by Rosanne Bane
CHALLENGES: RECOGNIZE THE SABOTEUR
As John Drozdal suggests, you need to know your Saboteur when it shows up. The following short exercises will lead you through some detective work to clarify what your Saboteur looks, sounds and acts like, so you can recognize it faster the next time it tries to sneak up on you.
Freewrite
Quickly complete the following sentences. These are all very metaphoric, so there is no one right way to respond or even a “logical” response. Just jot down your first thoughts.
If my Saboteur had a color, it would be:
If my Saboteur had a shape, it would be:
If my Saboteur had a texture, it would be:
If my Saboteur had a sound, it would be:
If my Saboteur had a smell, it would be:
If my Saboteur had a name, it would be:
If my Saboteur were an animal, it would be:
If my Saboteur were a natural disaster, it would be:
If my Saboteur were a fictional character, it would be:
Draw the Saboteur’s Mug Shot
Your next detective task is to draw your Saboteur. You don’t have to know what your Saboteur looks like before you start drawing, although you might have a pretty good idea by now. Sometimes the process of drawing reveals new information. Don’t worry about your drawing skills; it’s not as if you should care what your Saboteur thinks about the drawing anyway. And since the Saboteur is never satisfied, it won’t like the drawing no matter what you do. Play with color and shape and see what happens.
Brainstorm the Rap Sheet Possibilities
Your next detecting task is to prepare your Saboteur’s rap sheet. Start by brainstorming potential crimes your Saboteur may have committed.
Murdered hope
Assaulted my self-esteem
Pillaged my creative energy
Slandered, robbed, committed hit-and-run, battery, grand theft novel, fraud . . .
Now that you have some possibilities to get you started, write your Saboteur’s rap sheet. What specific crimes has your Saboteur committed? Consider the harm done to you, to your creativity and to your community. By undermining you, perhaps your Saboteur has delayed the completion of a novel or chapbook or collection of essays that could benefit your future readers more than you know.
Write the Eviction Notice
Write a letter informing your Saboteur that it is no longer welcome and you’re not going to let it push you around anymore.
Respond to the Saboteur
You might think that with all these detective metaphors, I’m going to recommend you get your inner detective hot on the case and that you spend a lot of energy chasing the Saboteur like a crime-fighting superhero, arrest it, put it on trial and lock it away. But I don’t recommend channeling too much energy into pursuing the Saboteur.
What you need is a way to keep the Saboteur at a safe distance. In “Squelch Your Inner Censor” Jacque Fletcher writes, “A friend thinks of her censor as a prissy Barbie doll. She bought a doll, and every time she gets stuck with the critic, she drops the doll into her metal trash can, which slams shut with a very satisfying sound. Then she continues to write.”7
Having a simple, quick ritual like this to remind yourself not to engage with your Saboteur can be effective and satisfying. Don’t try to put the Saboteur on trial; you’ll only get caught in a quagmire of arguing with it. Remember the fourth characteristic of the Saboteur: it’s never going to go away. The more you try to fight the Saboteur, the more powerful it becomes. Just notice it—“Oh, there’s my Saboteur again”—drop it in a trash can if you want, and keep doing what you set out to do.
Destroy the Saboteur
Remember, it is our reluctance to express destructive energy that feeds the Saboteur, so it’s very effective to release destruction energy on the Saboteur. It’s also very satisfying. Tear up the pages with the Saboteur’s description and rap sheet. Shred its mug shot. Stomp on the pieces if you want. Some people get a kick out of making a model of the Saboteur out of clay or Play-Doh and then smashing it.
An Obsession of a Different Color
An innovative therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) trains patients to acknowledge their obsessive thoughts as no more than faulty brain signals that they do not need to act on. Can we do the same with the Saboteur? Can writers learn to recognize saboteur thinking as faulty signals arising from unconscious self-destructive impulses and refuse to believe the thoughts or act on them?
Dr. Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, seems to think so. He declares that the plasticity-based OCD treatment developed by UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz can “help not only those with obsessive-compulsive disorder but also those of us with more everyday worries, when we start stewing about something and can’t stop even though we know it’s pointless . . . or when we become compulsive and driven by such ‘nasty habits’ as compulsive nail biting, hair pulling, shopping, gambling and eating. Even some forms of obsessive jealousy, substance abuse, compulsive sexual behaviors and excessive concern about what others think about us, self-image, the body and self-esteem can be helped.”8
My experience and that of my clients and students has convinced me that Schwartz’s approach can be effectively applied to resolving obsessive thinking (about what we have to do before we can write or how fatally flawed our writing is and so on), obsessive self-criticism, self-doubt and risk avoidance—in other words, the Saboteur.
In The Mind and the Brain, Schwartz writes, “One of the most striking aspects of OCD urges is that, except in the most severe cases, they are what is called ego-dystonic: they seem apart from, and at odds with, one’s intrinsic sense of self. They seem to arise from a part of the mind that is not you, as if a hijacker were taking over your brain’s controls. . . . Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder experience an urge to wash their hands, for instance, while fully cognizant of the fact that their hands are not dirty.”9
Self-destructive impulses from the Saboteur are typically ego-dystonic as well. For example, many writers know intellectually that their best strategy is to complete a draft no matter how “shitty” (as Anne Lamott would say) it is. But they can’t fight the urge to rewrite the first pages over and over, in the same way OCD patients can’t, for example, fight the urge to wash their hands over and over even though they know their hands are clean. When we’re in the grip of the Saboteur, like when a patient is in the grip of OCD, there is a split between what we know (“I should finish the draft,” or “I know my hands are clean”) and what we feel (“But I have to rewrite this one little bit,” or “But I have to wash one more time”).
Let’s be clear: OCD is not the Saboteur, and experiencing saboteur thinking does not mean you have OCD. OCD is a clearly defined “neuropsychiatric disease”10 that is caused by dysfunction in three distinct areas of the brain. The Saboteur, meanwhile, is a theory and a psychological concept. I know of no systematic research investigating the Saboteur; all evidence is anecdotal. But even though OCD is a far more devastating disorder than the typical writer’s struggles with the Saboteur, we can still draw some useful parallels and apply Schwartz’s success in treating OCD to our efforts to muzzle the Saboteur.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG
The orbital frontal cortex is the brain’s error detector. When something unexpected happens, this region of the cortex just behind our eyes starts firing, sending signals that something is wrong to the cingulate gyrus, which lies deeper in the cortex.11
A normally functioning orbital frontal cortex is probably part of what alerts us to something unexpected or “off” in our writing. A discerning writer not in the grips of saboteur thinking recognizes messages from the orbital frontal cortex without judgment and asks open-ended questions like, “What specifically is ‘off’ in this section? Why is thi
s piece of writing not working? How can I make it better?”
Brain scans show that in OCD, the orbital frontal cortex is hyperactive and keeps sending the “something is wrong” message to the cingulate gyrus. Although the Saboteur probably doesn’t interfere with the orbital frontal cortex’s normal functioning, it is like OCD in the way it tends to inflate, exaggerate and repeat warnings from the orbital frontal cortex. It also adds its own warped interpretation that the writing and the writer are fatally flawed and there is no hope of improvement.
When the cingulate gyrus receives the “something is wrong” message, it sends signals to the heart and gut, creating both the mental and physiological feelings of anxiety and dread that motivate us to take action. A discerning writer not crippled by the Saboteur recognizes this uneasiness as a sign that corrective action is needed and experiments with different ways to improve the writing and fix what’s “off.”
But a writer in the clutches of the Saboteur, like an OCD patient with a hyperactive cingulate gyrus, experiences heightened feelings of anxiety, dread or hopelessness. It may well be that thinking saboteur thoughts (“This sucks. I’ll never figure this out. Why did I ever think I could write? I’m going to fail”) increases activity in the cingulate gyrus.
People with OCD are driven by intense feelings of dread (triggered by the hyperactive cingulate gyrus) to repeat compulsive behaviors (to wash their hands, count their steps, check and recheck that the stove is turned off) that they know intellectually won’t solve the problem, in a futile attempt to ease the anxiety. Likewise, a writer wrapped up in saboteur thinking seems to lose the ability to take reasonable corrective action. Instead, she/he engages in self-defeating behaviors and does little or nothing to improve the current writing, situation and her/his mastery of the craft.
In a normal brain, when the caudate nucleus (a part of the limbic system that serves as a kind of switching station for the signals it receives from many other regions of the brain) recognizes that we’ve taken action to correct the error, it signals the orbital frontal cortex and cingulate gyrus to stop firing.
A discerning writer will recognize the “all is well” signal from the caudate nucleus with awareness that nothing is ever perfect but that she/he has done what she/he can with the writing, that good enough is good enough, and move on. But like an OCD patient with a “sticky” caudate nucleus that can’t shift gears, a writer immersed in saboteur thinking will deny the “all is well” signal. Nothing is ever good enough for the Saboteur.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: ERASING OCD
As Hebb’s Law (“neurons that fire together, wire together”) predicts, the more an OCD patient focuses on the content of the disorder (germs, the possibility that the door is unlocked, etc.) and practices the compulsion (washing hands, checking the door), the worse the disorder becomes. Doidge observes, “OCD often worsens with time, gradually altering the structure of the brain . . . with OCD, worry begets worry.”12
It is reasonable to assume that prolonged saboteur thinking, like prolonged, regular mediation practice or other mental habits, can eventually influence how the brain functions. And as Hebb’s Law suggests, we can reverse those negative effects by changing how we think.
Applying some principles of the Buddhist meditation he practices, Schwartz teaches patients to mindfully observe the universal form of OCD without focusing on the specific content of their own obsessions and compulsions. Schwartz’s treatment directs patients to “relabel” and “reattribute” their experience. They are not being attacked by germs, for example; they are experiencing false thoughts (relabeling what is happening) that are caused by pathological brain dysfunctions and therefore are not part of the patient’s true self (reattributing why it’s happening).13
In the same way, learning to recognize the Saboteur allows writers to relabel and reattribute the negative thoughts. They are not bad writers who are incapable of improvement and need to be careful to avoid rejection, for example; they are hearing the lies of the Saboteur’s inner monologue. They need not follow the warped thinking of the Saboteur, but can simply dismiss those misleading thoughts and continue with the writing or other activity they originally planned.
Schwartz knows this is not as easy as it might sound. But the payoff of such mindful effort is life changing. “Once I learned to identify my OCD symptoms as OCD rather than as ‘important’ content-laden thoughts that had to be deciphered for their deep meaning,” one of Schwartz’s patients reported, “I was partially freed from OCD.”14
My coaching clients and students have made the same observation about the significance of recognizing that the Saboteur is alien to who they really are. This is why it’s so effective to name your Saboteur, picture it as something that has a shape, texture and color, or think of it as an animal, natural disaster or fictional character. All of those are ways to remind yourself that your Saboteur is not who you really are.
Get Clear
The Saboteur thrives in uncertainty and ambiguity; intention and integrity are key to keeping it at bay. I cannot encourage you too strongly to make your commitments crystal clear. One of the reasons I recommend making a commitment to do Process, Self-care and Product Time for a predetermined amount of time is so you’ll know when you can stop without letting the Saboteur have its way.
Know exactly what you are committing yourself to: what will you do, when will you start, how long will you do it, how many times, and what does and does not qualify as honoring your commitment? For example, “I will color for fifteen minutes starting at eight p.m. five times this week. If I prefer, drawing or sewing are acceptable substitutions.” You can change your mind, of course, deciding that you’re going to color in the afternoon instead, for example, but do not deviate from the plan once you’ve started coloring or the start time has arrived. Thinking, “Maybe I’ll just do ten minutes tonight,” invites the Saboteur in.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: CHOOSE YOUR RESPONSE
Like John Drozdal, you can learn to recognize when your Sergei is making an appearance. Like Jill Bolte Taylor, you can recognize that the saboteur thoughts arise from nothing more than a peanut-size collection of neurons that will tell the most outrageous whoppers to make you miserable, and you therefore refuse to entertain those thoughts. Like Jacque Fletcher, you can practice meditation and choose to feel compassion for the Saboteur as long as you don’t let it push you away from your writing.
You can choose to respond to your Saboteur in any way that empowers you to dismiss its cruel, subtle, persistent lies and challenges. The more you refuse to let your Saboteur control you, the more you weaken that neural pathway and the less power the Saboteur has over you. You can, like Schwartz’s patients, free yourself by changing how your brain works.
Remember, if you weren’t expressing creative energy, you wouldn’t generate the equal and opposite destructive energy that feeds the Saboteur. Find suitable ways to consciously dissipate that destructive energy (shred paper, break glass, smash what you make out of clay for Process play, etc.) so that it stops fueling the Saboteur.
You are now armed with the most important tool you need to effectively respond to the Saboteur—information. Be mindful and use it well.
INQUIRY
Fill in the blank in the following sentence to describe the kind of writer you are (e.g., “aspiring writer” or “emerging novelist”):
“If I were a spy given the job of sabotaging an __________ to ensure that that writer couldn’t write, what would I do?”
After you answer this question, consider: “What can I do to prevent my Saboteur from doing this to me?”
9
FOUR STEPS TO RESOLVING RESISTANCE
Learning Story
When I was twenty-seven, I experienced the physically paralyzing power of resistance. Not in my writing—on the face of a cliff.
Going through a divorce I didn’t want, I avoided th
e emptiness of our house on weekends by traveling to state parks to camp with my dog. On this particular day, a group of ten or twelve college kids were jumping off a cliff into the lake where I was swimming. It was a safe place to do this—the cliff was undercut so they couldn’t possibly hit anything on the way down, and the lake was at least twenty feet deep, with no submerged rocks.
One young woman didn’t want to jump, which wasn’t unreasonable, since it looked like a twenty-five-foot leap. As her friends teased her good-naturedly, I got drawn into their banter. She admitted she was scared, and I tried to encourage her. When one of the other students asked me why I hadn’t jumped yet, the fact that I was at least six years older than they never made me pause. I was a native of Wisconsin; these were college kids up from the Chicago area, so there was the “I can’t let them show me up” thing. Besides, I was “outdoorsy”—I graduated Outward Bound, climbed mountains, and canoed whitewater rivers. Of course I could jump off this cliff.
But when I got to the top of the cliff, it was a lot higher when I was up there looking down than it had been when I was in the lake looking up.
I inched to the very edge. I shivered when I glanced down. I bent my knees and swung my arms to rock back and forward on my toes.
Swing. “One . . .”
Swing again. “Two . . .”
And swing one more time. “Three!”
I fully expected to jump on three. But my feet didn’t move. I was frozen from the knees down and completely shocked that I still stood there.