There is a scene in the movie Glass Castle where the father, played by Woody Harrelson, a highly intelligent man who has struggled with alcoholism, underachievement, and poor relationships for most of his life is visited by his daughter in the last few weeks of his life. He is proud and fond of his daughter and reminisces about the complex, and often turbulent relationship they have had. When she was a child, they used to play a game together called Chasing Demons.
He says to his daughter in a sincere and awakened moment of clarity, “All of my life I have been chasing demons, only to realize they have been inside of me the whole time”. The scene was emotional and gripping and aptly gives voice to the issue of self-sabotage.
Self-sabotage causes us to suffer emotionally. It can be defined as behaviors we engage in that ultimately keep us from what we most want out of life. Self-sabotage can take many forms which most commonly show up as perpetual procrastination, various addictions, consistent struggles in relationships, overworking, avoidance of personal responsibilities, and underachievement.
What is behind this paradox of human existence? Why do we work against ourselves as we try to achieve the very life we most want and desire? More often than not, it has to do with our relationship with ourselves. But what is at the emotional and psychological roots of this human paradox, and perhaps more importantly, what can we do to overcome it?
The Internal Tug Of War
Sigmund Freud, considered the father of psychology, developed his theory of how the unconscious mind works more than one hundred years ago. He saw the mind composed of three parts, the id, the ego, and the superego. These parts do not exist in reality; they are simply concepts to represent our mental processes.
The id represents our primitive impulses or drives such as the sex drive or our drive to satisfy hunger.
The superego includes the rules or prohibitions laid down by culture to make sure we behave in prosocial ways.
And the ego could be understood as our centered-self which is responsible for managing or mediating between the other two parts.
Freud was a scientist foremost, so he thought in terms of energy distribution. He saw these three parts as sharing psychic energy and working to find balance. The processes that the id, ego and superego undertake are outside of our full awareness making them, in other words “unconscious” to us.
While these ideas seem simple, in Freud’s days they were revolutionary. Yet even with how far we’ve come in understanding human behavior and how the mind works, Freud’s ideas still have relevance. His theory speaks of the idea that we all are prone to inner conflict often due to things we are not aware of.
In the simplest sense, self-sabotage occurs when these three parts are not in harmony, and the superego takes on more energy than is intended or is healthy. Instead of helping you manage life in a healthy way, it overworks and becomes imbued with harshness, criticism, and judgement. Then, it can become a critical or punitive superego. Other names for this are your internal critic, inner demons, and toxic shame.
This part of your mind can work against you in ways that you may not realize which is why it’s important to understand it.
Where Does Self-Sabotage Come From?
To begin, let’s look at how your unconscious conflict develops, which is a key step in leading you to self-sabotage as an adult. As children we are relatively helpless, and we depend on our parents for survival for a very long time compared to other mammals. We are tethered to them for such a long time so we’re able to learn to navigate relationships and how life works in general so we can live independently one day. As such, our early caregivers and the early environment in which we are raised are models for how we think and how we behave, both implicitly and explicitly.
When we grow up in an environment with less-than-ideal conditions for psychological and emotional growth or where there is trauma, we develop ways of protecting ourselves (also called defense mechanisms) to negotiate and manage our internal state within our external environment.
A threat to the external environment feels like a threat to our very survival, so as children we adapt in various ways to make sure our environment is able to meet our primitive needs. These adverse external conditions could be losing a parent when you’re very young, coping with parents with mental illness or alcoholism, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, a home that lacks love and warmth, or early caregivers that are harsh and highly critical. In addition, we unconsciously take in (or internalize) aspects of the external environment as if those conditions are about us, and not what is happening to us.
A protective mechanism is a thought or behavior intended to help us manage fear about something that is threatening. It develops without our full awareness and exists to ultimately protect us. For example, if as a child, if you were yelled at harshly for crying you may develop a natural fear of crying. You are not able to say, “I think my father has conflict around tears, so he is simply projecting his fears onto me – I am good!”. Of course, your immature brain is not able to process it like that because you are more driven by emotions. Your fear response also wants to make sure you don’t forget, so it makes it stick by making it deeply emotional. Thus, you stop crying to satisfy your father’s needs, prevent further punishment, or to “keep the peace in the family” as if that is your job. Ultimately, you sacrifice your emotional needs for the family’s “survival needs”.
As an adult, you may experience anxiety when you have grief or have an urge to cry and not know why. While the yelling father is no longer around, the emotional memory of fear is experienced as anxiety inside of you. Given that anxiety is uncomfortable and natural to avoid, you develop certain behaviors (protection mechanisms) to lower or manage it.
Self-sabotaging behaviors or engaging in behaviors that are ultimately not in your best interest, are typically a result of the protection mechanisms operating in your adult years. They are like residue from conflicted childhood experiences.
Why Do I Self Sabotage When Things Are Going Well?
While it may seem like the greatest of ironies, self-sabotaging while things are going well is rather common. It would seem like the best time not to self-sabotage, right? What is happening here? If you think about it, you have protective mechanisms developed early in childhood to help you survive that are still trying to help you survive as an adult. In a sense, while the original threat that necessitated protection is gone, the fear is still alive in you as a form of anxiety.
While of course you aspire to have a good life as an adult, that good life is a challenge to your internal fear system. I often explain to clients that although your relationships have changed (different relationships from childhood to adulthood) what remains from the past is the internal map to navigate relationships and that navigation mechanism may still be tethered to the past.
As an analogy, a map of Washington D.C. in 1900 may have been a great map then, but used in 2025 in D.C. you’re likely to get lost.
Perhaps an example is in order.
I once worked with a woman who despite her talents, consistently underachieved in her career. She reported that she had a mother that constantly put her down. Her mother often found little that she considered positive in how her daughter behaved. For various reasons her mother may have felt threatened by her daughter’s accomplishments. Naturally, this woman had complex feelings with her mother. On one hand, she felt angry. But on the other hand, this anger created conflict due to her feelings of love for her mother.
In complex ways, she learned to fear her own natural aggressive energy as it was linked in a way toward a mother she loved. She also internalized her mother, often treating and speaking to herself the way her mother spoke to her. Although this woman was talented, she found herself underachieving and not living up to the potential that others, including her therapist, could naturally see in her. We need aggressive energy for success in life, but sometimes, and certainly in the case of this woman, this aggressive energy gets pushed away as it is related to so much internal anxiety.
It was not until she could make peace with her aggression and see that she was not what her mother thought of her that she could realize and make use of her true talents and take off in her career.
How Does Self-Sabotage Show Up In Relationships?
Self-sabotage shows up most commonly in relationships. As I have touched upon, the relationships that we enter in as adults are often modeled after relational patterns we learned unconsciously as children.
I once worked with a female client who “knew” she self-sabotaged her relationships but nevertheless had a difficult time overcoming this. She had some awareness that she dated men who were not emotionally available and men who had substance abuse problems. What she did not realize was that while she focused her attention on blaming these emotionally unavailable men for her poor relationships, she did not see how emotionally avoidant she was due to protective mechanisms she had developed as a result of her relationship with her own emotionally and physically abusive father.
In a sense, she unconsciously chose men that helped her avoid her own emotions.
As we worked together, she was better able to see this pattern and develop the kind of self-esteem and confidence that allowed her to understand her protective mechanisms and eventually overcome them. Over time, she began to date more emotionally healthy men. But even healthy men created some challenges. The good news was that these men were more emotionally available.
The issue was that she found their openness threatening because she had anxiety about emotional closeness. Closeness for her meant hurt. She thus found herself pushing these men away and not really knowing why. With continued work she was able to address her own internal fears that arose whenever her emotions showed up in healthy relationships.
Sometimes, when progress is made, it opens doors to other challenges that also need to be addressed.
How Self-Sabotage Can Lead To Mental Health Problems
We often think that depression and other mental health conditions cause us to behave in self-destructive ways. With moderate or severe depression, we can have highly critical and negative thinking or suicidal thoughts or ideation. And of course, these can lead us to feel and behave in ways that do not serve us well.
For example, I worked with a severely depressed man who was once highly accomplished in his career. When in a depressive episode he would complain that he was a failure and did not know anything. This was clearly a distortion of his true abilities due to his depression. Likewise, someone who suffers from an anxiety disorder may over-react to life situations that under normal conditions do not cause distress.
While the link between mental health issues and self-sabotage may be clear, I have found that what is often underappreciated is how self-destructive behaviors due to early life conditioning, among other factors, can lead to more serious mental health issues.
As an experiential dynamic therapist, I have learned that people develop protection mechanisms due to early life conditioning across three broad patterns of behavior. There are others, but for the sake of this blog, we will focus on the three most common. These behavior patterns are shared by all people and all of us are susceptible to them depending on our emotional health, as well as times when we are under high stress. These patterns, if not understood and worked through, in one way or another can lead to self-sabotaging behaviors that can eventually lead to more serious mental health issues.
#1 Repressing our emotions
The first pattern is related to how we can keep our true feelings out of awareness by pushing them down (repressing them) or keeping others at an emotional distance. For example, we may minimize a great accomplishment at work and repress our own healthy pride (and the anxiety that comes with it) because we may have been taught “not to be a showoff”. To repress our pain and grief about losing a friend, we may go off on tangents or change the subject when speaking about that person.
Sometimes we can avoid our deeper feelings about things altogether, by creating emotional distance from other people. It is like if emotions are found inside the rooms of a house, the front door is locked. I once worked with a young man who complained about not having enough friends and feeling alone. When I worked to better understand what led to this problem, I noticed he would become vague, indirect, and unclear, making it almost impossible to find out what was really going on.
Over time, we began to notice, and ultimately understand, that how he was relating to me mirrored how his other relationships progressed. He began to see that his way of being with others led to him creating emotional distance from others and that was keeping him from what he wanted most, human relationships. In working with him I helped him understand the historic need for this protection mechanism and appealed to his courage and will to overcome it.
#2 The Feeling Trap
The second pattern is related to how feelings get stuck inside of us or get turned back onto us. This pattern typically develops because sometime in our lives we have “learned” that strong feelings towards others are too threatening. This behavior pattern is characterized by shame spirals, self-attack, and sometimes physical problems like upset stomach or headaches. Rather than repress our feelings or walling them off from others, here we are prone to having feelings getting trapped in us causing extreme frustration, emotional dysregulation, and sometimes physical problems.
For example, I recall working with a woman who when I asked, “what feelings do you have toward your boyfriend for hitting you” she would say harshly to herself, “I am so damn stupid for taking him back” and began to cry as if she was to blame. Instead of being able to experience and express anger at her boyfriend, she took him hitting her as if she was the problem. She was not able to tolerate understandable strong feelings of rage toward her boyfriend so in a sense, it got thrown back onto her. She was not fully aware of how this happened and thought it made sense to be upset with herself for her boyfriend’s behavior.
#3 Projection
The third behavior pattern is related to how we can project our internal lives onto others and/or the world. Projection can be understood as placing a thought, feeling or idea that we have inside of us out onto others or the world. In a sense, the thought or feeling in us feels so threatening that we unconsciously put it somewhere outside of us and essentially assign it onto others. This allows us to distance ourselves from the feeling and as they say, “out of sight, out of mind”.
With this pattern, we assume things about others and the world that may not be accurate, causing us to misinterpret others’ behaviors ultimately making it difficult to relate. We may engage in splitting and become prone to seeing things as black and white, instead of how things really are. Not having accurate information about us and others to work with, we may have trouble reasoning clearly through situations.
For example, I worked with a young man who believed strongly that others in his dorm did not like him but had no evidence for it. Through therapy he realized he carried a lot of anger but projected a lot of his anger out onto others and the world. I helped him deal with the anger he carried so he did not have to operate in his life as if other people were angry at him.
Across these three patterns of behavior, we can see how various self-sabotaging behaviors can develop. A few that come to mind are procrastination, keeping others at a distance or even staying in relationships that are not healthy for us.
Procrastination can show up by avoiding something inside of us that makes us uneasy or creates anxiety. It could be about avoiding what is best about ourselves, or the disappointment of not achieving perfection (an impossibility).
Keeping people at a distance can happen when we desperately want to be in relationships with others but unconsciously keep them at bay and then get upset with ourselves when we avoid social events or time with others.
Or we may desperately want a healthy romantic relationship but misinterpret the other person’s intentions to the point that we can’t relate genuinely. We can also end up staying in a relationship with an abusive partner because we have never learned how to make peace with our own aggressive energy and anger.
Overcoming Self Sabotage And Self Acceptance
At the end of the day, overcoming self-sabotage is about self-acceptance and coming to peace with ourselves. And self-acceptance can be a hard-won battle for someone who has experienced relational trauma. But do not be fooled, genuine self acceptance has more to do with what you have, than what you think you don’t have. You find self acceptance when you connect with your true essence and see that your core self is not your conditioning. You are more than how you were raised and how people treated you as a child.
Yet getting to this place of truly accepting the essence of who you are likely requires more than reading self-help books or general coping mechanisms. It will require you to take a deeper journey to find out what really is at play.
I have found that for most people, three things need to happen to get to a better place.
#1 You hold the key
The first thing is to realize that you hold the key to overcoming self-sabotaging patterns, not outside events or other people. The problem lives inside of you no matter how much you want to point your finger out. This does not mean that you are the problem; it simply means that the solution to the problem is found inside of you. If you go looking in the wrong places, you certainly won’t find the answers you are looking for.
There is a story about a young man looking for his keys at night. Another older man walking by offers to help and asks how long he has been looking for his keys, and the young man says “oh, about 4 hours”. The older man is taken aback and says “Wow, that is a long time, lets step back for a second, where do you think you lost your keys?”. To this the young man says, “over there near those bushes”. To this the older man says, “So why are you looking here?”. The young man says, “because there is more light here!”.
The truth is that you have to look in the places where the real answers can be found if you want to free yourself from self-sabotaging behaviors.
#2 Find out what you’re avoiding
The second thing that needs to happen once we realize that we hold the key to our own healing, is to find out what we’re avoiding and how we avoid it. It’s one thing to know what you avoid and an entirely different thing to understand it. Like the woman who knows that she dates unavailable men as a form of self-sabotage, does she know what she avoids inside of herself and how she does this? This is an important clue for discovering your own version of self-sabotage.
#3 Commit to emotional change
Emotional change is different from an intellectual understanding that you need to change. For example, you may know you want to stop smoking, but are you emotionally invested in doing so? Are you emotionally giving yourself what you need to succeed? It really is about the age-old idea of facing your fears. In the case of self-sabotaging behaviors, those fears are inside of us, like avoiding and fearing our own emotions.
Like Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1933, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. What this essentially means is that change requires a willingness to be uncomfortable and experience some pain as you go through it. One of the things that I have learned as a therapist that leads to emotional suffering is the idea that it is wrong to feel bad, or that there is something wrong if we are not always feeling good. Unfortunately, we live in a society which says that we should always feel good and experience pleasure.
There are many ways to achieve the above. It does not always happen in the linear fashion that I have described. Things that certainly help with this self-journey are building self-awareness, resilience, and exercising the will for change. There are many ways that we can do this. Good practices include mindfulness meditation, keeping a thoughts and feelings journal, keeping a dreams journal that helps you better understand your unconscious, having a spiritual practice that helps you get in touch with your true nature, and psychotherapy.
The point is we need to exercise our will to find our own answers and face what we avoid.
How Can Psychotherapy Help?
If you continue to struggle with self-sabotage despite your best intentions, then it may be time to seek professional help. This is usually the reason why most of us go to therapy, because we have tried many things already that have not worked. Contrary to what some people believe, reaching out to a therapist is a sign of strength, not a weakness. Simply put, it takes courage to face ourselves and go toward the pain, instead of avoiding it. Courage is about facing pain, not avoiding it!
Why is it so hard to figure this stuff out on my own, you might ask?
Well, the simple answer is that trying to figure out what you do that gets in your way is kind of like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. We all have blind spots, sometimes curtains, and seeing ourselves as we really are can be a tricky thing. We certainly may want to change and get to a better place, but the deeply rooted protective mechanism compromises our ability to do that. And as mentioned, we all also carry a natural aversion to experiencing discomfort.
While therapy is largely shown to be helpful to most people who seek out the help of a therapist, overcoming stubborn self-sabotaging behaviors that cause you to suffer will require more than general talk therapy or counseling. It will likely require more intensive therapy.
Studies have consistently shown that success in therapy has less to do with the model of therapy, the degree that the therapist holds or years of experience, although these can be important factors to consider. Success has more to do with the quality of the therapeutic alliance created between you and the therapist. Important elements of this alliance, among others, include agreement upon goals, agreement upon the tasks of therapy, and the bond that develops. If you were to visualize the therapy process as a house, the therapeutic alliance would be the foundation.
Establishing an effective therapeutic alliance requires more than kindness and warmth from the therapist. It also requires a therapist who has resilience, courage, and experience to work at a deeper human level. It usually requires that they have very good training beyond the graduate level and engage in some form of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means the therapist is intentional about their work, that they are constantly striving to improve themselves and the work they do to achieve the kind of results their clients desire.
It will take a therapist that can ally with your core self, help you understand how your mind and body work, help you see the protective mechanism that blocks your true growth, and mobilize your natural will and intention to experience yourself in ways you could not have imagined. It will take work from both you and the therapist. The important thing is that the therapist needs to be adept at challenging you in ways that you feel safe so you can accept and face what you tend to avoid. It will also likely require a therapist who can work with and process strong emotions and anxiety, things that we naturally tend to avoid.
If you are in the Annapolis, Maryland area and seeking a therapist who is engaged in deliberate practice and adept at helping clients overcome self-sabotaging behaviors, please reach out.
