Kitija Ozolina · Awareness Mentor for Mothers
Self-Sabotage: Why You Undermine the Things You Say You Want
Not laziness. Not fear of success. Something more specific than that, and more understandable.
Things were going well and then you did something to slow it down. You are not sure why.
It feels like self-destruction. It is not. It is self-protection. This is what is actually happening.
Self-sabotage is not evidence of how broken you are. It is evidence of how loyal you are. to an old story about what is safe to have.
The part that pulls back at the threshold is not your enemy. It is a part of you that learned something. maybe a long time ago. about what happens when good things arrive. Whether they stay. Whether you're allowed to have them. And it is trying to protect you from finding out again.
What self-sabotage actually is.
It is the gap between what you consciously want and what a deeper part of you believes is safe to have.
If you grew up in a home where good things didn't stay. where moments of happiness were followed by something difficult, where love came and went, where success made you a target. your nervous system learned something. Good things don't last. Having them means losing them. The anticipation of loss is worse than the thing never arriving.
So the sabotage is not irrational. It is preemptive. You are ending the story before someone else can end it badly. You are staying in control of the loss. You are protecting yourself from the hope that good things might actually stay this time.
That is a very intelligent response to a very specific kind of wound. The problem is that it is running in a present that is different from the past where it learned its logic.
The most common forms it takes.
Some of these will not be yours. But if one of them is, you will know it.
Procrastinating on the thing you actually want most
Not the boring tasks. The one that matters. The one where failing would actually hurt. You do everything else instead.
Picking a fight when things are going well
Things are good. and then something small becomes something that it shouldn't. As if the calm itself felt unsafe.
Doing something to break it just before it works
A relationship that was finally becoming solid. A project that was about to land. Something in you pulls the thread, right before.
Choosing the person who cannot fully commit
Again. Not because you like the chaos. Because if they can't commit, you know where you stand. and you know how this ends before it begins.
Stopping yourself right at the threshold
The application almost sent. The conversation almost had. The step almost taken. Something pulls you back, just at the edge.
What it looks like to catch it before it runs.
Not stopping it, at first. Just seeing it.
The moment before you do the thing. before you pick the fight, before you pull back from the submission, before you choose the one who is already half gone. there is a moment. A feeling. Something that says: this is going to go wrong anyway. I should control how.
That feeling is the signal. Not a reason to stop. Not a reason to judge yourself. Just. information. There is a part of me that does not believe this is safe. That is what it is saying.
And then you can ask, quietly: protected from what? What does the part that's pulling back actually believe will happen if this works?
Sometimes the answer is surprising. Sometimes it is very old. Sometimes it sounds like something a child understood about her world, not something that is true of the world now.
I still catch myself at the threshold. Still feel the pull sometimes. But I know it now. And knowing it. even just recognising it. is different from being run by it.
You're not sabotaging yourself. You're protecting yourself. The question is from what.
When you know the answer to that, something starts to shift.
Where do you notice yourself getting close, then quietly stepping away?
With love, Kitija 🤍
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