Why? Why do we do this?
It makes no actual sense. We want things in this life, we work for them, we often work super hard for them, then just about the time we might actually get what we have worked so hard for, we fuck it up. It can be a promotion at work, a new job, a relationship, a love interest, a friendship, a physical goal. We are so close to getting what we so desire...but then we take immediate and swift action that ensures that we will never get what we worked so hard for...
I think we have three reasons why we do this:
We lack the self esteem it takes to see things through.
We didn’t really want it, someone else told us we did and we were too codependent to evaluate whether this was our goal or someone else’s goal.
We want to control the outcome, so we pick the only outcome we can absolutely control.
The Self Esteem Bind
It takes a good opinion of yourself to be successful in this life. You cannot achieve in love, work and living if you have no self worth. If you do not believe in yourself, who else will? Seriously.
But we are crushed by all the demons from our past, all the times we didn’t succeed or outright failed. I spend a lot of time coaching people in relational areas while work and other areas of life kind of bleed in...and I will tell you that people’s assessment of situations is often so not based in fact. We often think we failed but really we didn’t. I find there is a very thin line between illusion and fact. And we cross over it all the time. And our assessment of ourselves is either extremely lax, letting ourselves off the hook for pretty much everything or it is so hard that we believe things were failures that actually weren’t.
If you fall into the first category, lying will often be part of the game. You will lie to yourself and everyone else because your self esteem is so fragile, you can’t possibly handle or own the truth about your shortcomings...so you act as if you do not have any.
If you are like me, your self assessment is so astringent, so caustic that you often find failure even when there really isn’t any. And this results in living in a largely fabricated and delusional place.
There is a lot to be said for being right sized. Not thinking too much of yourself and not thinking too little either. It is a delicate balance, to be sure. But I think we could all use a little more work here in adequate self appraisal. And then matching that up with someone else’ whose assessment might be a little more balanced and neutral.
The Codependent Bind
We say we want something to make someone else happy. It could be our parents, our children, our spouses, our bosses. We go for something that, in reality, is something that someone else wants for us and we just kind of get carried away with the whole endeavor. I almost got married once upon a time for just this reason.
As we move closer to the goal, we find that we didn’t really want it to begin with...we were not interested (see marriage Issue above). We just wanted the validation and praise and accolades that came with us aligning our will with others’ will for us. I see this in sobriety a lot. People get sober because they want to make their jobs happy or their families or their significant others. They are actually quite fine desecrating themselves on the daily. They are not unhappy even though the price they seem willing to pay is high and costly. They don’t see it that way. They see it as the price to drink and drug the way they want to.
The Control Bind
Most often people do not achieve their previously set goals because self sabotage gives us the illusion of control. I can walk away from a relationship, a job, a friendship, really any situation and say that I am walking because I don’t want the thing, but really it is because I am so terrified that I won’t get it. And I can’t handle the disappointment of going any further and having it not work out.
So I blow it up, I leave, I run, I tell myself a myriad of things in order to make myself feel better. And all the while, I am just attempting to direct the outcome providing myself with what I seem to desire most in this world...control.
I have learned that the most controlling people in this world are likely the most damaged. The more control a person needs, the more I want to know about their childhood. There is trauma there to be SURE! And while it makes no real difference if I know what it is, if the person doesn’t want to deal with that historical trauma, there is nothing I can do about that at all. If they don’t want to heal it, they will find some contentment in this world avoiding it.
I know in my life I have broken up with people, ended friendships, left employers and gave up things that I really wanted for myself because leaving gave me the illusion of control. If I decided to leave, then I was the one running the show. And I would not be fate’s bitch. Except we are all fate’s bitch. And there is nothing we can do about that. Life is going to unfold exactly the way it does. And while many of our consequences will be of our own making, many will not. Sometimes we are just in the wrong place at the wrong time and get hammered by someone else’s karma. We actually had nothing to do with why the situation happened, we just were standing too close when that person’s karma hit.
As a life long leaver, it is really hard for me to stay. I want to run all the fucking time. I want to GO! And remaining, most especially if I think the other person might leave, is something that is very hard for me to do. I just want to take control and manage that shit and then deal with how I feel about it all, later. Or never. I prefer never. I pick never.
The truth though is that I cannot predict the outcome of anything. But I have the kind of mind that likes to think she can. And I have been right a lot about relationships in the workplace, the bedroom and the social milieu. I have been right a lot, but my decision to exercise control doesn’t always come from all the experience I have had being right...it comes from this toxic and dangerous part of me that cares more about maintaining my illusion of control then it does about whether my assessment of the situation is factually correct.
If I am doing an honest self appraisal, then I have to own all the times I have been dead wrong. And there are many of those times. Many. But those don’t come up all that often in my run for the door. When I am scared enough, I just start running for the exit and I give no fucks at all about whether I am right. The only thing operating at that point is abject fear and a storyline I have concocted with all the demons from my head. I picture some mad woman from the 1800s running while a lit and aflame. But that is just me.
And while the self esteem and codependent bind are much in play with most of us, I think the greater number falls to those of us attempting to create this sense of control, this illusion that we can predict the outcomes. And we can’t. That is just one of the most basic, and irrefutable tenants of living, we do not know what will happen next. We can use all our deductive powers of reason and intellect, but we cannot say what will occur. Hell, we are not even that good at figuring out what is likely to occur.
And yet we persist...
We want control. We want dominion. We want to be able to predict what will happen next. While we are aware that no one else has this power, we somehow believe that we shall be able to claim it for ourselves.
I have ended a lot of things that perhaps were not at their ending because I so needed that feeling of agency and control. I sabotaged myself and my life and perhaps some of the things I wanted most of all because me being able to control the outcome was more important than the outcome. And since I could not make the other person do as I wanted or feel as I wanted, I could make decisions about myself and thereby cause the ending I most feared from the other.
It is a chickenshit way to live. Far bolder to stand your ground and allow the illusion to die its inevitable death. Far grander and harder and heroic. And I am working on that. It is a very courageous thing to remain when all of me wants to flee. All of me wants to take the fuck off and run far and fast with finality and fireworks.
And because I am special, I have never called it what it was. I came up with all kinds of different names for what I was doing: accuracy, intelligence, intuition. But I know what I did most of all was self sabotage. If you never really go after that which you really want, then you never have to face your own failure. You can live in your self create fantasy world where you are in control and nothing hurts. Except it does.
I am working on this. Staying instead of running. And it is hard. I would really rather predict the outcome and feel safer than I would rather stick around and give my all and fail because someone else had the upper hand. It is about ego but it is mostly about fear. Fear that I will lose something I have or not get something I want. Always.
In my more recent assessments and inventories, I have seen how much I gave away because I wanted the illusion of control. And now, upon further reflection, I am not sure that was such a good deal. But now my self sabotage has become a habit. And often times, I am so far in it that I don’t even see it until it has moved way past the point of no return. So I am working on sitting still and not taking action, which for a thinker and doer is very hard.
The internal dialogue has been interesting lately. Lots of ideas and plans of action that all keep getting killed by whatever part of my being that doesn’t want to do my life the way I have been doing it. Is this progress? Fuck if I know. I guess time will tell.
I will say that I think I am being fucking brave. It is hard to stay when you want to run. It is hard to give up the illusion of control. It is hard to work to improve your self esteem and create new healthier pathways and relationships than the codependent ones from your past. All of this is hard and feels like next level shit. It feels that way because it is.
Life will constantly provide you opportunities for growth. It will always be up to us to grow and change and live this life boldly and loudly and courageously. It will always be up to us whether we want to strengthen the muscle of self sabotage which in turn strengthens the illusion of control. Or to take action to change it all up and do something different. To wait it out and see what happens next. For me, I keep having to remind myself that if I can figure out the plot to every movie, why do I bother to buy the ticket?
Most of the time because I want to be right more than I want to be happy, which is a shitty deal all the way round. But I pick it, time and time again because it is familiar and a beautiful liar. And I apparently love a good liar, me.
Again...still.
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