Four Explanations for Self-Sabotage

One of the most curious and dispiriting of all psychological behaviours goes under the title of self-sabotage. Someone with prospects and talents starts powerfully but unconsciously to disrupt their lives. They drive away a partner to whom they are otherwise deeply attached. Or they ruin their chances in a demanding professional field to which they could be so well suited.

In our search for answers, we can identify at least four explanations:

1. Self-Sabotage as a Defence against Omnipotence

In the course of ordinary development, every child reaches a curious-sounding stage. They explore what it might be like to be all powerful. Despite their size and limitations, in a mood of manic excitement, they picture themselves as being the absolute ruler of the world, of controlling everything, of killing all their enemies, of triumphing over everyone. They might stand on the kitchen table with a plastic sword and declare themselves to be the king or queen of the universe.

This – psychologists tell us – is entirely normal, indeed very healthy. In order to one day achieve a sound relationship between our hopes and our reality, our ambition and our constraints, we all need a chance to befriend our fantasies of complete power and control. We need not to be scared of our own ambitions by having had an opportunity to take their full measure.

But how things develop from here depends on the surrounding environment. If parents are balanced and secure in themselves, they will be able to handle their child’s omnipotent moments with a benevolent smile. They can allow time for their expression and then gently and firmly suggest that it might now be time for the king or queen to head upstairs to bed. The omnipotent phase is both permitted and contained, laying the ground for an unfrightened relationship to our expansive self-determined impulses.

But not all of us are as fortunate. We may never have been allowed to express the egoism, aggression and triumphalism that have legitimate places inside all of us. The adults in the vicinity may have been so frightened of our potential and so inadequate in themselves, they never allowed us to roar – dooming us to a primitive fear of our strength.

We may now find ourselves excessively meak and cowed. We constantly suggest that we wouldn’t hurt a fly. We don’t want to show off in any way. We can’t bear to draw attention to ourselves. We sabotage our intelligence. We turn down opportunities for promotion. We dress in dour clothes. We call ourselves ‘shy.’

But this isn’t of course the whole story. Deep down we would love to win, impress, seduce and be admired, we want to tear our enemies to shreds, we would like to be President. But we haven’t been permitted to work out a mature balance between our competing forces. Triumphing in a measured and fruitful way seems to carry too high a price. We must become a mouse because someone took such fright at our first lion-like roars.

2. Only Failure can Bring Love

An associated explanation for self-sabotage lies in parents who subtly send out a perplexing message: only if you fail will you be loved.

While in most households, it’s the successes that are celebrated, in others, parental love seems only available when one is desperate and abject, pathetic and hurt.

It’s when one is ill or bullied, rejected and hounded that the unyielding and stern parent seems to melt. What stronger incentive then to make a mess of one’s life than to believe that we might thereby finally secure the parental love that we have always craved?

We ruin our chances because – at some level – they don’t feel like chances at all, rather harbingers of loneliness. By succeeding in the world, we feel we may lose the one thing that matters so much to us: the approval of those who put us on the earth.

3. A Search for Our True Selves

There are other households where the message is differently but equally dispiriting. The only route to love is through success. You will be loved, the child is indirectly told, if you win the races, the school prizes and later on the promotions and the titles. We will love you to the extent that you can be important in the eyes of others.

For a long time, we might follow the edicts dutifully. But at some point, perhaps when we are on the cusp of winning, there may come a moment of primitive rebellion. A part of us that longed to be loved not for doing but for being, not for achievement but for ourselves, turns against the part of us that has been so good at obedience and line towing. 

We find ourselves insulting our boss, or failing our exams because we are in protest against the awful sacrifice that we have been forced into. Success doesn’t feel real. Behind our sabotage lies a poignant basic aspiration to be loved authentically. We burn down our worldly achievements in a search for the sincere love we have been owed since the start.

4. A Desire to Sabotage Someone else

We call it self-sabotage but behind the behaviour there might also lie a desire to hurt or sabotage someone else: the parental figure who didn’t love us for who we are, for whom our medals were more important than our defenceless, vulnerable selves.

As we ruin our professional chances, it may look as if we are trying to hurt our interests but in fact we may also be trying to upset – even if only in our imaginations – the person who set us on the treadmill of external validation many years before and who will now have nothing left to boast about to the neighbours. As we tear down our pedestal, we are aiming – somewhere inside – to correct an original injustice.

We know so much about the appeal of success. We may still be at the dawn of working out how much certain parts of us are – for a range of touching subterranean reasons – so compelled by failure.