Subconscious Ways Self-Saboteurs Destroy Their Happiness

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If you are a self-saboteur, you can be prone to self-sabotage that destroys your chances of success and your relationships. You can trip yourself up, when you don’t feel deserving of the good things in life.

If you’ve internalised that you’re not good enough, then this can cause you to see the worst in everything that happens to you, when your internal saboteur takes over.

When you were constantly asked “what’s wrong with you?” from childhood, it becomes the inner voice or self-critic within, and you end up believing there is something wrong with you.

The only way to protect yourself is find a way to escape these feeling, or act upon them by self-sabotage

What are the signs of a self-saboteur:

1. You give up on yourself

When you don’t believe in yourself, you can do everything to avoid failure, including giving up, putting things off because don’t feel that good things will happen to you in life.

You let your internal saboteur take over the way you see things, letting it control you and sabotage you

2. You can’t see the bigger picture

You end up seeing the glass as half empty and distort the way you see things as always being negative. You see things as being catastrophic disaster, rather than a simple bump in the road.

You can’t take a compliment or feel uncomfortable with praise, thinking it’s untrue. This is because you don’t see your real self and over look the good aspects about yourself.

3. You’re self-depreciative

You fall apart when you make mistakes and give up or beat yourself up, instead of picking yourself up, learning from the mistake and continuing on the journey.

4. You destroy your happiness and relationships that matter to you

When you feel negative, you end up seeing only the negative in your life. You think your boss doesn’t like you, you expect to lose your job or you believe your partner is going to leave you.

When you expect the worst to happen, you act-out your fears by not turning up to work, putting off your goals or accuse your partner of things to destroy the relationship before they leave you.

You may do things to harm yourself or destroy yourself with drugs and alcohol to escape the negative feelings.

You can be jealous for no reason, because you think you’re not worth it, letting your insecurities kill your relationships

   5.   You draw negative conclusions

You jump to negative conclusions and make your mind up before examining the evidence or being open to learning alternative ways of seeing things

   6.  You externalise your feelings and blame others for them; you are critical of others

You think that your partner doesn’t care about you or doesn’t love you, assuming that they will leave you to find better, so you set out to prove this, pushing your partner away.

You are hard on yourself and imagine everyone is criticising you or having a go at you, so you react defensively, blaming or accusing others of things that you’ve concocted in your mind.

Because of how you see yourself, you misread things and think others have bad intentions towards you. You feel like the victim and others are the villains.

You project your negative feelings onto your partner and see the negatives in what they’re doing becoming critical of them. You look for things that reflect the way you feel about yourself and make it fit, even if it’s not true.

Your fears and anxieties can push loved ones away, seeing only the negative in them and complaining or being critical toward them. You think to yourself that they forgot to buy the milk because they’re inconsiderate, or they don’t care about you because they forgot to call you back.

Because you believe that others don’t like you, you might not bother with relationships, because you fear rejection.

You see your wife as attacking you, instead of offering you constructive feedback.

When you don’t feel loved, you may even protect yourself and become defensive, accusatory or attacking. You do this to protect yourself from the feeling unwanted, wrongly accusing others of not wanting you or rejecting you.

All of a sudden your partner feels pushed away and withdraws from you because they do not feel loved or accepted. In fact, you have blocked yourself off from receiving love from your partner, due to your internal saboteur which sabotages love.

A love saboteur is someone who destroys their chances of receiving and giving love to protect themselves from getting hurt.

You can end up acting-out in destructive ways to alleviate these feeling and repeat the pattern of feeling alone and rejection by doing so.

The real antidote to overcoming the self-saboteur requires accepting the feeling within yourself by recognising them and understanding how they get in the way of seeing yourself and others. This allows you to transform the pain, fostering insight and self-awareness.

Once you recognize the internal saboteur you can be aware of it, notice your triggers and become more open and curious about considering other ways of seeing things, rather than forming fixed conclusions. When you overcome your internal saboteur, you can have more control over yourself instead of resorting to self-sabotage.

Nancy Carbone has a M.Soc Sc (Couns) who is psychodynamic psychotherapist who addresses the underlying feelings that underpin self-sabotaging patterns of behaviour. Contact Nancy for an appointment or sign up on her newsletter for free advice and tips on relationships