Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  Jealous people, as another example, appear to hate the feeling of being rejected or betrayed. Yet their unconscious masochism produces an attachment to those very feelings. In other words, the jealous person’s secret wish is to feel betrayed. Consequently, they often collude in bringing about the very thing that they secretly wish for. They may choose friends or partners who are untrustworthy, or they may with their provocations drive their partner into the arms of another, all for the opportunity to replay and recycle their attachment to rejection, betrayal, and abandonment. Consciously, their jealousy is painful to them. In the process of experiencing the pain of real or potential rejection, they intensify the pain of their own self-rejection. “No, not true that I want rejection or that I reject myself,” they proclaim in their unconscious defense. “I’m not looking to feel betrayed or abandoned! Can’t you see how much I hate those feelings!”

  This illustrates the nature of psychic masochism—what we say we hate or fear the most is what we secretly wish for and what we are likely to go on experiencing indefinitely.

  A procrastinator hates to feel pressured and controlled. Again, he is secretly attached to a negative feeling, in this case that of inner passivity. The more he procrastinates, the more pressured and controlled he feels by the duties or obligations to which he is procrastinating. It is agonizing for him, yet he goes on procrastinating because, unconsciously and emotionally, he is under a compulsion to enhance the experience of feeling controlled, helpless, and overwhelmed. He also procrastinates so that secretly he can be passive to his inner critic and allow it to berate him and condemn him for his attachment to the passivity and also for not being productive and living up to his responsibilities or his potential.

  A promiscuous person is frequently attached to feeling unloved. The promiscuity is a search for some form of love, however degraded, and the desperate yearning for love serves as a defense to make it appear that the person really does want love, when all along the wish is to feel unloved. Promiscuity invariably accompanies the feeling of not being valued or being unworthy. The great lack of love is ultimately for oneself. The chronically lonely—“Nobody loves me, nobody cares”—are also indulging in the feeling of being unloved, unwanted, and abandoned.

  As mentioned, workaholics are desperately trying to validate themselves in order to gain appreciation and self-approval. Yet beneath their compulsion to work they are often attached to inner criticism and its implications that they are unworthy and have no value. Workaholics are also interested in using work to distract themselves because they come under more bombardment from their inner critic for allegedly being defective or worthless when they are at rest or trying to be at ease. Because of relentless inner attacks and the self-aggression to which they are attached, they desperately chase the mirage of enhanced self-image.

  Our masochism consists of our willingness to replay and recycle the three categories of negative emotions, as outlined in Chapter 2, involving deprival, control, and rejection. These are hidden from our awareness by hundreds of dynamic, shifting defenses and thousands of forms of self-sabotage. Sometimes the three categories of masochism all come together around one form of self-sabotage. For instance, an individual’s compulsive overeating can be held in place by emotional attachments to deprival, control, and rejection.

  When you are masochistically attached to feeling, say, criticized, you may believe that you are being criticized by others even when you are not. You will criticize yourself, sometimes mercilessly, for minor or imagined transgressions. You will provoke feelings of criticism by being careless, apathetic, or insensitive, inducing others to disapprove of you. You will also go where you can find and act out your attachment to criticism, such as teaming up with a partner who is inclined to be critical. We become living pin-cushions for what we are attached to. Meanwhile, through it all, we hate the feeling of being criticized and we may hate those we feel are critical of us. This hatred covers up or defends against realization of our underlying attachment to feeling criticized.

  As mentioned, whatever we are afraid of, or especially sensitive to, is what we are masochistically attached to. If you are sensitive to feeling criticized, you are masochistically attached to feeling criticized. If you are sensitive to rejection, then that is your masochism. And so on. Through defenses such as blaming, excuses, transference, and projection, as well as many varieties of behavior, we try to cover up our masochism. Often, we resort to the claim-to-power defense, through which we blame ourselves for the wrong reasons (i.e. being lazy, selfish, or lacking in character or personality), rather than recognize that our problems are being caused by the underlying masochism.

  When we are masochistically attached to feeling controlled, we may get angry or apathetic, lose our will to succeed and prosper, react passive-aggressively and get in fights with our partner or boss, feel like giving up on our life, or come under the controlling influence of people, ideologies, or substances. If we are emotionally addicted to rejection, we may feel jealous, lonely, and unworthy, and act out by driving our loved one into the arms of someone else, or eat and drink too much. There are many combinations and permutations of possible self-sabotage based on the underlying psychic masochism.

  Dramatic change is possible. This masochism can be neutralized. It may take some time to achieve this completely, but as we begin to study ourselves in the light of this knowledge we can feel the stirring of a new ability to moderate our reactions, to regulate our feelings and behaviors, and to determine our destiny.

  The current popular acceptance of pharmaceutical drugs for emotional health constitutes a major resistance to seeing the truth of our human nature. Sometimes, in certain circumstances, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers are appropriate. However, it is very seductive to give in passively to a drug or some external agent in an attempt to correct our emotional imbalance. In contrast, unlocking the secrets of our emotional nature can force us, propel us, into higher intelligence as we understand ourselves more fully and become more powerful and loving. When we settle for drugs, we risk losing so much of what makes us human—our intelligence, our dignity, our integrity, and our freedom. The drugs certainly won’t address or change the masochism that makes us our own worst enemy. It may be that pharmaceuticals, as well as illicit drugs, have taken such a hold in our society because of our unwillingness to take responsibility for our inner conflicts and because of our infantile dependency on an outside source to make us feel better. This plays into the hands of the inner critic, which in the darkness of our ignorance goes on working against us, and can become more vicious as the drugs lose effectiveness.

  Three Lessons in Identifying Our Masochism

  Each of us has periods of self-doubt when we wonder if we are good enough. At times we feel as if we don’t belong, or we feel helpless to improve our situation. The cartoon character Charlie Brown rings true because we all know what it means to feel helpless, hopeless, and inadequate. To some degree, most of us are hampered, and often impaired, by these feelings. Even when we know intellectually that we are good people, the emotional conviction of being inadequate or defective (created, maintained, and reinforced by psychic masochism) can become our reality.

  Sometimes we are so convinced we are defective that we seek to punish ourselves. Marie, a former drug user and bulimic who had been shy and withdrawn since childhood, described these feelings to me: “I just couldn’t be condemning enough of myself. All my destructive behaviors were a way to demolish myself, to punish myself for being defective, ugly, and repulsive. I felt so loathsome that even death was too good for me. My suffering was the only appropriate punishment.”

  Painful as it was, Marie had been firmly entrenched in this impaired sense of herself and couldn’t imagine life without this identity. “I knew it would be the death of me if I stayed that way,” she said, “but I also felt I would die if I was any other way.”

  It can feel like death to turn one’s life around. Marie would die to her old identity and be reborn anew, experi
encing herself without her masochism. Were this deliverance from her inner plight to happen overnight, she might feel disoriented, like a long-incarcerated political prisoner rushing out of her dark cell into the light of day. As it happens, the process of inner liberation is invariably gradual. We are more likely to be complaining that it’s occurring too slowly.

  Avoiding self-sabotage isn’t so much a matter of doing something positive as it is a process of undoing what has been set in place within us. We see more clearly into our emotional investment in maintaining our negative attachments and our resistance to personal growth. The key to happiness is found by laying bare our determination to be unhappy. The garden grows of its own accord once the weeds are pulled away.

  Often we can eliminate self-sabotage through an understanding of how we misuse our imagination. Our imagination is a biological function that enables us, among other things, to visualize images, colors, and scenes in which we are acting a certain role. However, our imagination can be usurped by our emotional attachments for self-defeating purposes, generating irrational fears and self-sabotage. The challenge is to expose how we allow our imagination (sometimes called the “emotional imagination”) to be used in wasteful speculation about our prospects, painful reflections on the past, and truly harmful considerations about our lack of worth and likelihood of failure.

  When we deepen our awareness, we are monitoring ourselves more objectively and being a witness to what we are experiencing. We enrich our experiences by being simultaneously aware of being a participant and an observer. Often people are at one extreme or the other—the shy person is all observer (in the subjective, self-absorbed sense) and feels cut off from the pleasures of participation, while the gregarious extrovert may be all participation, with little reflection on his impulses, motivations, or the feelings of others. The following three lessons are designed to help us to develop strength by becoming more observant of the ways we are willing to recycle unresolved emotional issues from our past.

  The first lesson involves misuse of the imagination, the second, “negative peeping,” and the third deals with our receptivity to negative inner voices.

  (1) Misuse of the Imagination. How well do you use your imagination? Writers, artists, scientists, entertainers, and others use their imaginations to create dramatic effects, useful products, or beautiful objects. Because of emotional attachments, however, many of us misuse the imagination and become enmeshed in negative thoughts and emotions. Worriers, for example, are always imagining bad things happening in the future. This causes them to suffer with worried feelings in the present moment. The things they worry about might never occur. All that happens is that they suffer for nothing.

  Worriers produce visualizations of bad things happening without being aware of the inner feelings that induce or inspire their negative images. Here is an example of how we do this. A woman who is worried about being overweight is invited to a party. For a week before the party she tortures herself with images of being seen in a negative light when she gets to the party. Yet she goes and has a wonderful time. So she worried and suffered for nothing—except to recycle how inadequate and defective she can feel about herself. In another example, a man says something inappropriate at a business meeting. For the next 48 hours he tortures himself with images of how those at the meeting are thinking ill of him (reflecting how he secretly sees himself ), although in fact what he said, even though inappropriate, was never held against him and was soon forgotten by the others.

  In order to stop producing visualizations or thoughts that maintain our anxiety, we want to understand how we might be misusing our imagination to gratify our negative attachments. If you find yourself chronically worrying, for instance, about running out of money, say to yourself something to this effect, “Am I secretly invested in feeling helpless once I run out of money? Do I not trust myself to figure out what to do? Am I imagining the shame and humiliation of being penniless, and am I ready to suffer with those feelings right now, in this present moment, long before I might have to go begging for help from my relatives? Am I afraid that everyone will see me as a loser, myself included? Am I afraid of how my inner critic will berate me for being a failure?” When you answer these questions correctly, your emotional attachments come into focus. You also expose the self-sabotage. You might be hurting your health with chronic worry, or making poor decisions out of desperation, or cutting back on spending for essentials, or spending carelessly in order to intensity the emotional attachment.

  Both the fact and the consequences of misusing our imagination are usually not conscious. All we may feel are symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, anxiety, or fatigue. The man who spoke out inappropriately at the business meeting, for instance, might have experienced depression for several days afterward. Even as he produced recurring visualizations of the embarrassing moment, he was not aware of the connection between his depression and his faux pas at the meeting. Were he to take his awareness to the next level, he would understand that his depression results from his emotional entanglement in feelings of being criticized by his colleagues as well as by his inner critic. Realizing his attachment to criticism, he is able to take charge on an inner level and neutralize that attachment. Now he is no longer tempted to continue to indulge in it.

  As I said, when we look into the face of another person, we often see subjectively. Instead of seeing the other person in his or her own right, we see what we feel about ourselves, which is often the sensation of being looked at with rejection or disapproval. We can spend a lot of time imagining that others see us as inadequate and unworthy, even as fakes or frauds, because that is how we feel about ourselves. We can be quite offended when we see or imagine the other person looking back at us with what amounts to our secretly anticipated negative reaction. “He’s got his nerve,” we are apt to say. “Who does he think he is, treating me like that?” This is, of course, our defense—how we deny or defend against realization of our attachment to feeling inadequate or defective.

  Through the emotional imagination, we create false impressions of reality. In the example above, we generate the belief that others see us in a negative light or are out to get us somehow. Then, as we begin to act as if the false impression were the reality, we can become the embodiment—through body language, tone of voice, and personality—of someone who others do indeed see in a negative light (i.e., a braggart, a wimp, a bore, or a jerk). The clinical term for this is negative exhibitionism. It is the acting-out of the claim-to-power defense that contends, “I cause others to look at me as defective or bad.” When we exhibit in a negative way, we are indeed likely to be seen in a negative light. That affirms our negative feelings about ourselves. The exhibitionism also puts another layer of defensive protection, to say nothing of the more painful consequences, over our unconscious attachment to the feeling of being looked down on by others.

  Both our will and our intelligence are stymied by the false impressions that we take as reality. The solution is to gather enough insight to see how some part of us is always ready to believe the false impressions. We acquire the knack of catching ourselves in the act of looking for problems that don’t exist or magnifying ones that do exist, as we correspondingly expose the part that wants us to believe the worst about ourselves and others. We learn to recognize the self-condemnation that previously operated outside our awareness, thus bringing it into our conscious life and weakening its influence.

  Exercise. Try this exercise in inner watchfulness to catch yourself producing negative scenarios. Think of something you are concerned about, something that bothers you. Maybe it is a problem in the family, a spat with a friend, or maybe you are worried about a problem at work.

  Ask yourself, “How much time do I spend every day producing this scene and the feelings that go with it? What is the feeling that I get into with this scene? Do I feel bad about myself? Do I feel sorry for myself? Do I blame my feelings on others? Am I acting out what I felt with my parents and being a disappointment now to mys
elf and others? Do I criticize myself? Do I see myself failing, or being rejected? Am I feeling lonely, abandoned, controlled, or criticized?”

  As you do this, you may be able to detect within yourself some tendency to indulge in feelings of being unloved, unwanted, a disappointment, or seen as inadequate or defective? Is this how you see yourself? Is this what you’re secretly willing to indulge in?

  Now, imagine that you are able to catch yourself in the act of producing imaginary scenes or images of bad things happening to you. When you catch yourself in the act of producing negative images, you can begin to see how you are misusing your imagination. You also understand your reason for doing so, which is your attachment to the negative emotions that you conjure up through this misuse of your imagination. You realize how you contribute to your own fears, anxieties, dissatisfaction and, ultimately, self-sabotage.

  As I have said, it is crucial to see and understand the reasons we allow our imagination to be misused. Through our lack of consciousness or self-knowledge, we abdicate responsibility for putting our imagination to better use. When we see this, we understand exactly what we are doing that is self-defeating and thus we can choose to respond appropriately. Now it will be easier to believe in ourself, to see a bright future for ourself, and to orient our imagination and our will in a way that helps us move in a positive direction.

  2) The Thrill of Negative Peeping. Lesson number two involves growing in awareness of how we use our eyes (as compared with our imagination in the previous lesson) to see things that reinforce negativity and low self-esteem. Edmund Bergler called this negative peeping.