I know a very rich man who started dating a very nice woman. Let’s call her Mandy. A friend of mine. Mandy was from a working class back ground of highly successful business people. Although Mandy’s family were successful, they were caught up in working about 50 hours per week to maintain their wealth. The rich man was so rich, he no longer worked. Let’s call the rich man Jamie. Jamie had to do many years of hard inner work to not feel shame regarding his wealth and his freedom of “not working”. He was in love with Mandy and he wanted her to join him on his travels around the world. In order to spend more time with Mandy, Jamie suggested a full time maid for the home, a ground’s crew and an assistant for meal prep, shopping for food, to pay bills and for other daily tasks. Jamie would pay of course, no expense to Mandy. And then the problems started……..
What started to appear was a very classic case of self sabotage, regarding the need to “work” in order to consider oneself noble, moral and down to earth. Mandy had been conditioned her entire life to WORK HARD. She was taught that nothing worth having in life could ever come EASY. She envisioned retiring but not that early of course and she also envisioned working hard to make her dream life happen. As her dream life showed up without work and earlier than she planned for, although she really wanted such a life, she started to have a full blown programming meltdown.
HARD WORK had to be done all day, every day, according to Mandy’s childhood conditioning……just like her family had done for 3 generations. If she didn’t complete her childhood programming around hard work coming first (before reward) she felt like her tribe would reject her. Her original tribe (her family) had one primary bonding ritual and that was hard work. A ritual of inching ahead slowing but surely. Not participating in that ritual filled her with unwarranted fear that her family tribe would ostracize her plus our society in general was based on this “hard work/slow rewards” concept. And that my friends is how most people react when their dream life comes knocking…..they’re filled instantly with fear, they often reject it and they don’t know why. Self sabotage is when you want MORE but your fears paralyze you, simple because you may have to make new tribal affiliations and break old habits.
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