In the last 5 articles I’ve written about self sabotage. All those previous articles can be found at www.jchristoff.com. Self sabotage is how our subconscious programming gets in the way of our own success. Failed weight loss attempts, failed businesses, failed relationships etc don’t always indicate that self sabotage is an issue yet if a negative result starts showing as a pattern in one’s life it can indicate that self sabotage may be something that needs to be explored.

In the last article we described a character called Judy and some common issues that link most health based self sabotage cases. Judy, despite many attempts,  could not keep the weight off even though she has lost all the weight she wanted many times in her life. No matter how hard she tried, she just kept moving back up the scale and literally watches herself stick bad food choices into her own mouth without much control on her part. Her wants and her actions could not be more different and that’s literally one of the first signs that the self saboteur may be present.

When you want to be thinner and healthier but keep doing things to make yourself gain weight and get sick, that’s highly illogical. Illogical behavior (like smoking cigarettes, alcohol consumption, consuming junk foods, taking toxic medications and hoping that somehow better health will materialize etc) means that something other than our rational minds are driving our decision making process.

Given that our body is designed to maximize our survival, it’s obviously highly illogical and irrational to participate in any regular activity that literally shortens our lifespan by years or even decades. Having the gift of living and then actively pursuing a premature and painful death should rank as one of the most illogical patterns of behavior in history yet millions (if not billions) of people do it every day.

Trying to hurt yourself and not understanding why you do it is the basis of self sabotage. The key to getting healthy and taking full control of your life has to do with looking inside as to the real reasons you do what you do. Some people are brave enough to take a break from hurting themselves to look inside and others just find it too painful and literally want to keep up appearances (or keep up with the Joneses) and just keep trying to hide their suffering. It’s OK to be hurt and talk about how you really feel. Getting to know every part of yourself and accepting yourself as the whole you is what making peace with the saboteur is all about.

Although how we act can be appear different or exactly the same as how our parents act, most of our sabotage methods would be learned from our parent(s)……most times before we were 7 years old. For example, lets take Judy whose mother smokes cigarettes.

Judy doesn’t smoke but she drinks alcohol most nights. Judy’s mind picked up the habit of body abuse/attack from her mother. The subconscious mind of a child picks up patterns of behavior from the parent(s) (guilt, judgment, suffering, self abuse etc) and not specifics. In this case the learned behavior was to attack and disrepect the body. The way it’s done doesn’t matter, the pattern is what will be duplicated. Unfortunately the children are also bound to increase the size of the pattern or in this case, the size of the attack. This is not good for obvious reasons.

The keys to reversing self sabotage are 5 fold. 1) You need to be brave enough to see it happening and recognize it 2) You need to be brave enough to admit that things are not what they appear and that something other than your rational mind is making important decisions in your life. 3) You need to be brave enough to look into your past and make peace with what may have happened to you during your childhood in order to block past reactions to extreme emotional pain from affecting your future. 4) You’ll need to be brave enough to cry for the pain you may have experienced as a child and then let it all go in order to live your life now as a functional adult. 5) You’ll need to constantly remind yourself that you deserve better, that you won’t let the past affect your future, that change is welcome and that you deserve a well balanced life.

If you would like to attend a free self sabotage seminar I’m giving one very soon please call 613.932.4766 to register.