***Trigger Warning***

This article includes an honest discussion about self-harming behavior. No triggering information is shared, but it is a highly triggering topic to some. Caution is advised.

Everyone experiences being overwhelmed at times. Perhaps your job has become more complicated while something is happening at home. However, emotional overwhelm can cause enormous problems for those who experience it and can make self-harming more likely.

This article will focus on emotional overwhelm and how it influences self-harming behavior.

What is Complex Trauma

We cannot discuss self-harm and emotional overwhelm without first talking about complex trauma. Complex trauma involves pain that occurs in childhood and can be experienced by adults as well.

In childhood, complex trauma is caused by living in a home where the child is not protected or cared about. The childhood hurt and betrayal that come with complex trauma leave the person feeling alone, disconnected, and sometimes filled with self-hate or disgust.

Some people recognize from early childhood that, in adulthood, their behaviors and choices are directly linked to what happened to them as a child. Others remain unaware that their childhood has caused them great harm until much later in life. Either way, complex trauma leaves scars that cannot be forgotten but can be treated.

Adults are also vulnerable to experiencing complex trauma, and it can occur when the adult experiences violence at home, in the neighborhood, or at work. The events that consist of trauma include physical, emotional, financial, sexual, or spiritual distress. Some adults experience re-traumatization of repeated traumatic experiences in treatment.

It is vital to keep in mind that complex trauma is treatable, and healing is possible.

What is Emotional Overwhelm?

Emotional overwhelm describes a state of being overcome by strong, complex emotions. Emotional overwhelm affects one’s ability to think and then act rationally and can prevent you from doing everyday jobs.

Being emotionally overwhelmed is often caused by stress, relationship issues, and traumatic life experiences, either in the present or in the past. If you find out you are emotionally overwhelmed; you will need the help of a mental health professional.

Emotional overwhelm happens when the power of your feelings overwhelms your ability to manage them. People are most likely overwhelmed by negative emotions such as guilt, fear, or anger. Some people who have mania are also overwhelmed by feelings of euphoria.

There are many signs you are emotionally overwhelmed; however, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely why. Below, we have only listed a few of the signs.

• You are disproportionately reactive to insignificant situations in your life.
• You cannot focus or complete simple tasks.
• You withdraw from family and friends.
• You feel tired or physically ill without understanding why.
• Your emotions control your perception of the world.
• You have insomnia and problems going to sleep, and staying asleep.
• You experience changes in your appetite.
• You feel depressed and anxious.
• You have flashbacks of stressful or traumatic events.
• Feeling sad for no reason, even during good times.

Emotional overwhelm challenges the person experiencing it, and until it is recognized for what it is and treated, life will be hard.

Emotional Overwhelm and Self-Harm

Emotional overwhelm, primarily resulting from complex trauma, is very distressing and uncomfortable and often shows up as maladaptive anger, seemingly endless worrying, and an increase in irritability. The person who is overwhelmed may exhibit behaviors that go along with difficulty breathing, racing heartbeat, or muscle tension with chest discomfort.

It isn’t difficult to see how a person experiencing emotional overwhelm might become self-destructive and look to self-harm to relieve the suffering. Self-harming behaviors relieve the pressure one feels when overwhelmed, even if that feeling is fleeting. Unfortunately, when one comes down from the slight euphoria caused by self-harm, the problems that drove the person to it remain.

Many of the causes of emotional overwhelm and the reasons people self-harm overlap a great deal and include the following:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Impulse-control disorders
• Dissociative disorders, especially dissociative identity disorder
• Gender dysphoria
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Complex post-traumatic stress disorder
• Sleep disorders
• Substance abuse disorder

While it is understandable why someone entirely overwhelmed by their circumstances and emotions might turn to self-harm, these behaviors can quickly turn to suicidality.

How to Help Yourself Quit Self-Harming

While there is no magic answer to fix self-harming quickly, you can make at least four changes to help yourself end your behavior before it takes your life. These four changes may include accepting your feelings, building your self-esteem, understanding the reasons you self-harm, and reaching out for the help you need.

1. Accepting your feelings. You may have shut down your emotions and feelings because of what transpired to begin you down the road to self-harm. It is scary to let yourself re-discover and re-experience emotions again, so it is to your advantage to approach healing slowly so you do not become overwhelmed. It would help if you had tools like mindfulness and keeping a journal. You can also use online tools such as books, worksheets, and positive affirmations to help you deal with your emotions.

It is critical to consider working closely with a therapist while you re-discover emotions you have denied yourself for months or years.

2. Build your self-esteem. It is vital to learn how to perceive yourself in a positive light and remind yourself daily of what you are grateful for. These changes in attitude can make a huge difference in your life. Practice speaking about yourself kinder, replace the mental urges to harm yourself, learn to assert your boundaries, and own your decisions.

It is your life to build as you see fit, and learning how to like yourself will help you go far.

3. Try to understand your self-harming behaviors better. The better you understand why you harm yourself and what you feel doing so does for you will prepare you to choose to do something else. By examining your behaviors closer, you can put things into perspective. You may want to ask yourself a few questions, such as: “What were the triggers that made me self-harm?” “When and why did you begin to hurt yourself?” and “How does self-harming make you feel about yourself now?”

By examining and questioning yourself and learning new ways of coping, you will gain more self-control when you are triggered.

4. Reaching out for help. Reaching out to someone else is critical if you are to overcome the urge to self-harm. No man is an island, and this especially pertains to you. You need to look for a trauma-informed therapist and work on these issues with them because you cannot do it alone. No. You cannot. It feels hard to reach out, especially considering the stigma surrounding mental health issues.

Just remind yourself that everybody needs help sometimes and that reaching out is not a weakness but a strength.

Ending Our Time Together             

Emotional overwhelm is something all humanity experiences at least once in our lives. It can build from simple things that add up or happen because of sudden situational changes.

I have experienced emotional overwhelm many times in my life, especially when I was a child. Being the victim of horrendous domestic violence, I faced my overwhelm by hiding inside myself and making two suicide attempts. Thankfully, I survived, and I have learned many coping skills to avoid being completely taken aback to avoid self-harming behaviors.

It isn’t easy to not harm yourself if you have been doing it for very long. Self-harm does bring temporary relief from the feeling of being overwhelmed, but the feeling is fleeting and is often replaced with self-hatred and shame.

It is critical that you reach out to a therapist, counselor, or any other mental health professional to get the help you need to end your self-harming behaviors. Yes, I realize it is hard to admit to anyone that you hurt yourself, but you needn’t be ashamed. Self-harm is a natural consequence of emotional overwhelm that has become too real to handle on your own.

If you self-harm, you’ll need to find a therapist that is a good fit for you. One place to look is find-a-therapist sites such as Psychology Today or Find-a-Therapist.com.

Another resource you can try is your insurance company. They will have a list of therapists that fit within your coverage.

Hang in there; you are not alone.

“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“I like the night. Without the dark, we’d never see the stars.”
― Stephenie Meyer

CPTSD Foundation wishes to invite you to our Pride Program, offered weekly on Circle. In Pride, we discuss important topics related to complex trauma and how it has affected our lives. The program is led by a fantastic person who understands personally the issues facing the LGBTQIA+ community.

Come as you are, take what you like, and leave the rest.

The program is offered every Thursday at 7 pm Eastern time through the Circle app. If you are interested, you can find information here. Please, if you are interested, contact the support team of CPTSD Foundation and sign up.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Shirley Davis

My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with over 40-years- experience writing short stories and poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has become the best way to communicate with the world. My interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science and read several research papers per week to satisfy my curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that most interest me.

www.learnaboutdid.com

Self-sabotage describes things people do that block their success and prevent them from reaching their goals. This behavior affects a survivor’s professional and personal success and mental well-being.

Facing the past isn’t easy. It takes guts, hard work, and recognizing our habits to overcome self-sabotage. This article will focus on overcoming and integrating trauma to end self-sabotaging behavior.

Overcoming Fear of Vulnerability

At first glance, you may wonder what the fear of vulnerability has to do with self-sabotage. Being vulnerable is one of the hardest things to overcome. Like you, it’s a casualty of complex trauma. As you may have realized already, those who suffer from CPTSD tend to hide away from others and not trust, significantly influencing relationships with others and themselves.

Being vulnerable requires facing rejection and exposing ourselves emotionally, which makes many survivors feel dread. We often fear vulnerability and try to close ourselves off from friends and family. People like us who have survived complex trauma often have social anxiety and avoid being among others, bringing isolation into the mix.

When faced with being emotionally vulnerable, our tendency is to sabotage our efforts and close up like a morning glory flower after the rays of the sun have changed to a new position. Sometimes, we may make excuses not to be vulnerable with others or avoid people altogether.

Being vulnerable with others and ourselves is the answer to self-sabotage in that we strengthen romantic relationships and friendships, improve our self-confidence, and increase our self-awareness. Once aware and open, we become beacons of light for those who remain caught in the self-imposed trap of self-sabotage.

The Trouble with Trauma

Our brains are elastic, growing, and changing depending on our experiences and the accompanying emotions. Usually, when we have an experience, our brain can file the memory and its emotions away in long-term memory, which can be retrieved later.

However, trauma changes how our brains function because when overwhelmed, our minds cannot file memories correctly. Memories impacted by trauma, especially chronic trauma, interfere with the function of the amygdala and hippocampus of the brain. The amygdala and hippocampus are necessary for memory consolidation and storage. This interference sequesters memories of what happened to us, keeping our brains from incorporating traumatic memories into ordinary consciousness.

Integration of memories is the opposite of dissociation and is necessary for one to function correctly. Simply put, dissociation is failing to incorporate information and experiences, leaving thoughts and emotions disconnected. Integration means pulling all the memories together to make a whole past. Many who live with complex post-traumatic stress disorder experience dissociated emotions and memories.

Repeated trauma exposure leads to over-reliance on dissociation, a normal defense mechanism that helps with emotional regulation. Unfortunately, if we are dissociating in order to handle our feelings and emotions, we are not living our full lives.

The Integrating of Traumatic Experiences

When traumatic experiences are not adequately integrated, many survivors say they feel stuck because of the memories of what happened. The experience of being stuck in trauma-time (the past where the trauma is still occurring) makes life difficult to navigate as it is interrupted by flashbacks and other symptoms.

Successfully integrating traumatic experiences, especially when they are chronic, takes time and patience. Integration means being capable of remaining centered in the present while acknowledging and remembering the trauma of the past.

Integration occurs when trauma memories are properly stored in your brain as long-term memories and no longer affect your daily experiences. You accept your past as your past and the full knowledge that it cannot be changed. The memories of abuse become incorporated into who you are and are no longer ruling your life.

Integrating who you are away from dissociation requires some actions and developing coping skills that can serve as distractions if nothing else.

Journaling. Putting your racing or negative thoughts down in black and white on paper aids you in having clarity of your thought processes and feelings. Write down exactly how you feel about your life, but don’t forget to sprinkle in a lot of self-love and respect.

Pursue gentle movement. Yoga and tai chi are only a few physical things you can do for yourself that improve mental health. Consider taking a meditative walk to move and relocate energy throughout your body and clear your mind.

Get out in nature. Nothing is more grounding than walking or sitting in the natural world. Listen to the birds singing in the trees or the sounds of children enjoying a playground. Breathe deeply while outside and drink in relaxation.

Practice deep breathing. Paying attention to how you breathe and doing breathing exercises will immediately calm you when you are stressed. Better yet, deep breathing is something you can practice anywhere at any time.

Make evening plans. Plan a night where you relax alone or with a friend. Play games or eat a nutritious meal with someone and enjoy a good conversation.

Challenge negative self-beliefs. Whenever you experience a negative thought about yourself, you push yourself further and further into the abyss of self-hatred. Stop it. You are a wonderful person who deserves the best. Challenge negative ideas about yourself by doing any of the following.

• Identify your feelings so you can challenge them.
• Accept your feelings, and don’t worry if they are right or wrong.
• Find replacement truths to replace your old negative ones.
• Repeat your new truth back to yourself.
• Meditate on your negative thoughts to see how they harm you.
• Be kind and loving to yourself, and allow yourself to be human.

Don’t allow echoes of the pain from the past to sabotage your life today.

Where Are You on Your Healing Path?

Healing takes time; that is a truth we all must bear. Survivors must address trauma that occurs throughout a lifetime, including those of early childhood. Building resilience and post-traumatic growth makes the healing journey easier to swallow.

Your healing journey is a long and challenging process, but it is all worth it in the end. Self-persistence enables healing, developing a sense of trust and safety, making new connections with other people, and acquiring new tools such as reframing and remaining positive.

Where are you in your healing? This is a legitimate question you need to ask yourself so you will know your next steps.

You can gauge your healing by several signs, as listed below.

• You are experiencing increased self-awareness.
• You have better relationships with others and more of them.
• Your physical health has improved due to lowered stress levels.
• You have stopped blaming others for your problems.
• You have begun taking full responsibility for your words and actions.
• You no longer feel like a victim.

Overcoming self-sabotaging behavior to arrive at the destination of inner peace is possible and achievable.

Ending Our Time Together

Healing from complex trauma is an arduous task. You go to therapy to heal and find that your therapist is only your seeing-eye dog, your Annie Sullivan, and cannot give you answers that only you can find.

To make matters worse, you discover through your many hours of treatment that you are self-sabotaging your life and relationships.

No matter where you are in your healing journey, I understand. I’ve worked on my mental health issues for more than thirty years and have gone through many of the stages of healing.

Living with the knowledge of what happened to me in my childhood and the bad decisions I’ve made since then has been difficult at times and has nearly cost me my life. Yet, I am still here and stronger than most people will ever be. I’ve learned to accentuate my positives and downplay my shortcomings. After all, I am only human, a lesson I also had to learn.

Integrating my past experiences meant allowing the past to be the past while acknowledging it but not living there. I have found most of the places where I committed self-sabotage and have stopped those behaviors because I have learned to love and accept who I am.

I invite you to continue your healing journey while watching for self-sabotaging behaviors. If you mess up, learn to tell yourself that you never win or lose; you win or learn from your mistakes.

“I never lose. I either win or learn.” – Nelson Mandela.

“You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it’s important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.” – Michelle Obama.

“Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will, and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom: the power to choose, to respond, and to change.” – Stephen Covey.

Shirley Davis

My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with over 40-years- experience writing short stories and poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has become the best way to communicate with the world. My interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science and read several research papers per week to satisfy my curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that most interest me.

www.learnaboutdid.com

This article will focus on self-sabotage and how it can affect your finances, mental health, and spiritual connectedness.

A Recap of Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotage describes things people do that block their success and prevent them from reaching their goals. This behavior affects a survivor’s professional and personal success and mental well-being.

These behaviors are caused by how our families of origin and early life experiences influence everything, including our relationships, career choices, and mental and financial health.

A few self-sabotaging behaviors include:

• Procrastinating
• Using drugs or alcohol to self-medicate
• Impulsive eating
• Self-injury

It is challenging to admit that you are self-sabotaging your life, but a few signs to look for may help. Some of these signs are listed below.

• Asking yourself why your plans don’t go as you wish
• Feeling unworthy and insecure
• Thinking that someone else can do better than you
• Often doubting your decisions

As stated, self-sabotaging behavior tends to be more prevalent in those who have experienced significant childhood and developmental trauma, such as abuse, abandonment, and neglect.

Compulsive Spending

Emotional deprivation experienced in childhood is often linked to impulsive shopping. Survivors who perform this destructive behavior have an internal void where memories of good parental experiences should be. In other words, the abuse you might have gone through as a child has left you wanting, and you shop impulsively to fill the void left in your heart.

Compulsive shopping represents a search for self in people whose identity is not firmly or dependably felt. Many who compulsively shop try to compensate for low self-esteem by getting an emotional high from buying new things.

Compulsive shoppers often experience a higher incidence of mental health problems such as depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and a tendency to self-medicate.

Unfortunately, we live in a consumer/provider society where we are bombarded with television commercials that encourage us to buy, buy, buy. So, our capitalistic society does not help those with oniomania, the medical term for the compulsive need to shop.

Procrastination as a Self-Sabotaging Behavior

Survivors procrastinate on tasks that make them anxious or cause them distress. By putting off a task, survivors avoid negative emotions and prevent them from accomplishing goals that should bring them fulfillment and happiness.

It should be clear that chronic procrastination causes enormous problems for survivors. Procrastination is not a sign of laziness; in fact, many people go to great lengths to avoid doing something. Some common reasons for procrastination are as follows:

• Feeling inadequate about yourself
• Feeling incapable
• Feeling you are a failure
• Fear of not achieving the perfect results you want
• Fear of criticism

One disorder in which procrastination is more likely to occur is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD. With ADHD, a person might find the task to be completed boring and put it off or may procrastinate because of having a shortened attention span.

Chronically putting off solving a problem or completing a task causes anxiety.

Self-Sabotaging Spiritual Health

Note: We are not talking about religion as many are spiritual without ever stepping into a church, and I know that talking about religion is an immense hurt for some.

Your spiritual life consists of how you feel inside about yourself and your environment. Spirituality also involves how you think about yourself and how you relate to others.

Below is a partial list of spiritual self-sabotage.

You talk badly about yourself. Self-sabotage is a defense mechanism to defend yourself from you. You might find that you talk badly about yourself with a negative monologue running in your head.

If you find you are critical of yourself, it is critical to remind yourself that you are on a journey to peace of mind, not a race to the finish line. Stop saying mean things about yourself and accept who you are with all your flaws and imperfections.

Fear. Spiritual sabotage also involves self-talk that tells you that you are afraid you will succeed and change. You can see how these thoughts are unhelpful and only push you toward failure.

Internally, your ego is trying to help you survive by being afraid of change. Change brings the unknown, and the person who has survived childhood trauma might find themselves doing everything possible to stop change, even if it is good, from happening.

The above spiritual self-sabotage has kept you from making a giant leap forward in your spiritual evolution, and you have nervousness and doubt about who and what you are.

Ending Our Time Together

Self-sabotage in your finances and spiritual health may be why you have been stuck where you are. Other symptoms that indicate that you may be self-sabotaging yourself include:

• Negative thinking that doesn’t line up with your beliefs about the divine
• Keeping yourself from standing out
• Giving way to mindless distractions
• Trying very hard to be and do everything perfectly
• Thinking negative thoughts about yourself and being disorganized
• Experiencing imposter syndrome

(Imposter syndrome is where you think or believe you are faking and that someday “they” will know and not like you anymore.)

I, too, have had problems with financial self-sabotage. In the past, I have spent money I didn’t have and paid for it later with bills that couldn’t be paid. This behavior caused me a great deal of anxiety, and only when I learned how financial self-sabotage is a form of harming myself did I begin paying close attention to what I was spending.

I also have experienced a great deal of spiritual self-sabotage. I was afraid of god and felt led around by the nose…by religion itself. However, I hid behind religion for many years, knowing I doubted god’s existence. Only when I broke free of religion and began to embrace spirituality did I begin to grow and change.

Now, I avoid religion and have become a spiritual person, believing wholly in my ability to connect with who I am and what I want from life. Some may call me an atheist, and if by that term they mean that I am not religious, they are right. However, I do believe that humans are spiritual beings and that we all seek connection to something greater than ourselves.

Change is terrifying to survivors like me until we heal enough to understand that all things change and change is a part of life. We cannot run far enough to avoid change, so why try?

If you think you will accomplish healing in these areas perfectly, then you have missed the point of this article. Financial and spiritual growth is difficult to achieve. It is time to admit that humans are beautifully imperfectly imperfect.

By embracing your imperfections, you can overcome self-sabotage.

“More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.”  — Roy T. Bennett

“Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.” — Brian Weiss

“Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself.” – Roy T. Bennett

Shirley Davis

My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with over 40-years- experience writing short stories and poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has become the best way to communicate with the world. My interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science and read several research papers per week to satisfy my curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that most interest me.

www.learnaboutdid.com

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