Confronting Your Inner Saboteur Pt. 2
Uncovering the Saboteur
In the last post, I covered facing your inner Saboteur. I pointed out the relationship between self-sabotaging behaviors and self-esteem. I covered how every action is a moment for empowerment or disempowerment. If you need a refresher, you can access it here.
Continuing on, I wanted to explore how to begin uncovering the wounds and trauma that give birth to our inner Saboteur and ultimately serve as the anchoring script for our self-sabotaging behaviors.
When prepping to write an article, I usually take inspiration from my own journey. Lately, this journey to reconnecting with the self has brought my attention back to my own wounds, as opposed to learning to deal with the idiosyncrasies of everyone else.
Quickly I found myself lost because I don’t consider myself wounded or traumatized. Even when I look back on the two or three things that most would consider traumatizing, I couldn’t figure out how they correlated with the problems I’ve been suffering from the past few years.
They didn’t seem to answer the question of why I kept getting in my own way. So I knew then I would have to pick the most cyclical behaviors and work my way backward. Starting, I jotted down a few questions in my journal, then let the questions sit in the forefront of my mind for a few minutes, and then go for a walk, letting the questions drift back into my subconscious.
Some examples included:
In the past two years, what situation have found myself in over and over again?
What is a habit I can’t seem to escape from?
What are things that I’ve heard repeatedly from those close to me?
What is that one thing that constantly feels out of reach?
What seemed to come easy to my loved ones but was extremely difficult for me to achieve?
The goal here was to start identifying routine behaviors and then begin to work out what may have been the root cause. And that's when I started to piece a few things together.
I found three repetitive things:
Firstly I consistently quit tasks or projects right before they would go from good to great. I could never bring myself to take something to the point where if I failed, I wouldn’t be able to avoid some level of public shame. My biggest fear was embarrassment, of being unable to ‘hack it’, so I either never started or quit right when the stakes began to rise.
Secondly, I avoided anything and everything that would make me confront shame. I avoided shamefulness like the plague. Anything that reminded me of my shortcomings or made me feel as though I wasn’t enough, I hid from.
This led me to the final repetitive cycle, I always found myself back in my comfort zone. Inevitably the world became too ‘dangerous’ for my ego and I’d slither back into bed, back to the bar, or back into mental escapism.
Making these conclusions after days of reflection and asking myself the hard questions, the next step was asking myself when did I start developing this fear of shame. When did I first feel embarrassed if I didn’t measure up?
I found a few points that could count for the genesis of this, one being how achievement-oriented my family was. Playing many sports and taking various honors classes as a kid, the only two things that made me feel like a success were trophies and receiving A’s. This was the only time I felt “good enough” in my parent’s eyes. But this was also when I started to look at things as either a win or a loss. If there wasn’t some award attached to ample recognition, then I had lost. As you enter adulthood, finding these kinds of things becomes increasingly difficult, and everything begins to feel like a loss. And so the cyclical aversion and procrastination begin.
When you look back at when these belief systems originated, it’s important to think of concepts like validation, empowerment, and allowance. When did you feel most validated/unvalidated as a child? Where did you feel the most empowered? When did you feel that power or ‘right to greatness’ be taken from you? And when did you feel most/least allowed to be yourself?
Starting with these questions can help expand your awareness immensely. Now begins the task of how you then recognize these actions as the Saboteur.
You do so by monitoring your inner language and then shining your mind's flashlight on it. Learning to monitor our inner dialogue is a lifelong skill, but it begins with simply being quiet in moments of discomfort.
When you think of going back into the gym, going to that seminar, or starting that new endeavor, and those uncomfortable thoughts creep in, what are they saying? Are they saying, “You won’t be as good as they are” “You’ll never look that good”, or, “So and so said it would be too difficult for me”? Observe what you tell yourself in moments of empowerment. That is the Saboteur.
It may take some time to recognize the voice of the Saboteur, but some things to look for:
Phrases that compare you to others.
Phrases that invalidate the potential for future outcomes.
Phrases that call you to rest with an activity that doesn’t empower you.
Impulses to seek counsel from people who have never been supportive.
When you begin to learn the Saboteur’s language, shine your mind's flashlight on it.
Call it what it is. Every. Single. Time.
This brings the conclusion to pt. 2 of this 3-part series.
The next article will address how to begin the road of Self-Empowerment now that we have recognized some tactics for discovering the scripts and language of our Saboteur.
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