How We Self-Sabotage
Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions as you handle life’s everyday challenges. They represent the automatic patterns in your mind for how to think, feel, and respond. Your Saboteurs cause all of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness. They sabotage your performance, well-being, and relationships.
Meet the Judge, Your Master Saboteur
The Judge is the universal Saboteur that afflicts everyone. It is the one that beats you up repeatedly over mistakes or shortcomings, warns you obsessively about future risks, wakes you up in the middle of the night worrying, gets you fixated on what is wrong with others or your life, etc. Your Judge activates your other Saboteurs, causes much of your stress and unhappiness, reduces your effectiveness, and harms your relationships.
The Accomplice Saboteurs
The Judge works with one or more Accomplice Saboteurs to hijack your mind and cause most of your setbacks. Do any of these seem familiar to you?
Focusing on the positive and pleasant in an extreme way. Avoiding difficult and unpleasant tasks and conflicts.
Intense and exclusive focus on the rational processing of everything, including relationships. Can be perceived as uncaring, unfeeling, or intellectually arrogant.
Restless, constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or constant busyness. Rarely at peace or content with the current activity.
Anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will. High anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.
Continuous intense anxiety about all the dangers and what could go wrong. Vigilance that can never rest.
Perfectionism and a need for order and organization taken too far. Anxious trying to make too many things perfect.
Dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation. Latest achievement quickly discounted, needing more.
Indirectly tries to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others. Loses sight of own needs and becomes resentful as a result.
Emotional and temperamental as a way to gain attention and affection. An extreme focus on internal feelings, particularly painful ones. Martyr streak.
Discover what’s holding you back
The free Saboteur Discovery Session helps you identify your own saboteurs so you can begin to loosen their grip.
In just 45 minutes, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of the mental habits that may be undermining your well-being, relationships, or performance. It’s an empowering process that opens the door to meaningful change.
Before we meet, you’ll take a short 5-minute Saboteur Assessment to get a sense of which patterns are currently active for you. During the session, we’ll reflect on your results and explore what can support you as you move forward.