Self-Sabotage: Recognize And Eliminate It With Shadow Work

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here for the last couple of weeks on this channel we have been talking about Shadow work so if you don't know what I mean when I say the term Shadow work I will link a video in the description of this one that goes over what the shadow is and how we can start working with it but today what I want to talk about specifically is the role of the shadow in self-sabotage behaviors so I tend to take these

somewhat radical Viewpoint that there's no such thing as self-sabotage I believe that all parts of the self are striving towards the betterment or the greater good of the self but we can sometimes have very severe coordination issues between those different parts of the cell and the less psychologically integrated you are the more coordination issues you're going to experience and the more you're going to feel like you are chronically fighting yourself to get anything done so what we need to do in order to start that integration process is become aware of what is in our shadow

and like young says make the unconscious conscious so that it stops directing our lives so the bad news is that if you are self-sabotaging there's likely a lot of stuff in your psychological shadow that needs to be worked through but the good news is that integrating it is probably going to go a long way in helping your self-esteem because when we feel like there is this major part of ourselves that wants us to be unhappy we kind of make an enemy out of ourselves and that's a pretty uncomfortable and largely miserable way to live a

much Kinder view you can hold of yourself is the view that something that looks like self-sabotage to your conscious mind can actually look like a very deep Act of self-love on an unconscious level so it's not that you you're such a piece of crap that even you hate yourself it's that the different parts of yourself all of which want to see you happy and healthy just need better communication and coordination so I kind of liken this to having an office building that is open 24 hours a day and let's say there is a day shift

and a night shift and the day shift works with the lights on they're largely very aware of what they're doing and they have very clear instructions that all of them are following but then at night they turn off all of the lights in the office building and the day shift goes home and in comes the night shift and the night shift has a totally different set of end goals than the day shift but there's no way for the two departments to communicate with each other so the night shift comes in kind of bumbles around in

the dark tries the best they can to meet their bottom lines and then when the day shift comes in again in the morning they're likely to arrive at an office where things have been spilled on important documents where everything is cluttered and out of order and it would be very easy to conclude the night shift is trying to sabotage the day shift when in reality both teams are just striving to meet the goals that they have been given it's just that neither team has an awareness of the goals and bottom lines of the other team

so it might chronically feel like each one is working against each other when in reality they're all just doing the best that they can to make sure the company flourishes so using this metaphor and applying it to self-work the day shift represents what's going on in your conscious mind so the goals and plans that you are very clear on and aware of and the night shift represents what's happening in your unconscious or subconscious mind so the needs and feelings and impulses that are important to you but that you aren't consciously aware of and the goal

of doing Shadow work is to kind of turn the lights on in the building when the night shift is operating so that you get clear on what it is that the night shift is trying to do and you can eventually sync up the different parts of yourself that want different things and figure out how to get them working talking together so that you are not taking one step forward and two steps back and you're actually able to set holistic goals that meet your needs long term so again my personal view on self-sabotage and the way

that I try to think of it in order to work more effectively in relationship with myself is that all self-sabotage is is self-love emanating upwards from the subconscious mind so some part of me when I feel like I'm standing in my own way or sabotaging myself is trying to love me in a way that I don't understand maybe there's some form of self-protection that my subconscious mind feels is very important for me that I'm neglecting in my conscious mind so my job when I feel like I'm in self-sabotage mode is not to fight with myself

it is to understand what benefit some part of me is getting from acting out of alignment with my conscious goals and when I'm able to get in touch with that part of myself figure out what it needs and learn how to move towards my goal in a way that integrates that need or learn how to adjust my goal if it turns out that the goal I had is something that I think I want but subconsciously I really don't then in either case I'm at least eliminating my own internal tension so I'm just going to Loosely

Define self-sabotage here because again it's a term that I don't love is the process of struggling to change in a way that you have consciously decided you really want to change and there are so many reasons why this happens but I think a really big one is that the conscious mind has a tendency to paint things in the brush Strokes of all good or all bad or mostly good or mostly bad whereas almost any experience or challenge or new opportunity that we could take on in life has elements to it that we are going to

feel very aligned with and elements to it that are going to threaten Us in some way or that we're going to feel uncomfortable with but sometimes the only part of us that is aware of the latter part of a given plan is our subconscious mind so that which exists in the shadow of our psychological awareness so you could pick something that your conscious mind might think is just unilaterally quite Obviously good like okay I want to be super rich and famous right A lot of people instinctively go that is a thing that would just make

my life wonderful on so many levels and there are a lot of levels where that might be true maybe getting rich and famous solves your money problems gives you more travel and dating opportunities and all of these other benefits that come along with it but it would also come with a whole slew of new problems and challenges that you have probably never had to deal with before if you were rich and famous you would be constantly in the public eye and frequently getting scrutinized or criticized that might be really difficult for your inner child who

might live largely in your Shadow to deal with or you might have new threats popping up around your ability to keep yourself safe maybe you're suddenly getting stalked or harassed and having your privacy consistently invaded and that might be incredibly taxing on your nervous system so in that kind of office building that makes up your mind the day shift's job might be something like make me feel good about myself at any cost and the day shift is going to be working as hard as it possibly can to get you those opportunities that are going to

help your self-esteem or solve your financial problems or whatever it is that you think is going to go into making you feel good but let's say the night shift's job is to make you feel protected and safe at all costs if you're pursuing Fame and Fortune the night shift is going to come in and go what is the day shift doing what we're trying to do is keep this person safe and protected and they're putting themselves directly In Harm's Way We need to immediately reverse the steps that the day shift is taking in order to

accomplish our end goal of keeping this person protected and safe so again integration happens when we get these two departments talking to each other if I want to be rich and famous I have to accept that it's also going to be very stressful and very taxing on my mental and physical health in some ways how do I strike a balance how much recognition am I willing to get for how much nervous system stress and of course this particular challenge is one that very few of us end up facing but any pause positive change we take

on in our lives comes with a similar set of trade-offs and the work of ceasing to self-sabotage is the work of making those trade-offs conscious so that we can begin working effectively with them so I remember I hit a point last fall where I was getting into YouTube and really enjoying it and I had to kind of put YouTube on hold because I was finishing my dissertation at the time but I had all of these plans and ideas brewing for what I was going to do with my work after I finished my dissertation and what

happened is I wrapped up my schooling and then I had almost no desire whatsoever to get back into YouTube despite the fact that I was immensely enjoying it prior to that point and I really sat with myself and was like I don't know what's going on I love YouTube I love making videos I love connecting with people over psychology what is happening here that I just can't seem to motivate myself to get back into things and I ended up doing a coaching call in the call the coach was asking me what's it feel like to

be you right now and don't think too hard about it just kind of get a visual if you were to visually represent what was happening right now and let me know what visual you're getting and I was like okay when I sink into it I see myself standing in the middle of this park that is near where I was living at the time in Colorado and I see the beautiful mountains on one side and my home on the other side and I feel a kind of stress because I visualize these opportunities flying past me almost

like these colorful pieces of paper in the wind and I have this sense that I should grab onto those opportunities but I don't want to I want to stay exactly where I am and the coach asked me well what does it feel like to be in that park for you and immediately I was like that's the easiest question I could possibly answer I love being in this park in real life I come to this park and just walk around and think every single day often for a couple of hours a day and when I'm in

this park I feel calm I feel relaxed I feel inspired there's beautiful scenery my mind feels open the person who at the time I was dating lived on one side of the park and I had friends who kind of lived in the other direction of the park and anytime I went and spent time there I had this feeling like I was loved from every direction around me and the coach went okay great what would happen if you were to grab one of those papers as they flew by you and I went oh I would be

worried that I would lift off the ground and get carried just clear out of the park holding onto this paper and then I had a massive aha moment where I realized that in the past when I'd worked as a writer and my professional career had started to gain some traction I'd started to take on opportunities because I was very young at the time that I didn't feel truly aligned with I just thought oh my God people are offering me money and opportunities that of course I should take because anyone in their right mind would recognize

these as growth opportunities and grab them but what happened was I ended up getting further and further away from what I genuinely loved about the process of writing as soon as I started following opportunities faster than I could keep up with them I started feeling really out of my element and my creativity kind of died alongside that and so now as I was feeling that Creative Energy come back the part of me that knew that I needed stability love from all sides and a sense of home and comfort felt threatened as soon as that creativity

came back online and so I sat down with myself and I made a deal with myself I told myself you can get back into doing creative work because I do consider YouTube to be a creative field as long as you promise yourself that no matter what opportunities come up you will only say yes to them if they do not in a significant long-term way threaten your ability to stay grounded at peace and in connection with the people that you love those things need to always be at the center of your life because they are what

actually matter to you in life so it does not matter if the person you respect and admire the most in the world comes up to you and offers you a project that is going to make you billions of dollars you have to answer no if it would take you away from those feelings that make your life feel meaningful to you and as soon as I made that promise to myself in a way that I knew that I would keep it was suddenly like I was going through this absolutely abundant creative spring where all of my

ideas returned to me and I had all of this energy to start executing on them and we're going to talk more about this in a future video but what that is is a negotiation between the inner child and the inner parent so in order for me to feel creative inspired and energized my inner child has to be healthy and active so I need to be communicating with what that inner child needs and in the story I just explained my inner child was letting me know that they need a certain degree of stability and relational consistency

in order to feel safe enough to take creative risks and my inner parent accepted that they had to honor that because if they didn't their inner child was going to get depressed and a depressed inner child is going to be deeply uncreative and without creativity the inner parent cannot meet the professional goals that they want to have met so the inner child as far as I see it represents our needs our vulnerabilities our passions and what we feel aligned with in the short term and the inner parent represents the part of ourselves that is disciplined

and knows what's good for us in the long term if the inner parent is consistently setting and rigidly enforcing rules that the inner child thinks are stupid or that are too restrictive they're going to start lashing out or protesting in some way and on the flip side you do not want the inner child running the entire show because they have no idea how to work with their own energy and manage it well so again we're going to go into this more in a future video but an important thing to think about might be does my

inner parent or my inner child tend to run the show more often and how can I get them talking to each other in a more Cooperative way so to bring this more directly back to self-sabotage we're going to go over some of the ways that I recommend working with the shadow that part of yourself where you have repressed certain needs or certain personality traits inside of yourself in order to stop that cycle of feeling like you are working against yourself so strategy number one for getting more aligned with yourself in your own goal is figure

out which of your goals are based on authentic embodied wants versus which of your goals are based on things you feel like you should do that you actually on an emotional level would kind of rather die than do which might be the response that your body is giving you when you try to move towards it kind of shrinking away averting having low energy suddenly getting tired when you think about doing something feeling overwhelmed all of these can be signs that what you're trying to move towards is not something that you actually want it's something that

you think you should be doing so maybe we're being offered some job that is really high paying really impressive and that our families would think we were really cool for having and yet maybe we're totally unmotivated to go for that job or we find ourselves bombing the interview because our bodies do not want the reality of that job doesn't matter how impressive it looks on the surface if we're not going to enjoy doing the day-to-day tasks of that job our body is going to react with a no and a no in the body often feels

like a lack of energy like an inability to concentrate whatever it is that is preventing us from moving towards the thing that we think we should want in our conscious minds and so often when this happens when we have a conscious want but for whatever reason our energy is not responding to it in the way that we hoped it would a good question to ask ourselves can be what about this is it possible that I don't want when I think about my day-to-day having this new thing or experiencing this new opportunity what about that day-to-day

life would I not like and is it possible that I've really been avoid looking at that reality with my conscious mind and if so how can I draw my awareness to a bigger more integrated picture of what this thing would look like and make negotiations with myself around what I am versus am not willing to do to get that which leads us kind of into the second Point here which is that often in order to make a significant change in our lives that we are experiencing resistance around the most impor important thing we can do

is get clear with ourselves on what we are getting out of not making that change which again is often difficult to access because it is a part of our shadow so one of the best books I've ever read in my life is the book how we change and 10 reasons why we don't by Ross ellenhorn and in this book he talks about the fact that often the reason why we don't walk away from uncomfortable circumstances or situations we consciously think we don't want to be in is because there are a lot of benefits we are

getting out of the situation that are not in our conscious awareness so let's say I am in a terrible relationship and I just can't seem to leave it for whatever reason chances are unconsciously what I know is that leaving that relationship would mean leaving my main source of stability or Comfort or companionship and I don't have a way of filling those needs elsewhere yet maybe the job I'm working is not properly meeting my practical needs maybe it doesn't pay enough for the hours are terrible but it's meeting a ton of my emotional needs that I'm

not aware of maybe I feel kind of cared about by my boss because he reminds me of the kind of authoritative form of parenting that I grew up with so maybe there's a sense of deep Comfort I get even inside of something that I consciously don't like it's going to be really hard to for example manage your weight if food is your main source of comfort because it's possible to kind of deny that need using willpower for a certain period of time but definitely not forever if you don't find a way to get that need

met in other ways as soon as you lose the weight you're going to go right back to using food for comfort and the whole cycle is going to start all over again it won't get broken until you find alternate means of comfort besides eating or drinking or whatever it is that you're currently turning to so again instead of asking yourself why do I hate myself and can't manage to make this change last ask yourself which repetitive need is this Behavior fulfilling and how do I find a way to get that need fulfilled without this particular

Behavior because this need is a part of me that loves me and that wants me to thrive a human being cannot Thrive they cannot reach their full potential without feeling a sense of comfort so if we don't know how to get it through people we'll get it somewhere else that need will go on trying to fulfill itself it's only once we make it conscious that we can actually start making choices about how to fulfill it without significantly getting in the way of what else we want and keep in mind that even the most positive relationships

or opportunities come with adjustments that need to be made that your entire system is probably going to take some time to get used to so Brianna Wiest who is a brilliant writer wrote extensively about this in a book she put out called the mountain is you in the book she goes over how What We crave is most often what is familiar to us rather than what we find let's say the most consistently exciting and so sometimes when we're working towards something that we really want in our conscious mind but we're experiencing inner resistance it might

be that what we actually need is time to adjust to the positive change and all of the little negative aspects that come along with it even if they aren't that significant so there's a quote I absolutely adore from that book that goes resistance is your way of slowing down and making sure that it's safe to get attached to something new again everything no matter how wonderful comes with an adjustment period if I'm getting to know someone in a romantic sense it does not matter how wonderful I think they are how aligned we seem to be

how inspired I feel being close to them I am still making considerable changes to get close to them there is time that I used to devote to other things that I am now devoting to getting close to this person there is a routine I have that is probably getting disrupted in some capacity and emotionally my inner child is kind of side eyeing this person and going are they safe for me to really trust and lean into even if my conscious mind has already decided yes if I'm being offered a new professional opportunity that is going

to drastically change the way that my day-to-day life functions it is going to take my system a long time to get used to those changes and to trust that they're net positive and that there are parts of this new routine and this new opportunity and this new life that I'm living around it that are good enough to Warrant giving up certain other things that I've gotten very accustomed to on various levels it takes time for our nervous systems to kind of gather enough data over a long enough period of time to concede with our conscious

Minds assessment that this thing is net positive and that is okay so the point here is to illustrate that sometimes we're experiencing resistance to what we want because it's more of a should when in reality we truly don't want it but other times we're experiencing resistance because we're just not giving our systems an enough time to get used to something and to kind of absorb it into our comfort zone now of course we don't want to live our whole lives inside of our comfort zone but if we try to live our whole lives outside of

it our system is going to get totally overwhelmed and start shutting down in very major ways so we have to find that kind of balance of how far can we stretch ourselves and then how much can we give ourselves time to adjust and catch up to that stress until we've constructed a kind of new normal for ourselves that allows us to integrate whatever new thing that it was we wanted into our lives which leads me to the fourth point that I want to talk about if we want any positive change to stick around what we

have to be willing to do is to make conscious that which we hate about it and again I don't care how wonderful the person you're dating is how perfect and aligned for you your job is whatever it is that you are trying to move towards there will be trade-offs and to give yourself the best chance at succeeding at this thing long term you have to be willing to continuously recognize eyes when you are making a trade-off validate the part of yourself that is sad about that trade-off or that doesn't want to make it and accept

that whatever part of you is taking that hit is going to need to be compensated in some other way so this is the art of recognizing that not only do we have shadows so part of ourselves that we repress so does every other person and every other thing out there and the more we can account for the shadows of other people and other situations the better we are at making informed decisions about those things and figuring out how to integrate them into our lives without desperately needing to change them in order to fit them into

our lives so let's say you're dating someone and you like that they are so positive and so confident and yet you start feeling super anxious and insecure around them and you might go oh my God this is crazy like how am I finding fault with this person who is so positive and wonderful it might just be worth acknowledging that in the shadow of their positivity and their independence is all all of their true pain and their neediness and if they can't access those parts of themselves maybe you're really going to struggle to connect with them

in those areas maybe when you're in pain or in need they're not able to deeply meet you there because they've repressed those parts of themselves so the trait that you are the most attracted to in them comes with its own shadow and generally the kind of more balanced a person is psychologically the less extremes we're going to see in their Shadow but that also means the less extremes we're going to see on the positive side and when we have insecure attachment systems often we're looking for people who outwardly display that which we have in our

own shadow maybe I consider myself to be not very compromising or not particularly kind and then I meet someone and they are so kind and so nurturing and so emotionally expressive and they start bothering the absolute crap out of me and I start thinking to myself what is wrong with me this is the nicest person ever why are they bothering me so much when in reality it might not be that I'm just a terrible person who hates nice people it might be that the shadow of their niceness is a lack of assertiveness maybe they very

rarely if ever stand up and tell me what they actually want or what their needs are and with that comes a complete lack of tension in our relationship maybe there's kind of nothing interesting there for me to feel like I can sink my teeth into because they're not showing me the full range of themselves and so it's kind of natural that I'm feeling my attraction lesson because I'm picking up on something real which is the lack of tension that arises between two people perceiving each other's differences which is very often the birthplace of Attraction so

this isn't about being hyper critical but what it is about is being realistic the question you need to ask yourself is because this is a whole person am I willing to take them and their Shadow understanding that if they were to change one aspect of themselves the other aspect would change as well everything in life has bad parts to it wonderful opportunities come with changes that will shock our systems and that will come with new problems I've spoken about it before but this is very often an error that I see people making in the attachment

healing process they think that healing their attachment systems means things just get better and better and better as they go when in reality your insecure attachment strategies are actually allowing you to function quite well in many areas that you're not aware of until you start the healing process and so for a period of time you might actually feel less equipped to deal with your life and your personal relationships the healthier you get because it's like you learned a whole bunch of cheat codes that you're now having to put down and the game is going to

feel like it's on hard mode until you can learn different strategies for navigating it in a different way which leads us to the last thing I want to talk about when it comes to combating what feels like self-sabotage which is that in order to make changes and have them be sustainable try to look at what your day-to-day life is going to look like if you accomplish a given goal or outcome rather than just imagining the Highlight Reel the Highlight Reel is always constructed by the conscious mind the day-to-day realities is always what your unconscious or

subconscious mind gets faced with so I might have all of these dreams of being a pop star but when I really think about what it means to be a pop star do I want to wake up five years from now open my phone see a whole bunch of tabloids slamming me not be able to leave my house because there's too much Paparazzi everywhere and I have to train mercilessly to write songs and master dance moves or is that actually not the day-to-day life that I want at all and for some people the answer is yes

if you really truly love the thing that you are doing the day-to-day components of what it takes to play out a given goal then you're probably going to be willing to put up with a lot of the parts that you don't like as much you're going to be more willing to sacrifice some sleep sacrifice some time sacrifice some money or energy or trade in certain parts of the life that you have now in order to get the life you want but if you aren't looking at the full reality of what you want and factoring in

what it's going to actually feel like inside of your body and your nervous system day to day to have that thing that you want you're going to get continuously blindsided when your body is kind of shrinking away from you trying to move towards it because our bodies will shrink away from anything that makes them deeply uncomfortable or kind of shocked and alarmed so when you're evaluating a potential romantic partner are you thinking of how good it would feel for your ego to have that first kiss with them or are you thinking of what a life

is going to look like with them five years from now on a Tuesday afternoon when you're making a significant career change are you really thinking about what it's going to feel like to wake up in the morning five years from now having made that change and looking at your to-do list for that day if you really want your body to look a certain way are you really thinking about what types of food you're going to have to eat on a daily basis and what types of exercise you're going to have to stay consistent at in

order to maintain that body type and in any of these cases if the answer is that you don't actually like the day-to-day work that's involved in that how could you kind of shift your vision slightly to still move in the direction of what your conscious mind wants but in a way that is more aligned with the way that your body likes to feel and the more I can really slow down this entire process and listen to my own resistance when I feel it coming up the more I'm going to learn about exactly what I actually

want and the more I listen to what I actually want the more my inner child wakes up and the more my inner child wakes up the more they give me Creative Energy and inspiration to go towards the thing that I actually want out of my life inner children are crazy resilient they will overcome any setback any challenge they will not give up in the face of what they truly want and so if we find ourselves continuously self-sabotaging one of the best things we can do is get in touch with that inner child and figure out

what about this thing that child does not want and remember children don't care all that much about things like Prestige or accolades those are things adults care about because they have lost connection with the part of themselves that just likes to be happy and joyful in life and doesn't need all that much to do it so if you can find something that your inner child genuinely loves doing on a day-to-day basis that ends up moving you in the direction of something that's prestigious or impressive and nature that's going to be a much smoother process but

if you're trying to fight yourself to get there every step of the way that's only going to work for so long the process of ending self-sabotage is the process of getting really honest with ourselves about what we actually want and what parts of the thing that we actually want are challenging or negative or depriving us of needs in some area that we have to find other ways of attending to and the process of ending self-sabotage is the process of getting back in touch with ourselves the whole of ourselves both the day shift so the conscious

mind and the things that we decide using logic and reason and a conscious awareness of our feelings that we want and the night shift so the part of ourselves that is working to fulfill the needs we have repressed into our shadow but with minimal resources and ways of going about it because the conscious mind is pretending that the night shift's job does not exist the more we can turn on the lights figure out the the entire gamut of what is happening inside of our mind psychologically the more we are going to find ways to achieve

what we want with minimal resistance but this might mean we achieve it at a slower Pace because if I want some massive change in my life but my entire system freaks out anytime I start moving towards it because I'm trying to achieve it too quickly getting the day and the night shift talking to each other might mean I have to significantly adjust my timeline so that I can give myself the opportunity to move towards something at a pace that actually makes sense for me it might mean I have to accept that I need to learn

new skills if I want to get the thing that I want in a sustainable way it might mean that I have to sacrifice some part of my ego that has traditionally been a core part of the way that I think about myself that might be a really painful process that takes a long time to move through so when we are engaging in Shadow work when we are making conscious the parts of ourselves that have not been in our conscious awareness there's often a lot of pain and we need a lot of rest and a lot

of patience with ourselves but this is the way that we end up designing a life for ourselves that we are not only excited about but that we can actually hold on to because all parts of ourselves are present and accounted for within it all right that's all I have to say for today on the topic of self-sabotage and working with the shadow as always let me know in the comments what you guys are thinking feeling experiencing I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and your inner children enter in her parents and

I will see you back here again really soon [Music] thank you