Why Do I Sabotage Myself When Things Are Going Well?

Self-sabotage often comes up in the context of addiction.

Someone with tremendous potential who keeps choosing the substance that wrecks their judgment. The path is obviously destructive, and everyone with a front row seat knows what it looks like.

But plenty of people who’ve never had a problem with a substance sabotage themselves, too.

The question they keep asking themselves is, why do the same scenarios keep happening like this every single time?

From the outside, it looks like it should work.

Declarations of “What am I doing wrong?” are peppered in your journal or in conversations with friends.

You genuinely want the promotion.

No one argues that you’re not qualified for it. But when the time comes to actually step into it, you find yourself doing the oddest things.

• Applying at the last possible minute, landing you at the tail end of the process. You lose the power of being the first to make an impression.
• Or you ruminate ten reasons why this role really isn’t right for you. Even though it’s an obvious step towards the thing you keep saying you want.

You might be sabotaging your relationships.

You scratch your head wondering why you keep choosing people who need fixing.

Why can’t you just find someone who can own their stuff and support you in your growth?

It might even feel like you’re in the same dysfunctional relationship, just with different people.

This gives you the warrant to feel trapped by the obligation to once again keep everyone else going, then resent them when they let you.

But you won’t step out of that rescuer role. Because that would mean letting someone else be accountable for their own stuff.

And what if they fail at that? Or worse, what if they refuse to take that accountability?

Where does that leave you?

Their failure or pushback just might say something about you. Where do you go with that?

You could spend a lot of time unpacking all those patterns and how you got here.

And you probably already have.

The unfortunate thing about patterns is that you need some time for them to develop. So you don’t catch them until later when you’ve probably acted in ways you wish you hadn’t.

The good news is that discovering a pattern helps you learn what you can do differently. And DOING something different is what will transform your life. Not just nodding along that the pattern sure does makes sense.

The three patterns below pop up for many who find themselves trashing the very outcomes they wanted.

If you couldn’t count on the adults when you were a kid, you may have learned how to:

• Lay low when you see a threat brewing
• Brace for impact when the threat is imminent
• Manage the fallout on the backend — for everyone, including the person who brought the threat.

In this environment, reaching for something you want may not have been safe. So you became skilled staying out of the line of fire and taking care of everyone else’s business, too.

Those skills probably kept you safe then.

But they’re keeping you from what you want now. Your inability to move into something where you can’t control the full spectrum of the threat is costing you opportunity and movement towards what’s most important to you.

• Laying low is keeping you invisible.
• All that bracing is keeping you stuck waiting for a shoe to drop.
• Rescuing everyone and soothing the people who bring you the most chaos is keeping you small and resentful.

The key to changing these patterns isn’t to just stop doing those things.

It’s to redirect that fuel to a different engine. Stopping doing something isn’t a goal. Working toward something that will change your life is.

The nice thing about skills is they can be learned with practice, along with a commitment to suck at them for a bit.

1. Put yourself in a place where you can be seen.

Resist the shadows that you’ve gotten so comfortable with. Stop telling yourself you’re the wizard behind the curtain. You were created to walk the yellow brick road along with everyone else.

But you have to decide to take the first step and let others see who you really are: without a brain, a heart, or courage or whatever you think your shortcomings are that cast you in that role.

Staying in the shadows bought you time and space to observe everyone else and plan your reaction so you’d stay safe. It worked then. But it’s costing you opportunities now.

The people who get considered are the people who are visible, and you’ve made an art of not being visible.

Step into one visible space today, take a breath and have the big feelings about it, and keep moving anyway.

2. Learn the difference between running for cover and vigilance.

Everything you want is out there, but you can’t predict what’s out there. No one can. When you engage something, even something that looks promising, you have no guarantee of any particular outcome.

There is always the risk this won’t turn out like you want, even if it’s low.

So of course you’ll have to protect yourself to get what you want. That’s prudent. What’s not prudent is treating every possibility of danger like the end of the world.

Because if you’re not careful, you end up catastrophizing the things you want, along with the things you’ve already identified as dangerous.

Assessing the horizon for danger was how you learned to stay safe as a kid. But now it’s aimed at things that haven’t even happened yet.

Vigilance watches for threats from all sides. But running for cover at the possibility of a threat will have you quitting before anything even happens.

Pursue something — anything — today that doesn’t have a defined outcome, take a breath and have the big feelings about it, and keep moving anyway.

3. Let go of trying to control everyone else’s stuff.

I’m guessing you’re probably always the one brokering peace on the back end of something, or shrinking yourself back so everyone else can feel better about what just happened.

You frame it as you being the only one who can handle this, or the only one willing to. But here’s the deal-io, and I need you to hear this so I’m going to put it in a callout box so it looks important: 👇

You doing other people’s work is keeping you from engaging fully in what you want for yourself. You’re grown now, and so is everyone else. Now that everyone’s grown, it’s time to let others take responsibility for their actions.

This is a great place to step out of the victim story a bit. Because you doing everyone else’s work — and resenting it — sets up a perfect martyr scenario for you. Seeing yourself as a victim will keep you stuck.

And as long as you can point to someone else who’s taking from you, you never have to look at what you could be doing differently to move forward.

Feeling wronged and doing other people’s work validates your pain for longer than is necessary to heal.

Set one unapologetic boundary right now that future you would set, take a breath and have the big feelings about it, and keep moving anyway.

The antidote to self-sabotage is in taking action towards what you want.

For anything to change, you have to do something different than what you’ve been doing.

If you’ve been sabotaging yourself, the only way it changes is when you decide that the cost of staying where you are outweighs anything the self-sabotage is doing to validate you.

And you have to decide you’re no longer willing to pay that cost.

Big feelings come with the territory. Instead of running from them and shooing them away, read them as evidence that this is important to you.

If you didn’t feel some kind of way, it may not matter much.

The more you allow yourself to feel big feelings and let them pass, the sooner you can get to the next opportunity to act.

And the next time you’re confronted with that scenario and the big feeling, you’ll have the confidence to engage it in a more empowering way.

Over time, that scenario and big feeling will have less power over you.

And you’ll spend the time and energy you get back by chasing what you want.