Coaching 

ON SELF-SABOTAGE

In principle, the idea of self-sabotage is madness. Why would anyone in their right mind undermine their own chances of success or happiness?

Yet it happens. Among coaching clients, I have encountered it many times.

So how do we account for self-sabotage? Here are three ways:

1. You reach a certain point in your career and/or relationship - the point at which it’s going to the next level - and you do something to wreck it. Why? Because you don’t have the confidence to play on that next level. Maybe you suffer from imposter syndrome. You feel you have reached the limit of your capabilities and so pull back, or walk away, or get yourself ruled out. So that’s a capability x confidence explanation.

2. At a deeper level, you sabotage yourself not only because you feel you don’t deserve to advance, but worse, you feel as if you ought to experience failure. It’s a kind of masochism whereby you punish yourself. Perhaps you are repeating a childhood experience of feeling worthless. You repeat it because you didn’t understand it. Sadly, the repeating doesn’t resolve it. That’s a repetition-of-punishment explanation.

3. You have a perhaps unconscious attachment or loyalty to someone in your family system whose life didn’t go or hasn’t gone well. To do better than them makes you feel guilty - again, not necessarily at a conscious level. To sabotage yourself is to ensure you don’t go beyond them. Doing so would be to cruelly highlight their difficulties. In failing, you spare them from their failures. The irony being that most people in our family system want us to succeed, even where they have failed. This is a systemic loyalty explanation.

PS the word ’sabotage’ comes from the French for a wooden shoe. Workers supposedly threw their shoes into machinery to stop it functioning. The etymology is debated, however.