Reassessing Self-Sabotage | Terry Baranski

From CPTSD Foundation: “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 . . .

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.

. . . 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.”

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