Are you preventing your business or blog from being successful? Are you absolutely sure? I suspect that none of us has achieved success as quickly as we could have. I know for a fact that some people repeatedly self-sabotage because I lived through it with them.
My readers may not be aware that I am old enough to remember the draft. Many of the young men I knew during my high school days and college were either drafted or joined because they had low draft numbers. They hoped that joining would let give them a better choice.
My husband and his best friend joined the Army and volunteered for tank duty because the tanks were in Germany. But after a year in Germany getting to know everyone, the tanks shipped out to the front lines in Viet Nam.
What does this have to do with you and your success? Keep reading and I’ll explain. I use this example because it will be so obvious.
Obvious Self-Sabotoge Example
What happened in Viet Nam is what caused this severe case of self-sabotage – but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that as long as we struggled everything was fine. But as soon as things started to go our way, he would do something that ruined our progress.
The first symptom: just before he would have enough credits to graduate he changed his major. Eventually, though he graduated with a degree in computer science. And then immediately declared he hated it and didn’t want to work in that field.
He was a partner in a ceramics company. We both worked there for hours during our college years. They invested in a really expensive kiln to increase production. The company was finally making good money. Then they suddenly sold the company. What?
So he took a job as an assistant manager of a drug store. He did quite well. I had just seen his latest appraisal and they offered to make him manager of another store. He quit. What? He claimed he wasn’t doing well – but I knew he was based on the appraisal and the job offer.
He took a job as a gardener that paid a fraction of his old salary. That would have been fine if he were happy. But he hated that job, too. He hated everything. He started partying with his best friend’s much younger brother. He stopped talking to me. His self-sabotoge had gone from bad to worse.
What Caused It?
It became obvious that whenever we were doing well he would do something to halt our progress. He would do things like take out a loan and then quit his job – causing financial issues.
But it took me 7 years to figure out what the cause was. Every year one day a year he and his best friend would drink and talk. On the seventh year he finally told his friend what happened in Nam and the friend told me.
He was the gunner on a tank. The tank was destroyed and he was the sole survivor. After they patched him up they put him on another tank. It, too, was destroyed, and again he was the sole survivor. The people who died weren’t strangers to him. They were men he spent the past year with in Germany.
I knew he hated the medals he was given. I knew he wouldn’t talk about what happened with anyone. And now I knew the source of his self-sabotoge: guilt over being the only one who lived when everyone else around him had died.
What About You?
All of us self-sabotoge at times, although thankfully not as severely as he did. His ended our marriage and a couple years later, his life. No one around him suspected what would happen.
Whether you have severe self-sabotoge like his or lesser issues, there is no one who isn’t affected by what has happened in their lives. All of us can benefit from better understanding ourselves.
Have you ever known what you should do, but just didn’t do it? Or known you shouldn’t do something – but did it anyway? Who hasn’t? To stop self-sabotage, we must identify the cause.
A good place to start is to watch Mike Bundrant’s 20 minute video on how to stop self-sabotage. You may already know of Mike because he writes for Natural News and Psych Central. Even if you think you don’t need it, I encourage you to invest the 20 minutes. It could change your life.
Gail Gardner
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I learn something from this post that’s why I often visit this to read some of its articles.
Thanks for sharing some of your personal life with us Gail. I think we all suffer from times of self-sabotage – some more than others. To understand and recognize what we are doing is the first step towards doing it less 🙂
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Thanks for commenting, Julie,
If you watch the video you’ll see three different ways most of us end up self-sabotaging. I suspect it is unlikely that all people don’t have all three. Perhaps someone who had a great childhood might not, but I see all three issues in my own life.
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