Each time we progress in life, we have to confront the shadows that were holding us back in the first place.
We don’t heal our wounds and then move forward; we move forward, and we are prompted to heal our wounds.
But sometimes, we get stuck, pulled back into the shadows of who we
used to be. We return to the same self-sabotaging behaviors, over and
over again.
Often, those self-sabotaging tendencies look like this:
1. Discomfort is your comfort zone
If
you’ve spent years in a state of discomfort, it’s going to take a long
time to reacclimate yourself to comfort. This seems completely
counterintuitive, but human beings are built to seek out what’s
familiar. If you don’t become aware of what you keep returning to —
habits, choices, behaviors, beliefs — those comforting tendencies will
begin to dictate your life.
“I’ve
decided to start calling it a familiar zone, because that’s really what
it is. There’s nothing comfortable about staying small, keeping
yourself ‘safe’ by not stretching yourself or doing anything new,” personal coach Teddey Hicks says.
If
all we’ve known in life is discomfort (such as struggling to keep a job
or stay in a relationship), we’ll recreate that feeling because we
crave what’s familiar. When a problem is familiar, we know what to do
about it. It affirms our preexisting beliefs about ourselves, and we
assume it’s inevitable.
What
seems most comfortable is not always what’s best for us — it’s just
what we’re used to. Slowly, we must re-adapt to a healthier comfort zone
in which we’re used to (and crave) things that improve our lives.
Just
as discomfort being our comfort zone, trauma can sometimes trick us
into feeling attracted to someone who isn’t right for us but simply
feels familiar.
This
is why your one good friend always chooses the partner who’s completely
wrong for them, explaining that’s just “their type.” It’s why you see
people almost magnetized to the exact type of individual you know will
hurt them in some way.
Experiencing trauma withsomeone — or being attracted to them because of similar wounds, such as what happens in trauma bonding — can also produce a sense of togetherness that isn’t always healthy. As writer Arah Iloabugichukwu explains in MadamNoire:
Shared
pain brings people together. Known by sociologists as “social glue,”
trauma behaves like a binding agent in social settings, forging
connections between survivors known as “trauma bonds.” Stockholm
syndrome, a term used to describe the distorted relationship between
kidnappers and their victims-turned-defenders, demonstrates one form
these bonds can take over time. While confusing to us on the outside,
Stockholm syndrome creates a mental escape for victims by reconfiguring
the brain to find comfort in captivity.
It’s
not that everyone’s masochistic. It’s that unconsciously, when we see
or sense behaviors we recognize, we regard the person exhibiting those
behaviors as someone we can trust, someone we can open up to.
If we are traumatized in any way, familiarity is so appealing it can seem like attraction.
3. You’re facing old feelings that have resurfaced
Emotions
we resist feeling do not simply go away — they can become embedded in
our bodies, typically in our cellular memory or fascia. Often, we ignore
these feelings because we don’t feel safe enough to express them.
When
life stabilizes in some significant way, we begin to feel safe again.
This is why people tend to have breakdowns around big (and often
positive) life events, like weddings, having children, or making a
long-awaited move. It’s not a coincidence. When we feel safe enough, we
give ourselves permission to feel. That permission to feel can translate
into permission to heal.
You
may not realize it, but major life changes can often bring up really
ancient wounds — perhaps even wounds you didn’t know existed.
Maybe
you’ve fallen in love again after a long hiatus, failing to realize the
mistrust you developed from years of bad relationships has made you
disinclined to fully open your heart. You find yourself paranoid,
nervous, and anxious. What you’re dealing with, deep down, is a need to
release old beliefs and fears about what life should or shouldn’t be.
This is not an opportunity to hurt again; it’s simply an invitation to revisit emotions you forgot you hadn’t dealt with.
4. You don’t trust yourself yet
If
you have a history of making less-than-desirable choices, it’s no
surprise that you’ll probably be a little wary when it comes to any new
or different decisions.
Maybe
you’ve always picked the wrong relationship. Maybe you’ve decided to
leave your full-time job and work for yourself, but you’ve made big
mistakes with money before. Maybe you didn’t value or prioritize the
right things in life — and you deeply regret it. How can you be sure you
won’t repeat your past mistakes? Are things really different now?
That kind of self-doubt can be paralyzing.
Over
time, you have to relearn how to trust your decision-making skills. You
have to understand that what matters most is learning lessonsfrom the mistakes you made so you don’t repeat them.
You
picked the wrong relationships before, now you know what to look for.
You’ve made money mistakes before, which is why you should be extra
diligent if you’re taking a risk in your career. You didn’t prioritize
the right things in the past, which is why you should check in daily to
ensure you’re not going to regret choices you’re making now.
We are not foolproof. We are always human. There is no way to guarantee a 100% positive outcome every time.
All we can do is what we know in the moment to be best. Then, we adapt from there.
5. You believe there’s only so much good you can have
When
you’re a child and only have marginal control over life, you come to
understand — and then believe — that life can only be so good. You are,
ultimately, under someone else’s control, and your happiness cannot be
sustained forever. Then, as you grow up, you learn you have autonomy.
But sometimes it seems that the “upper limit” has already been set for us even with that autonomy. Psychologist Gay Hendricks
uses this term to describe the amount of happiness we’re used to or
that we think is appropriate for us. Once we surpass our “upper
limit”—i.e., our lives have become better than we’re used to—we actually
start self-sabotaging to bring ourselves back to what’s comfortable.
To
raise our “upper limit,” we must slowly adjust to small improvements in
our lives. Over time, they become our new “normal” and, therefore, what
we want to recreate.
If
you’ve experienced a pattern of back-and-forth growth — where you made
progress and then “lost” it all — you might try to insulate yourself by
generating more stress and confusion. We do this as a way of shielding
ourselves from pain.
If
you’re already hurting, nothing can come along and make you feel worse.
If you’re already aware of your most negative qualities, nobody can put
you down. If you’re already struggling to keep up with the basics, you
never have to turn your attention to the deeper issues — the ones you
actually care about.
We
often believe, falsely, that there can only be so much good in life
before it’s outweighed by bad. In reality, the more good you build in
your life, the more goodness it produces. The more
you stabilize, the less susceptible you are to a potential blow. The
more you love yourself, the less other people’s opinions matter.
6. Without problems, you don’t know who you are
If
you’ve been wrapped up in simply trying to survive for the majority of
your life, you might find yourself having an identity crisis when those
problems subside.
If
you’re always known as the sweet person who struggles, who do you
become when you’re not struggling? If you’re always the person who
justifies their complacency by not being able to afford otherwise, who
are you now that you can? If you’re always the person who has
relationship problems to gossip about with your friends, what do you
talk about if you don’t?
We
build identities around our most repeated habits and when those habits
are negative, they become who we think we are. What we have to do is invent a new identity.
We
have to become different people — ones who identify with what actually
moves us forward and makes us happy, not what we’ve always known and
never dared to question.
None
of these behaviors are deal-breakers. They’re natural steps in the
process of progress. By identifying old attachments, allowing
long-forgotten emotions to surface, and examining old beliefs about what
your life can and cannot be, you’re making unprecedented forward
movement.
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