How to stop self-sabotage

Self-sabotage is like working against ourselves when things go away.

Clinical hypnotherapist Kinneri Parekh says that it happens when an experience beneath our conscious awareness prevents us from living up to our full potential.

She explains it as an unconscious protective pattern that develops when part of us learns that staying where we are feels safer than changing.

Self-sabotage, she notes, can affect almost every area of life and the choices we make.

It can show up as procrastination, emotional outbursts, avoiding opportunities, low self-esteem, self-doubt, people-pleasing, fear of failure or success, perfectionism and self-criticism.

Kinneri says that some self-sabotaging behaviours can be connected to experiences during childhood.

Children are highly impressionable and learn to make sense of the environments around them.

A child who feels safe, seen and supported can nurture confidence and a healthy sense of self.

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However, experiences such as neglect, rejection, abandonment, abuse or a lack of safety can affect a child’s self-esteem, sense of self and ability to regulate emotions.

“When children experience adversity, they get into coping strategies to manage what they are feeling and to navigate an environment where they may not feel safe,” she says.

These strategies can serve a protective purpose at the time. The child isn’t consciously choosing to have an unhealthy pattern but is finding the best way they know to cope.

As they grow older, however, these two influence behaviour even after the original threat has passed.

The younger self experiences events through the limited understanding of a child, while the adult self-returns with perspectives and awareness that weren’t available at the time.

She differentiates between ordinary setbacks and self-sabotaging patterns.

Everyone experiences setbacks, makes mistakes and occasionally makes choices that take them off course.

As adults, however, people can generally reflect on what happened, learn from it and make different choices.

Self-sabotage can be different because the behaviour may be happening in the present while the emotional response is rooted in the past.

“This can explain why someone may consciously know that something is good for them but still find themselves avoiding it or creating obstacles.

The adult understands one thing, while an older protective pattern is responding to something else,” Kinneri says.

She explains that when emotional experiences aren’t fully processed, the emotions and meanings attached to them remain.

Later, something in the present may remind a person of an earlier experience and trigger a familiar emotional response.

The beliefs can become so familiar that people stop recognising them as beliefs and see them as part of their identity.

They may tell themselves, “I’m not confident,” “I don’t trust people,” “I’m a people pleaser,” “I always procrastinate” or “I just can’t make decisions.”

She says that people don’t always see it as a pattern that is working against them but see them as who they are.

She believes that some behaviours people consider part of their personality may actually be beliefs and coping mechanisms developed earlier in life.

The possibility of change comes from recognising that learned patterns can also be unlearned.

Kinneri notes that hypnotherapy and regression therapy can help people explore what lies beneath self-sabotaging behaviour instead of paying attention only to the behaviour itself.

“A person may present with fear of commitment, procrastination, low confidence or difficulty making decisions, but the behaviour seen in adulthood may not be where the pattern began,” she says.

Exploring earlier experiences can help uncover what a person felt, what they believed about themselves and the world, and what they concluded they needed to do to feel safe.

She explains that the aim isn’t to manage or replace the behaviour but to get to the root of what is driving it and heal what lies underneath.

She tells apart this approach from teaching someone to replace an unhealthy behaviour with a healthier one.

While changing behaviour can be useful, she says that understanding why the behaviour started in the first place can help address the underlying pattern.

“As experiences are brought into awareness and emotions are processed, a person may start to view old beliefs differently. The protective behaviour may then no longer feel necessary,” she says.

The process can also help people reconnect with resources that may have been suppressed or constrained by longstanding emotional patterns.

For one person, that resource may be trust. For another, it may be confidence, a sense of self, the ability to speak up, the freedom to make decisions or the capacity to feel safe in relationships.

“When the underlying emotional experience has been processed and the belief that maintained the pattern has been resolved, the person finds that they naturally respond differently,” she says.

She adds that it isn’t about changing the behaviour but healing what made the behaviour necessary.

Kinneri says that self-sabotage is not necessarily about deliberately working against ourselves. It may be an old protective pattern that no longer serves us.

Understanding where the pattern comes from can help people process the emotions and beliefs attached to it and move beyond strategies that were once necessary for coping.

“Healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about coming home to ourselves, to who we truly are beneath the person we learned to become to feel safe,” she says.