Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  In this quest to find our real value as human beings and to feel ultimately fulfilled, we can’t count on much help from a culture which emphasizes materialism, money, power, image, and celebrity. We have to come home to ourselves and realize what we have been missing. We do so by becoming explorers on the frontier of our psyche, searching for the great magic and mystery of our being.

  Many of us can face our deeper aspects if we have a roadmap and if we believe our effort will be rewarded. We are ready to seize knowledge that will free us of negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. Behind our determination is the increased inner pressure for us to account for our continuing unhappiness and to fulfill humankind’s destiny. We have unlocked the secret of the atom, so we can and will do the same about human nature. We are ready to explode the weaker theories about human nature that have taken root in our universities, treatment centers, and social-policy discourses and that have left us stranded in dire predicaments.

  We are caught between an old and a new way of thinking and understanding. The old way isn’t working anymore. Yet, emotionally, it feels so threatening to give it up. We are used to the old way, the old identity. Even though it is painful and no longer works, we can’t quite cast it aside. We hesitate, not knowing what will replace it. The old way, represented by our determination to suffer, is unconsciously associated by us with the survival and preservation of our ego. We don’t know who we are without our ego and our suffering. Paradoxically, we feel we will perish without this old identity, yet it is what imperils us the most.

  Each of us is born into the world to grow and learn, beginning when pressure builds in the womb to dislodge us from our primal consciousness. We are provided in our psyche with a map that guides us toward our destiny. Surely now we will use that map to refine our being and overcome self-sabotage.

  Appendix

  Solutions and Exercises

  One man told me, “It just seems so hard, doing what’s required to grow and develop. It’s all a big maze. I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “Do it as a hobby,” I said. “Some people find it fun, for instance, to set up a workshop in their garage and tinker there with their hobby in the evenings and on the weekends. Imagine that you set up an inner workshop. You take it with you everywhere. And you tinker there with new knowledge, old memories, painful feelings, insightful observations, and helpful exercises. In this workshop, you don’t set goals, undertake projects, or lift heavy weights. Instead, you let the material float around in space, and you watch to see what comes together, what fits in place. You just play with what you have and what you’re learning. It all comes together as your new knowledge is processed through your intelligence and your daily experiences. Experiment with your insights and ideas. Go light and easy.”

  Here are several exercises for the inner workshop. They help readers sort through the layers of self-sabotage in our psyche. The exercises can be done quickly in a matter of hours or slowly over a period of weeks.

  Learning to See Yourself Objectively

  First describe a situation that is contributing to your emotional distress. Give the details of what is happening (or has happened) and how you are reacting (or reacted). What is the other person (or situation) doing to you? For example, “He lectured me for an hour about how inadequate I am.”

  Now describe the feelings you experienced. Were you angry, depressed, sad, or fearful? For example, “I felt rejected, unimportant, and criticized.” Or “I felt gypped and deprived of what I want.”

  Go back into your childhood and recall an incident or incidents that bring up the same feelings. For example, who lectured you in your past? How did that feel?

  Run through your life and recall how you have experienced those same feelings in different contexts and with different individuals. Note the predominance of those emotions—for instance, rejection, criticism, deprival, and so on—throughout your life.

  Give examples of how you may have provoked the same reactions in others. For example, do you lecture others and criticize them in the same way that you were just lectured? The traits you despise in others are usually your own. If you feel that the other is withholding love, ask yourself, “How do I withhold love as well?”

  Describe how you subject yourself to the same treatment you feel others subject you to. For example, how often do you lecture and relentlessly criticize yourself? Can you see a pattern? Can you recognize your emotional attachment to the feeling of being criticized?

  Try to remember your dreams. When we do inner processing, our dreams can come to our aid with relevant material that has been repressed. Write your dreams down and study them.

  The self-understanding we glean from an exercise such as this helps us to see ourselves more objectively, leading to inner growth.

  Identifying Guilt

  Guilt, the feeling that one deserves to be punished, is one of our most common forms of suffering. Most often feelings of guilt are completely inappropriate to a situation. Of course, guilt is appropriate if you cheat on your spouse or rob a bank. But most of the time we feel guilty for minor or even nonexistent infractions. Guilty feelings disappear when we understand and work though the underlying attachments.

  The following exercise can help you identify the deeper source of guilt.

  List all the behaviors or actions you still feel guilty about.

  Give examples of when other people have “laid” guilt trips on you and how you responded.

  Give examples of the guilt trips you lay on yourself.

  Give examples of guilt trips you have laid on others.

  Give examples of guilt trips that your parents laid on you while you were growing up and later as an adult. Did you ever lay guilt trips on them, such as trying to make them feel responsible for your feelings or life situations?

  Try to become aware of what negative emotion hides behind your guilt. For example, is your guilt a reaction to your indulgence in feeling rejected or criticized? Are you feeling guilty because you are absorbing unfair accusations of misconduct from your inner critic? Are you feeling guilty for your passivity, or your pseudo-aggression, in some situation? Most often we experience guilt not because of “bad” conduct but because we produce it in our psyche to cover up a deeper issue.

  Seeing Parental Patterns

  Many of us have a hard time remembering how we felt in our interactions with our parents. These feelings may be consciously forgotten but they remain in our unconscious awaiting opportunities to surface in painful ways. As mentioned, we unwittingly transfer hurtful feelings experienced with our parents and siblings on to circumstances or people in the present.

  It is liberating to understand how you interpreted your parents’ behavior toward you and how you modeled yourself on their strengths and weaknesses. By reconnecting with these old hurts and grievances, we become conscious of how we anticipate and promote these feelings in the present and how we produce self-sabotage. The purpose here isn’t to blame our problems on our parents, of course, but to see and understand how we still play out being victims of their real or alleged malice or neglect.

  Some of these questions are similar to those in the work-history profile at the end of Chapter 6. However, they are important in this new context. Reflect on and answer the following:

  Did your parents allow you to express your feelings openly or were you afraid to reveal what you thought or felt? Were you ever punished or made to feel bad for expressing these feelings? Are you afraid now to express and reveal your feelings in your personal relationships? What do you expect will happen if you do?

  Describe the communication pattern in your family. Were verbal exchanges sarcastic, judgmental, superficial, nonexistent, and so on? Describe the quality of communication in your past or present relationships. Are you able to be generous in your words and comments to others?

  When you had a problem as a child, did your parents make it your fault, tease you, ridicule you, disapprove of you, protect you, ignore you, pamper you, make e
xcuses for you, dismiss you, or discount you? Do you still experience these same feelings in your life? How and when?

  Did your parents support your growing independence? Did they ask you questions about how you felt or perceived events? Did they allow you to participate in and make your own decisions? Or did you have to conform to their way of thinking and behaving? To what degree do you believe that you act independently and autonomously today?

  Did your parents treat you with respect? Did they see you as a unique individual with needs and dreams? Did they recognize your talents? Or were you used to satisfy their needs? Were you invisible to them? How have these feelings affected your feelings about yourself today and your ability to be expressive?

  Did you ever feeling unwanted by them? Were you a source of delight to them? Or were you supposed to make them look good? Do you have similar feelings with your friends and in your relationships?

  What measures did your parents use to control your behavior? Such measures might include threats, guilt, shame, intimidation, bribery, and sugary praise. Explore these same control measures in your present relationships.

  Were your parents able to admit their mistakes and take responsibility for their behaviors? Or did they deny any wrongdoing and blame others for their faults? Are you involved with someone with the same problem? Explore the degree to which you accept criticism and admit your mistakes. If you are a defensive person, be aware that you will also be inwardly defensive in your reactions to your inner critic.

  Consider the extent to which you were praised and criticized by your parents. Did they put pressure on you to perform? How has their response to you affected your ability to perform today? Are you still reacting to their negative judgments?

  Did interactions with your parents produce fear or guilt or feelings of well-being? Do you feel fear or guilt in your interactions with others?

  What Fuels Your Emotional Imagination

  The visual drive or emotional imagination can become our worst enemy. The emotional imagination is always ready to create thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and scenarios that resurrect old emotional memories, which in turn lead us into self-defeating behaviors.

  Where do negative scenarios come from? They are produced by our emotional attachments to the primary feelings listed in Chapter 2. The following exercise helps readers to understand how these primary feelings represent unresolved issues from childhood that still plague us and fuel the emotional imagination.

  Write down the most prominent negative scenarios you have recently experienced, been tempted to visualize, or conceivably been obsessed by. Examples include being killed in a car accident, starving in the gutter, being rejected by a lover or spouse, or being exposed as a fake and a fraud. To remember these scenarios and make them more conscious, it might help if you ask, “What have I been afraid of lately?”

  Now look into the memories of your childhood. Ask yourself, “Are any of the feelings (not the scenario itself) similar to feelings I had in my childhood?” For example, a fear of flying and crashing usually can be traced back to childhood. The fear may be a consequence of how, as a child, you didn’t trust your parents. You might have felt they were going to let you down and not take care of you in some way. Now you have transferred that fear (the expectation of being let down painfully) on to the pilot of any airplane you fly in. (Fear of flying is also commonly associated with an emotional attachment to helplessness.)

  For each worst-case scenario you come up with, look for your bottom-line attachment, meaning your unconscious willingness to indulge in some old negative issue and feeling. Now you can begin to take responsibility for that negative feeling by seeing how you secretly maintain and reinforce it.

  Learning Self-Regulation

  List all the behaviors and patterns that you feel you are having difficulty regulating. For example, overeating, drinking too much coffee, working too hard, overspending, and so on. For each one, let an image come that reflects that part of you that seems determined to continue with this behavior. Have this part of you answer the following question: “I don’t want to stop doing this because . . . ” Next, list all the feelings and reasons this part gives for resisting balance, for instance, “It’s too boring,” or “I like the taste,” or “I just want to do what I want to do.”

  Scan your memory and see if you can determine where these feelings or behaviors originated. Was either of your parents involved with the same unbalanced behavior, perhaps in its opposite version? For example, if you are a workaholic, maybe your father was lazy and irresponsible. Do this for each behavior. And spend some time exploring these patterns in your past.

  Now let an image come of another part of you that is critical and scornful of this first part’s behavior. That critical part might be saying, “Why are you doing this to yourself? You’re disgusting. You have no will; you’re a pushover.” Write out all the ways you reproach yourself for your feelings and behaviors.

  Now try to identify (or watch for) the voice of inner passivity, which makes excuses for your weakness or even encourages you to give in to your weakness. That voice could be saying, “It’s no use, I always fail,” “If only my mother had been stronger,” or “Go ahead and do it this one time.”

  Do the critical or passive voices sound like your mother, father, or one of your siblings? One voice represents your inner critic and the other represents inner passivity. The inner voices can represent the words, thoughts, or feelings of your parents or siblings, or they can represent the negative feelings and sentiments you encounter, mostly unconsciously, in the conflict between your superego and unconscious ego.

  Take a step back and observe the conflict or struggle that has been going on in you for some time now. Can you see how fruitless the struggle is? Realize that this struggle is all you know and that it would be scary to let it go. The pain and self-defeat are so painful that now you are determined to resolve the conflict.

  Imagine a third part of you that stands apart from both the weak aspect and the critical aspect. This new part represents your authentic self. Have this part address both the weak part and the critical part, and announce that it is now taking charge of the situation. Write down the suggestions for resolving the conflict that come from your authentic self. Trust yourself. Through your inner self, you do know what is best for you. Let this quality of consciousness come forward. We have what it takes to balance our behaviors and clear away negative attachments.

  The Observer in You

  When you learn to observe, without judgment, your thoughts, fantasies, and emotional reactions, you have taken a big step in regulating them. Take some time out each day to chart the following:

  Your thoughts or feelings about others. This includes becoming aware of taking on their pain; how you have been trying to solve their problems; how you might have avoided being honest with them; what you think they think about you, or how you expect them to react to you; how they have hurt you (past or recent past), or how they are going to hurt you; your critical judgments about them; and your good or ill feelings toward them.

  Your thoughts and feelings about yourself. Do you engage self-reproach? Do you focus on past failures or blunders? Are you tempted to experience negative expectations about yourself and your life, saying or feeling, for instance, “I’ll never amount to anything!”

  Whether you replay past grievances or emotional injuries? Examples include the memory and feeling of not being invited to a party, a friend not calling you back, major or minor betrayals experienced with friends, children, parents, or siblings.

  Your daydreams. Are you concerned with what is going to happen in the future? Do you regularly imagine yourself in some triumphant situation, or in some situation that involves humiliation, shame, and impending catastrophe? What are your fears about the future?

  Whether you focus on lists and chores to be done. Do you have a drill-sergeant in your head? Are you preoccupied with not getting things done?

  How much time you spend reflecting on a) depr
ivation—not getting what you want or (as a defense against that attachment) daydreaming of riches and privilege; b) control issues—feeling dominated, pushed around, or (as a defense against that attachment) dreaming of dominating others or of being completely free and having no responsibilities; c) rejection—not being recognized or seen as important or (as a defense against that attachment) being loved and admired.

  Experiment with the Power of Will

  The following exercises, adapted from Roberto Assagiolli’s book, The Act of Will, are perfect for tinkering in your traveling workshop. They help us understand how our passivity gets in the way of the power of will.

  Exercise 1: Go through a day saying to yourself, for every action you undertake, “I am choosing to do this; this is my choice.”

  Make it a choice to do what you are doing, even for ordinary, everyday things. Say, for instance, “I’m choosing to do the laundry today. This is what I choose to do. I am making this choice.” This is different from the negative feeling that, “I have to do the laundry today.”

  Watch how many choices you make. Do you slip into using have to? Do you ask others what to do? If so, ask yourself if you are not secretly willing to go about your activities feeling forced, controlled, or overwhelmed (which will produce resistance and resentment).

  Once you have done this for a day, look at your whole life in terms of the decisions you have made, choices you have made, and what has been motivating those choices.

  Now examine whether or not you apply the power of will to the choices you make. How much resistance do you experience? What sort of feelings come up when you find that your will is flagging and you are unable to continue on a chosen course? Do you feel forced, controlled, or deprived? Maybe your will is weak because you have a secret agenda to be disappointed in yourself, and then to criticize or disapprove of yourself, or to imagine that a parent, boss, or spouse is disappointed in you. Our attachment to inner passivity can produce a weak will, while it can also at times make us exceedingly stubborn or fanatical.