’s ugly head when negative beliefs of fear, failure, success, love, self doubt, or self worth percolate up.
Self sabotage says “I’m here to help you.” I’ll create a situation to sabotage your success so you don’t have to experience the fear, anger, failure and worthlessness this situation will ultimately result in anyway.
As the great author Marianne Williamson says, it’s our fear of what we may become, rather than not become, that holds us back. Huffington Post
Types of Self-Sabotage
Self-sabotage can come in many forms and manifest in our lives in many different ways. Here is a list of methods that we often use to sabotage our own success:
- Expecting failure or not having the situation work out.
- Fear of taking risks.
- Fear of making mistakes.
- Assuming people won’t like you.
- Not wanting to speak in public, for fear you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, or no one will listen to you.
- Worrying constantly.
- Having unrealistic expectations, that set yourself up for failure.
- Critically judging ourselves.
- Constantly comparing yourself to others.
- Procrastination.
- Having Limiting beliefs, emotions and attitudes.
Benefit of Self Sabotage?
As you have been reading, the benefit of self sabotage is really an illusion, and you can eliminate self sabotaging behavior for good. Your subconscious mind says the benefit of self sabotage is that it will protect from the feelings of fear, anger failure, disappointment, or getting hurt, based on how you internalized an event from the past that either happened to you, or that you witnessed and you decided the event was true; you internalized the negative outcome in your subconscious mind as a safety mechanism to prevent you from experiencing similar negative events.
In reality, the way to overcome self sabotage is to experience the situation again and correct your belief system about the event, or remove the negative energy blockage in your body and mind that the original event caused which will cause the negative energy and ultimately the negative belief around this event to simply drop away for good.
How to Overcome Self Sabotaging Behavior For Good
What self sabotage doesn’t know is you have had a secret weapon your whole life to overcome sabotaging beliefs. By simply changing the word “I can’t” into “I can” in your mind, and eliminating the negative energy around the issue, the sabotaging beliefs will drop away.
Some people say to overcome self sabotage you need to learn from your issues, stay conscious and aware of your behaviors and actions and repeat affirmations. By staying conscious of your limiting beliefs, which takes an awful lot of energy, you are also reinforcing the negative beliefs, feelings and emotions. This is how traditional psychotherapy works.
On the other hand, a key tenant of spiritual healing is that your issues are based on energy, which is neither good or bad, it is just energy. You don’t need to even know where, when, why or how about the energy. The key is to come in contact with the energy to bring it up from your subconscious mind, the neutralize the energy and allow it to simply fall away.
Through my own personal experience with traditional therapy, and spiritual healing, EFT tapping is the fastest way to eliminate self sabotaging behavior, and once it is gone, it is gone for good.
Sources:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/self-sabotage
http://www.uncommonhelp.me/articles/stop-self-sabotage-behaviour/
Do You Sabotage Your Own Success? Here’s How to Stop Self-Sabotage in its Tracks!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/self-sabotage/
Ken Weiss is a health blogger who is passionate about natural and holistic cures for men’s health issues. He is the founder of menshealthcures.com
