THE ENDLESS WAYS WE SABOTAGE

What do it mean to sabotage yourself? Unfortunately, there are an unlimited number of ways that we can sabotage ourselves, or another way to put it, is to engage in behaviors that may solve the problem in the short term, but lead to long term damage to our health.

There are numerous aspects of health. There are habits and behaviors that can negatively impact our physical health, mental health, financial health and even spiritual health. When we act in ways that are in contradiction to our long term goals or out of alignment with our values, we may come over time to not trust ourselves and to falsely believe that we need others to tell us what is the right thing to do.

Before talking about self sabotaging behaviors, it’s important to remember a basic life philosophy and practice that is essential for us to remember if we are going to explore these topics. The life philosophy is considered one of the primary assumptions in DBT which is that at every moment, every person is doing the best that they know how.

It just does not make sense that we would knowingly and purposefully engage in behaviors that we know don’t serve us. The underlying assumption is that everyone is doing the best they can and if they would do better they could. Our assumption is that something in that moment is getting in the way. And there are so many things that could be getting in our way: for example we might have a certain faulty belief system that we are not worthy or deserving of what we want. Or maybe, in that particular moment, we are too emotionally overloaded to engage in the healthier behavior.

A lot of what I see in my practice, is that many people don’t have the skills they need, they don’t really know what else to do. So if this is a philosophy that is difficult for you to hold onto, if you really truly believe that every person or you aren’t doing the best you can at every moment, then I’d just ask that you open yourself up to the idea of it. Try it on, like a hat or a new sweater. You don’t have to buy it yet, but maybe just try it on for a little bit and see how it feels. You might in time come to see this is as very compassionate and non judgmental way of looking at yourself and the world.

Getting back to self sabotaging behaviors...Let me give you some examples of what I mean. I see lots of patients who struggle with stress or emotional eating. Often times they desperately want to stop these behaviors but in the moment, so many things get in the way of engaging in a healthier behavior when they feel upset or overwhelmed. Many of my patients are well aware that this is a behavior that may feel good in the short run, they may even plan for it in advance knowing full well they are going to regret it afterwards. But the food tastes so good in the moment and temporarily improves our mood and distracts us from whatever it is that was upsetting us in the first place.

It isn’t a lack of awareness that’s the problem. Often times, my patients will say, "I know this isn’t good for me but it’s like I can’t stop myself, my emotions are so strong I just can’t deal with it and the food helps to numb the pain and helps me cope." They might say things like, "I know I should just read a book or do a puzzle or better yet go for a walk, and I tell myself that that’s what I’m going to do, but I can’t get myself to do it in the moment."

Just for a second let me bring this back to the “best we can do at every moment” concept. It makes no sense that someone would continue to engage in a behavior that they don't want to engage in if they could stop it. If you were able to just take a walk, or just distract yourself, then you certainly would, because that’s what you want. Something is getting in the way of you doing what you know would be better for you.

Let’s take my patient Mary, not her real name of course. Mary is a single mom of 3 young kids and she’s a lawyer and has a very stressful job. She wakes up first thing in the morning and hits the ground running. She lives off of coffee and protein bars for most of the day and doesn’t even really think much about food during the day because she has so much on her mind related to getting all the kids where they need to be and balancing her demanding work. She runs all day and gets home, makes dinner, cleans up, gets the kids ready for bed and by 9 pm it is finally her time to sit down and breathe. She turns on the tv and the next thing she knows she is looking through the pantry, she eats something sweet, then wants something salty, then sweet again. She knows she isn’t hungry physically because they usually eat a late dinner, but she wants something. She has strong cravings but sometimes can’t identify for what. She feels very uncomfortable and restless but doesn’t know why. She has some thoughts like “I work so hard all the time and have so little support in my life, I deserve this.” Other times she feels very overwhelmed and anxious and can’t settle down so she thinks food will help her to finally relax and unwind before she goes to bed. She notices that it is hard for her to sleep if her belly isn’t very full. She ends up regretting it, she feels her clothes getting tighter and she really truly wants to stop. She promises herself every night that tomorrow she will just get on her peloton instead of watch tv, but every night she falls back into the same habit and goes to sleep feeling mad at herself, telling herself she is a failure.

Or let’s take Jessica, also not her real name. Jessica is a married mother of 2 and has always been a stay at home mom. Her youngest just left for college and she finds herself feeling very lonely and bored. Her husband works long hours and he is not ready to retire as he said he would. Jennifer spends a lot of her time shopping online or going to the mall. She gets an idea in her head about a specific item she needs, often a beauty product or skin care product. She watches Youtube videos and the next thing she knows she is at Sephora buying another skin care set even though she hasn’t even opened up the last 3 that she bought, still sitting under her sink. Sometimes she hides her purchases from her husband, either leaving them in her trunk if he is at home rather than brining items inside the house. Even though she and her husband share a bank account, she opened up a few credit cards on her own so that her husband would not scrutinize her spending. She tells herself things like “I deserve this, I am lonely” . She knows she doesn't need all of these things but they do bring her joy in the moment, the problem is that the joy is just so short lived. Sometimes she has to pay one credit card off with another because she doesn’t have the money. She sets limits for herself but never keeps them. She worries often that her husband is going to discover this and get mad at her, because this happened a few years ago that he found about a huge credit card bill she had been hiding and she promised to him that she would never ever do this again, and here she is. She wants to stop this, but just does not now how.

Maybe you can identify with these women. Think for a moment about your own life, are there any behaviors that you engage in, that you feel like you can’t stop or can’t easily, even though you wish you could and feel really guilty about it afterwards? We can sabotage our own health goals with food, shopping, alcohol, drugs or gambling. We can even sabotage ourselves with behaviors like losing our temper, yelling at our kids or spouse. We can also think of things we don’t do that are problematic, like avoiding things we need to do and procrastination. Again, there are millions of ways that we engage in a behavior that meets a short term need but hurts us in the long run.

So why do we do it? The main thing is really that these behaviors work, temporarily, to manage our emotions. Oftentimes what I see is that we are anxious and that the behavior temporarily reduces the anxiety. The problem is, that when the behavior is over, we feel anxious that we engaged in that self-defeating behavior, thereby starting the cycle all over again.

Sometimes we are trying to manage other emotions in addition to or instead of anxiety. Sometimes we are sad, lonely, bored, or even angry. The very first step to breaking self sabotaging behaviors is to increase our awareness of what we are feeling.

That leads us to the topic of how do we start to reduce this.

Step one: Increase your awareness. You can’t change something that you aren’t aware of. The first step is to gain more insight into all the aspects associated with the behavior. With Mary and Jessica, the first things I asked them to do is to start a journal. When they have the urge to eat or shop I ask them before they do it, to please write a few paragraphs in a new journal that answers the questions: what's going on for me right now? How am I feeling emotionally? What is the word for the feeling? Am I anxious, sad, bored, angry, etc. List all of my feelings in this moment.

Also, what am I doing or what was I doing just before I had the urge to eat or shop.

Write out as many thoughts that you are aware you were having just before the urge hit you. What were you thinking about? This is often the hardest step at first because oftentimes we feel that the urge “came out of nowhere” but I promise you, it never does. There was always a trigger, we just have to act like a scientist to better understand it. And the only way we can do that is with self compassion. If we are beating ourselves up, if we are telling ourselves we are failures, then we won’t be able to figure it out, so that’s where the philosophy of I’m doing the best I can at every moment, comes in. If we compassionately try to understand what I was doing, thinking and feeling when the urge struck, we will start to notice some patterns over time which will inform us how to change.

Step two: Look for patterns: What do you notice? What Mary noticed was that her emotional eating only happened at night, after turning on the tv and sitting down. She noticed through journaling that as soon as she did those things she had the thought, "I’m so tired, I’m so thoroughly exhausted. I should exercise but I just can’t, I’m so tired." She thinks, "If I can just eat a little something, maybe it will give me some more energy. I deserve a little treat. I don't want to go to bed because I have so little time for myself, if I eat, it will be a little treat and something to do before I go to bed."

By giving herself the space to think and journal she discovered that the two key points that she explored were “I am so tired’ and “I have so little time for myself”

Step three: Brainstorm solutions to the patterns. List all the things she could do instead. We did this together. For your own work, I encourage you to work with a therapist or coach or even a good friend to discuss this step. We started with the fatigue issue, Mary realized that she was truly not getting enough sleep, we rarely do. So going to bed was the healthiest thing she could do for herself in that moment. But it didn’t solve the “I have no time for myself” issue. We explored what were the barriers to getting more support in her life? Why did she think she had to do everything herself. She explored and realized that getting divorced led her to feel like a failure and that these beliefs probably even preceded her divorce, events in her childhood led her to believe she was not good enough and would not be successful. She avoided these feelings by overworking and never asking for help. But she was trapped in a cycle of overworking, exhaustion, overeating and still feeling like a failure.

As we explored deeper, there were actually more self sabotaging behaviors that she was engaging in, all because she had the false belief that she wasn’t good enough. By becoming aware of how much that was driving her, and using the motivation to be healthier for her own children, she started working on changing this belief, that she was worthy, and that asking for help did not make her weak.

Mary then decided to get a nanny, a part time helper who could pick up the kids at school and start dinner. Mary was able to come home and relax with dinner already made. She had help getting the kids ready for bed, which made her evening much less stressful. She also decided to start taking random days off from work and having more time just to herself without work or the kids and was thinking about the possibility of even taking a small vacation by herself.

By getting more sleep, getting help with the kids and taking time off from work, Mary reduced her overall stress level and the desire to comfort eat in the evenings significantly reduced. We also talked about additional ways she could reduce the association of tv and eating: she got ready for bed, brushed her teeth, got in bed and read a book rather than watching tv. She found reading made her sleepy and she fell asleep almost immediately.

To review, step one, increase awareness. The best way to do this is with journaling in the moment. If you wait you will forget or just won’t get in touch with all the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are occurring in that exact moment.

Step two is look for patterns, after journaling for a couple of days or weeks, look to see what patterns you notice. You will likely see a repeating thought, feeling or behavior that comes right before the action you are trying to change.

Step three is brainstorm solutions for the patterns or the core issues. This won't be easy. It will require you to be creative, to be willing to try new things, or to think of things in new ways and to be open to living your life differently. But it is possible. Your inner healing intelligence is guiding you on solutions but you just need to listen.

OURSELVES