You don’t have to read any of the previous parts in this series to understand what is written below. If you do want to read the previous parts in the series please go to www.jchrsitoff.com and scroll down the front page to see those articles.

In the first 4 articles on this subject (all can be found at www.jchristoff.com) I explored the idea that many people generally have some very simple goals, like weight loss, yet they have an extremely difficult time achieving those goals. We all have subconscious programs regarding our behavior, which we’ve learned throughout our childhood. Think of these programs as records in an old jukebox and it ‘s these records that are continually played in our subconscious mind.

If the lessons we’ve picked up in our childhood are reflective of low self care, low self esteem and low self respect toward self and other……getting healthy will appear as a near impossible goal to attain.

In real life this would look like a perpetual cycle of weight loss attempt and failure, at something as simple as placing one food in your mouth instead of another. Health is nothing more than controlling what we buy and eat yet as we know most people just can’t make those simple changes and that’s why you know something else is really going on. Will power does run out eventually but our jukebox of old records never does. When our subconscious programming is such that there’s a benefit to us staying unhealthy it’s called self sabotage.

Understanding self sabotage is about understanding that the sabotage itself, like eating the unhealthy foods again after you lose the weight, has nothing really to do with what it looks like on the surface.

First, the self saboteur portion of your personality calculates an extreme benefit to staying overweight and sick. Second, the self saboteur uses the cycle of weight loss and weight gain to get it’s emotional needs met. Third, this would be learned behavior and most often would be picked up by  your subconscious mind via your parent(s) or guardian(s) before the age of 7. Fourth, the parent(s) or guardian(s) would also use similar cycles to get their emotional needs met. Fifth, the self saboteur part of the personality believes that if the cycle is broken (like if you actually get healthy and stay healthy) that it will lose the ability to get its’ emotional needs met and that it will lose control over maybe the only actions it has ever learned to control in your life. Sixth, this perpetual cycle of crisis not only provides a good deflection away from what really needs to be addressed in one’s life (like looking at the programming driving the illogical behavior) but it also hides the very hurt child from our past from letting go of the fear/pain/hurt, which is driving the entire process. Here’s an example of what this can look like in real life.

Judy has a mother who is always sick. When Judy was a child her subconscious mind picked up the pattern that Judy’s Mom satisfied a lot of her emotional needs when the she was sick, given that people were always providing extra attention because of her victim-hood. Judy also learned  many other habits from her mother regarding not eating properly, visiting the doctor (having third parties take care of her), consuming medications when disease is a self care issue, telling people her disease was genetic and blaming circumstances or others for her unstable health situation etc. Judy’s mother just avoided what really makes people healthy and participated in anything that kept the disease rolling. Avoid health, stay sick. That’s what Judy was exposed to as a child.

Judy grows up to gain her attention and love from others in the exact same way because it’s all she knows. Judy was also taught that disease/victim-hood is indeed an aspect of her life that she could control and without that very odd and unhealthy control in her life, she believes she would have very little or no control at all. Having no control of one’s life is noted as one of the greatest fears an ego can experience. Basically, Judy’s disease state brings her attention and love from others plus a since of control and predictability. To Judy’s subconscious child ego, the removal of disease/sickness/victim-hood equates to a loss of love and attention, a loss of control, a loss of predictability and an insult to her mother’s value structure. This part of Judy is the self saboteur, which has real reasons not to keep the weight off and not to get healthy.

I will discuss how to get some new records into the old jukebox and how to facilitate re-programming in the next article. For more info like this, follow me on facebook.