When your smartness is keeping you stuck
“Do you think your generalised anxiety disorder and history of over-achieving might be because you believe you’re not good enough?” the Doctor gently asked.
“No, that’s ridiculous. I know I’m good enough.” I retorted.
I was then sent off to “do the homework.” I had to make a list of all the things I’d achieved in my life. Which the Doctor made me read aloud at the next session.
“Does this prove something to you? Can you see this person is good enough?”
“Yes, I get it.” I retorted again, taking in her look of bewilderment. I had clearly failed to get the revelatory ‘a-ha’ that this exercise was supposed to elicit. I was a terrible patient. (Hopefully a much better therapist. 😂)
It would be a loooong while before I was truly able to grasp the link between unconscious self-limiting beliefs and external behaviours.
I remember when the penny dropped. I was on the treadmill. Forcing my body to run a few kilometres more than it wanted to. I was in pain. I was tired. My body was screaming and I couldn’t stop. I just had to reach my target.
And suddenly, having an out-of-body moment, I was able to witness the way my mind, in some sort of frenzied trance, was over-riding my body. And I thought this is crazy. Why am I doing this? Why am I so addicted to reaching this goal? A simple gym goal. I wasn’t training to run a marathon nor to perform an elite sport. I had literally picked an arbitrary number and here I was, running towards this number as if my life depended on it. And feeling completely powerless to stop myself.
It was then that I realised.
This behaviour – of dismissing pain, chasing a number and running like a maniac on a treadmill at Williamstown gym – wasn’t exactly logical.
I imagined that if an alien had arrived to view the ‘people of earth’ and found one sweat-soaked specimen effectively running on a conveyer belt while fixated on a digital clock, they’d probably conclude that this place and all its inhabitants were insane.
Behaviours don’t always make sense. And when we seek to change them, we rarely understand what is driving them because we remain stuck in expecting them to make sense.
The ‘striving’ behaviour on the treadmill helped me to understand my own irrationality. Yes, on the surface, I had all the evidence that “I am good enough.” But below it, the constant striving to achieve, the inability to stop, the fear of failing and the obsession with perfection – were all evidence that I didn’t in fact, truly believe that I am good enough.
This seems obvious to me now. But then, it was a blind spot. I also now know that having these conflicting beliefs is not a situation unique to me. Since that day I have had the privilege to have many clients give me the same ‘retort of denial’ I gave my Doctor.
The conscious mind and unconscious mind can hold contradictory beliefs. This is the essence of a sabotage. And when it comes to tackling a sabotage, it’s important to realise that the beliefs held in the subconscious rarely make sense.
Why Strategies Don’t Always Work
I love a good strategy. As a client said to me the other day when I sent her one of my distance healing reports: “You can take the girl out of Management Consulting, but you can’t take Management Consulting out of the girl.”
I think she’s right. Believe me, I’ve tried.
A strategy, according to the dictionary, is a ‘a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.’
If you want to change something, do something differently, stop doing something that’s unhelpful and start doing something that’s more effective – then you need a strategy. You need an understanding of your current problem, a vision of your desired outcome and a considered roadmap and action plan for how you’ll get there.
Strategies are simple, logical, and common-sense. It’s where any intelligent person would start.
Which is what makes it the absolute opposite of a sabotage.
Sabotages don’t make sense. They are illogical. And often incredibly complex.
The roots of a sabotage go deep beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Sabotaging behaviours arise from the realm of our subconscious memories. These memories represent how we processed events in our lives and contain emotional energy, the beliefs we formed and the coping mechanisms we used. The problem is – how you felt, thought and reacted as a 3-year-old – is perhaps not a mode of behaviour that is relevant or helpful decades later. But the subconscious has no ability to distinguish between the 3-year-old’s version of past events and what is happening now.
While strategies may help you to ‘manage’ your sabotage or alleviate some of its difficulty - they are no match in truly stopping it. A sabotage will see a strategy coming at them from a mile off and laugh in its face. Think of it this way. Your 3-year-old self, aka your ‘Inner Chucky Doll,’ is having a tantrum in resistance to going to bed, do you think you can rationalise with it? How do you think explaining the ‘science’ of sleep benefits and the ‘evidence-based’ steps of a systematic ‘sleep routine’ will go down?
Even when you’re highly intelligent, you can struggle to change self-sabotaging behaviours. You may remain stuck until you learn to appreciate the irrational. It can be incredibly frustrating when an unwanted behaviour doesn’t respond to an obvious solution. Essentially, you get caught in a ‘strategy loop’, repeatedly applying a rational strategy to an irrational problem and wondering why nothing changes. It wasn’t until I had my out-of-body witnessing of my own madness that I could begin to understand how I could l truly help myself.
Suspending Judgement Long Enough to Listen
When it came to changing my long-standing self-sabotaging patterns, I had to stop judging myself and my behaviours. I also had to stop trying to strategise my way out of them. Instead, I began to direct my energy towards understanding the irrational — exploring the seemingly nonsensical reasons behind why I behaved the way I did.
And here’s the interesting thing.
Once I suspended my judgements and remained open to the irrational, I realised that my behaviours actually had a perfect rationale. I could understand why they were there and what they were trying to achieve. Even the most absurd (and often the most frustrating) habits had a purpose and logic to them. In fact, I came to appreciate that some of them were indeed genius. They were creative and intelligent responses to legitimate needs.
This skill is at the crux of my work now.
Being able to suspend judgement, resist the urge to ‘fix’ and refrain from implementing rational strategies, to create a space of curiosity and compassion for yourself is a worthwhile and time-saving skill. It will save you thousands of dollars in impulse infomercial purchases alone. Being able to tune into your body, understand its signals and listen to its needs, is not just timesaving, it is lifesaving.
Ready to work with what is lying beneath?
Building this skill of suspending self-judgement to listen more openly to what your body and your life is telling you, is at the heart of my new course, Working with Emotional Needs.
It is designed for self-enquirers and practitioners who want to develop their ability to work beneath the presenting problem, particularly when they of their clients are stuck in patterns of self-sabotage or repeating behaviours they genuinely want to change.