The term self-sabotage enjoys wide usage in psychological, spiritual, and self-help circles. It is often used to explain a variety of behaviors such as addiction, compulsion, perfectionism, procrastination, and bad financial management. In this article I’ll contend that there are several problems with the notion of self-sabotage:

1. It does not accurately describe what it’s attempting to describe.
2. It carries with it an aura of blame and shame.
3. It provides no explanation for why a person is behaving in a particular way and is therefore essentially useless as a concept.

I’ll also lay out what I consider a more helpful way of looking at behaviors that are often described as self-sabotage, using the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a guide.

A Question of Intent

The first and most glaring problem with the idea of self-sabotage is that it’s not actually “sabotage.”

Sabotage implies conscious intent. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, defines sabotage as follows: “to deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct” something. Self-sabotage, then, would involve intentionally destroying or obstructing oneself, one’s relationships, one’s career, or what have you. As an example, consider someone who tries to get a new job. They apply for it, get an interview, and then proceed to botch the interview in an explicit way – perhaps by behaving bizarrely or showing up late. The theory of self-sabotage would say that this person initially thought to themselves something along the lines of “I want this job, so I’m going to apply for it and hopefully get an interview”, but then before the interview, they changed their thought to “I’m going to intentionally ruin the interview by behaving in a way that the interviewer finds unacceptable.” Needless to say, this isn’t how things usually happen.

Other examples may seem to be more intentional at first glance. For example, a person commits to a diet and then a week later binge-eats ice cream and ruins all of his or her progress. It may be tempting here to conclude that the person intentionally ruined the diet, but this viewpoint conflates the intentionality of the action (eating ice cream) with the intentionality of the effect (ruining the diet). While the eating was intentional – insofar as the physical movements required to do it were under the person’s conscious control – ascribing intentionality to the effect assumes that the person ate the ice cream in order to ruin the diet. One would be hard-pressed to find a situation where this scenario was the case.

This matter of intent is extremely important when determining how to treat a given behavioral pattern.

Blame & Shame

As a result of the fact that it implies intentionality, the term self-sabotage carries with it a connotation of blame, shame, and guilt. If people are intentionally engaging in maladaptive behaviors, it must be their own fault. Can’t he simply stop doing this? Can’t she control herself? What’s the matter with him or her? Whether or not these types of questions are communicated explicitly, they’re inherent in the very name of the diagnosis.

Muddying the Waters

Much like mental health diagnoses, while the term self-sabotage may appear on the surface to be helpful, it doesn’t actually explain anything. In fact, the logic of it turns out to be completely circular. For example, consider a person who is trying to get a new business off the ground, but keeps herself perpetually distracted by spending inordinate amounts of time on social media. One might say she is self-sabotaging as if this view somehow clarifies the issue, but consider the circular logic of such a claim.

“Why does Helen spend hours a day on social media instead of working on her new business?”

“Because she is self-sabotaging.”

“How do we know she is self-sabotaging?”

“Because she spends hours a day on social media instead of working on her new business.”

“Why does Helen spend hours a day on social media instead of working on her new business?”

What becomes clear is that the term self-sabotage is nothing more than a label that describes behavior (or behaviors). This label offers no insight into why the behaviors are occurring and is therefore unhelpful as any kind of explanation or diagnosis.

Getting at Why

With any kind of repetitive, maladaptive behavior, it’s critical to get to the root cause – rather than offering a surface-level description – if treatment is to succeed. The behaviors that often fall into the realm of self-sabotage are, in my view, virtually always the result of unconscious emotional processes. As such, a bottom-up therapeutic modality that works with the unconscious – such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) – offers a far more comprehensive approach to healing relative to cognitive (top-down) techniques.

IFS recognizes that our minds consist of parts, rather than being a single entity. Each person’s parts interact and function in different ways depending on his or her history. We are particularly susceptible to trauma (both overt and covert) early in life, and this susceptibility causes our parts to take on two basic roles:

• Burdened Parts carry pain and toxic self-beliefs.
• Protector Parts take on protective roles aimed at preventing more pain from being inflicted on burdened parts.

A practitioner of IFS takes a systems-level view of the parts to understand what the parts are doing, why they’re doing it, and how they’re interacting with each other. Only through the IFS lens can we truly get an understanding of the dynamics underlying one’s behavioral patterns. We then can work with our parts rather than against them – in a compassionate and non-confrontational way – to effect change.

As parts largely operate in the unconscious, ascribing intentionality (which implies conscious awareness) to the effects of one’s actions is often inappropriate when parts are in the lead. The parts themselves are acting in intentional ways, but the person’s consciousness has no awareness of this scenario. This type of distinction is a good example of what a parts-aware approach brings to the table: a deeper understanding of the internal dynamics at play, which leads to a more informed and holistic plan of action in therapy.

Going back now to the example of the person who did poorly in the job interview: If there are indications that a part (or parts) caused this to happen, in an IFS context we guide the client to form relationships with these parts and find out what their fears were about the prospect of getting the new job. This information-gathering will likely lead to other areas in the person’s life that these parts have been influencing. Once the relevant parts in the system have been identified, the process of unloading the trauma that the burdened ones are carrying can begin, at which point the protective parts won’t need to engage in defensive behaviors anymore.

While this post is necessarily a brief overview of how the IFS process works, hopefully, it is helpful in providing a baseline understanding of how the IFS approach can be used to dig deeper into symptoms that might appear as self-sabotaging.

Conclusion

Thus, the term self-sabotage is inaccurate, unhelpful, and full of negative connotations. A deeper look into the behavioral patterns which typically fall under the self-sabotage label reveals a far more complex and subtle picture, an understanding of which is critical in order for healing to occur. Furthermore, the Internal Family Systems approach provides a far more comprehensive method for healing than cognitive (top-down) techniques.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Terry Baranski

www.healingtheself.net

Trauma-Centric Mental Health Practitioner and Parenting Coach

Internal Family Systems (IFS), Compassionate Inquiry, Therapeutic Coaching

 

One of the banes of our culture’s psychiatric ideology is its tendency to pathologize mental health difficulties as “disorders” and “diseases”, both of which imply that there’s something wrong with a person that needs to be fixed. This often leads someone diagnosed with a disorder to self-shame, self-blame, and try to fight against their symptoms. In this article, I’ll investigate the notion of disorders and argue that they are actually processes that, as trauma expert Gabor Maté eloquently states, are “normal responses to abnormal circumstances”.

The Dreaded Disorder

Complex PTSD (CPTSD) derives its name, of course, from PTSD, which was begrudgingly added to the DSM-III in 1980. PTSD was the first diagnosis in the DSM for which the cause – severe trauma – was accepted as being external to the person. Despite this, it was still named a disorder, consistent with the vast majority of the other diagnoses in the DSM which were (and still are) largely considered biological in origin.

Particularly with CPTSD, it’s interesting to consider the use of the term disorder and ponder what it reflects about how we view mental health conditions in general.

With respect to mental health, the term disorder – while it has a softer feel than older descriptors such as insane, deviant, or mentally ill – nonetheless carries with it the negative connotations mentioned in the introduction. In addition, when a person has a disorder, the typical next step is that we must figure out how to get rid of it. (Or, most often, its symptoms.)

The implication is that the disorder is a thing to be eliminated – an entity somehow separate from the person who “has” it.

Viewing it as a process, on the other hand, can be much more useful. It eliminates the notion of a condition being a thing – a noun – and instead recognizes it as a verb – dynamic and unfixed. For example, we typically say that someone has depression as if it’s a static entity inside of them. But consider if, instead, we say someone is experiencing depression. While at first, this may appear to simply be a subtle shift in wording, it’s actually a dramatically different way of viewing mental health.

Persistent Processes

So what exactly are these dynamic processes? To shed some light, we must trace them back to their causes. With CPTSD (along with virtually any other mental health condition), the symptoms that manifest are, in my view, actually a collection of coping strategies that kicked in during childhood due to trauma. These adaptations are highly intelligent when they first come online – they prevent our traumatic experiences from becoming even worse, and in many cases actually save our lives. Once the trauma is over, however, they often become maladaptive and outlive their usefulness.

As a fairly straightforward example, consider someone who is chronically hypervigilant – always on alert for threats, always stressed, and always anxious. Rather than seeing this as something genetic or random, labeling it CPTSD recognizes that it’s the result of childhood trauma – the child adapted to a prolonged lack of safety in its environment by becoming hypervigilant.

This coping strategy is extremely beneficial while the trauma is occurring, but then becomes harmful once the trauma is over.

This type of thing can also be more subtle. Consider someone who is a people-pleaser – chronically putting the needs of others ahead of themselves, and focusing on the happiness of others at the expense of their own. This is a well-known manifestation of CPTSD. In virtually all cases it can be traced back to chronic childhood trauma. For example, a child learns that she has to please her parents in order to be loved, and adapts accordingly. Her #1 priority becomes constantly adjusting and suppressing her behavior, emotions, reactions, and impulses in order to be as pleasing as possible to her parents. Even the slightest prospect of disappointing them becomes a matter of survival and therefore generates extreme amounts of stress. As an adult, this coping strategy continues, now directed towards everyone in the person’s life – her spouse, co-workers, and other family members. The adult becomes obsessed with keeping others happy, and terrified of letting them down.

The only difference between these two examples is that, from Western medicine’s perspective, the first one is diagnosable (i.e. it’s in the DSM) and the second one isn’t. But when we step away from this superficial distinction, we can see the same fundamentals at work: Both of these dynamics are the result of childhood adaptations that become very harmful to a person in adulthood, causing high levels of stress and anxiety which eventually take a toll on their physical bodies as well. Both are the result of trauma, and both are processes that were, at first, highly effective coping strategies.

Implications for Treatment

The notion of a disorder tends to create an attitude that symptoms are something to be gotten rid of – to battle against using any means necessary. Far from being compassionate, this approach essentially puts the internal system at war with itself. The process perspective, on the other hand, opens the door to treatment modalities such as Internal Family Systems (IFS), which work with our coping strategies rather than against them, using self-compassion and understanding. IFS respects that coping strategies came about for good reasons, and therefore doesn’t attempt to change behaviors directly. Instead, a bottom-up approach is used to heal and release a person’s trauma, at which point behavioral change comes about as a natural outcome.

Conclusion

Developmental trauma doesn’t create disorders – it creates coping strategies, which are processes rather than discrete things. Complex post-traumatic stress is what trauma victims suffer from – adding disorder to the name is unhelpful. This shift in perspective is, in my experience, highly effective at enabling clients to look at themselves in a more compassionate and respectful way. Treatment approaches such as IFS – which go beyond the level of the cognitive – can then be used to work with a person’s processes in a balanced and holistic fashion.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Terry Baranski

www.healingtheself.net

Trauma-Centric Mental Health Practitioner and Parenting Coach

Internal Family Systems (IFS), Compassionate Inquiry, Therapeutic Coaching

 

Trauma as a Wound

The word trauma comes from the Greek word for wound. As author and trauma expert Gabor Maté points out, the two words are perfectly analogous in a number of ways. Wounds create a sensitive area that is painful to the touch; trauma makes us sensitive to emotional triggers. Wounds are covered with scar tissue that is inflexible, numb, and doesn’t grow; trauma’s impacts on a person can be described with precisely the same words. Trauma, therefore, can perhaps best be understood as a psychological wound.

With trauma, however, we have the opportunity to actively heal rather than passively wait for scar tissue to form. Rose Kennedy once said: “It has been said that time heals all wounds, I don’t agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but is never gone.” Here she’s referring to what most of us typically do with our trauma: wait for time to make it better, ignore it, or hope it goes away. One need not look too carefully at the state of the world to see how this is working out.

Cause & Effect

It’s important to differentiate between trauma and traumatic event; the latter being the cause of the former. We often think of trauma as being what happened, but it’s actually the internal consequences of what happened – how it impacts us today, and what we make it mean about ourselves. In the words of some of the world’s trauma experts:​

“Many people think that trauma is the terrible event that happened to us. But trauma is the response that happens within the body’s nervous system.” – Thomas Hübl (mystic, healer)​

“Trauma is not an event. Trauma is how we react to certain things that happen to us.” – Esther Perel (relationship psychotherapist)​

“Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.” – Bessel van der Kolk (trauma psychiatrist)

Overt vs. Covert

Traumatic events are often divided into two categories. The first of these is the more obvious one: Specific, overt events such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, or a car accident. Such events can inflict an immediate trauma on an individual, which if not addressed will often manifest in various ways for the rest of their lives.

​The second type of traumatic event is more subtle (covert) and is often called developmental trauma. Here, the traumatic “event” is a prolonged misattunement between a child and his/her parents, resulting in pain for the child. Children have certain fundamental needs that, until the last few thousand years, were consistently met throughout our evolutionary history. When these needs aren’t met – as is quite often the case in modern societies – trauma results. Developmental trauma, therefore, is most often what didn’t happen rather than what did happen.

The resultant traumas from these two types of events are often distinguished as Big-T and Little-T trauma. While I understand the intent behind this language, it’s not phrasing that I use. There is nothing “little” about Little-T trauma. Not only is developmental trauma more common, but its insidious nature makes its impact on a person’s life harder to recognize. Many pathological behaviors, thought patterns, and tendencies – both at the individual and societal levels – are the result of pervasive developmental trauma and are so common today that they’re considered normal. Recognition is an important first step.

Note that this is by no means an intent to minimize overt trauma. The point is simply that both types of trauma, in my view, warrant equal attention.

The Effects of Trauma

Whether overt or developmental, trauma is a spectrum – and we’re all on it somewhere. The extent to which it affects us in our day-to-day lives is often shocking to discover, but the key to keeping in mind is that all of these impacts are coping strategies that, when they originally formed, were very intelligent responses to the environment. These adaptations came along to protect us, typically as a result of trauma during childhood, and at first were quite effective at doing so. Over time, however, they become maladaptive.​ When we say that someone “has CPTSD”, it is their trauma adaptations that we’re referring to.

Coping strategies are like puppet masters in the unconscious, controlling our behavior to a far greater extent than we imagine. But there’s a good reason for this: to our unconscious, these adaptations are matters of survival. They came along to quite literally help us survive. The level of importance that the unconscious, therefore, assigns to these strategies is precisely why it can be so difficult to turn them off. It’s also the reason why resisting them, as we’re so often prone to do, is generally destined to fail. (See the Turning against the Self section below.)​

Below are some big-picture ways in which trauma adaptations impact us.

Disconnection from the Self

Trauma disconnects us from who we are, in the sense that coping strategies and adaptations aren’t fundamentally the real “us”. We tend to identify with these behaviors, not realizing that our real selves are hidden underneath. Someone may say, for example, “I’m a very anxious person”. But their true self isn’t anxious – the anxiety is simply a trauma response.

Another way of viewing this is that trauma splits off portions of us, which will then cause problems until they’re healed. As Thomas Hübl writes, “To survive, the person’s system splits off the physical, emotional, and mental experience of the trauma. If we don’t integrate that fragmented part, it will create side effects or symptoms that we call suffering. These symptoms will continually call our attention back to that unresolved past.”

Trauma also disconnects us from our bodies, causing us to view our bodies as something separate from ourselves. This is known as disembodiment and is a whole subject in of itself. The gist, however, is that when we view our body in a strictly utilitarian kind of way, we will tend to treat it marginally, ignore its wisdom, and even consider it a liability.

Disconnection from Life

We often operate in what might be called a semi-conscious trance state: mindlessly going from task to task, place to place, barely conscious of the individual decisions we’re making or the actions we’re performing. The classic example of a person going for a drive and not knowing how they got to their destination – being on autopilot, so to speak – describes a lot of our day-to-day lives far beyond just driving. While the intent isn’t to suggest that we “should” be 100% conscious at every moment, it’s interesting to consider just how much of our lives are lived semi-consciously, and what this might mean with respect to free will.

Disconnection from the Present Moment

Trauma disconnects us from the present moment in a number of ways. In day-to-day life, we tend to think that we’re reacting to the present, but often we’re reacting to the past. When someone triggers us, we can be sure that what is being triggered is past trauma. But even more subtly, the adaptations and coping strategies that we use are all based on the past – so we’re living in the past whenever we employ them. As mentioned above, in many cases we identify with these adaptations so much that we can’t separate from them – the result being that we’re living in the past, to some degree, at essentially every moment.

This can also show up when embarking on a healing journey. Trying to modify or get rid of our adaptations in a top-down kind of way – resisting or fighting against them – is another way of not being in the present. We disrespect who we are right now by trying to force change upon ourselves in order to become “better”. In this way, we live in the future rather than the present. This fake future can entrap us when we focus on a healing destination (“I want to fix myself“, “I should be more developed than I am“) rather than the journey (bringing curiosity and compassion to one’s patterns, and having a growth mindset).​

Trying to live more in the present is wonderful in theory, but one needs to take into account that not being present was the better option during painful times. Thus, a tendency to live in the past or the future is yet another trauma adaptation. And like all the others, resisting it tends to not work – as anyone can likely attest who, when scatter-brained during meditation, has tried to force themselves to be more present.

Turning against the Self

Just as we can identify with trauma adaptations such that they seem like they are truly us, so too can we turn against them and make them the enemy. This can take shape in the form of resisting emotions/behaviors that we consider bad, criticizing ourselves, or blaming ourselves for our past (or its resultant coping mechanisms). This creates what might be considered a psychological autoimmune condition. In medicine, the term autoimmune condition refers to the immune system attacking the body’s own tissues. Over time, this causes immense damage and can lead to death. The mind’s version of this is no less severe: negative self-talk is a chronic condition for many of us, despite how “normal” it may seem.​

Strange as it may sound, however, turning against the self in this way is also a coping strategy – one that served a valuable purpose when we were young. It is also a purely emotional response that doesn’t take direction from the intellect. For example, if someone tends to blame and shame themselves for their childhood (or adulthood) misery, they’re likely quite aware rationally that it’s not really their fault. But neither the person telling themselves to stop doing it nor someone else telling them will likely have an effect. This adaptation, therefore, warrants the same open curiosity and compassion as any other.

Living in Endurance

As a result of our coping strategies, we often end up largely living a life of endurance – enduring the parts of ourselves that we don’t like, enduring maladaptive thought patterns, enduring unpleasant and repetitive emotions, enduring behaviors that we subsequently regret, and enduring how others trigger us. The calling within us to heal is the part of us that doesn’t want to endure any longer. Honoring this part of ourselves is the beginning of our journey.

Becoming Whole

The word heal evolved from an Old English word that meant to make whole. While today we typically think of healing as curing or eliminating what ails us, its older definition was broader in scope, and recognized that humans strive for wholeness. While the specific meaning of wholeness could be debated, what’s clear is that trauma takes us away from it. Trauma disconnects us from ourselves by splitting off, shutting down, and hyper-activating various parts of our minds and bodies.

The healing journey is therefore one of returning to wholeness by reconnecting with ourselves. How precisely this is achieved will vary for each person. From therapy to yoga to psychedelics, the list of available modalities is a long one.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Terry Baranski

www.healingtheself.net

Trauma-Centric Mental Health Practitioner and Parenting Coach

Internal Family Systems (IFS), Compassionate Inquiry, Therapeutic Coaching