I want to explain Self Sabotage from an angle you haven’t had before.

That which we call a trauma is the experience that has changed me forever from what I was before the experience. It lays as a baseline for the behaviours I will have later on in life.

 

When I work with people who are not feeling well, we tend to look into what typical behaviours they use to compensate for the lack of wellness. After having experienced injury, we can lose the function of a part of our body. In the rehabilitation of our functions we might learn strategies to compensate for the malfunction. We call that a compensatory strategy.

This is a conscious work.

But it works on the unconscious part as well. Because our whole organism is constantly trying to compensate in order to reach a state of balance, homeostasis. 

If we take the rehabilitative situation and use it as we look at emotional trauma we can see that an  injury has changed how the limb is functioning and we then work our way around this new version of ourselves in order to compensate for it. When trauma happens and there is a change in how we function, we also adopt new strategies in order to strive towards balance. 

If the trauma is something obvious, we might remember that later in life and we know why we do what we do. But very often it’s not that obvious and we don’t even realise that the experience actually did traumatise us. 

The reason for that is our extremely capable mind. When it occurred, maybe sometime in early childhood, we found a way to deal with it in that moment so that we would survive. We might have taken a passive strategy and positioned ourselves in a role that was more acceptable to the mind so that we could live with it. 

Furthermore, from the external perspective it might not even seem so traumatising since it’s what happens INSIDE that creates the trauma. So as an adult we might remember the situation and not necessarily how it felt because we disconnected from it so that we could live more easily with it. 

This might be as “normal” as a hard working parent that just wasn’t available when we needed them. In the child perspective it created a feeling of abandonment and the idea that we are powerless in keeping an important person in our lives. We wrapped our brain around the experience with a memory of being responsible or taking our destiny into our own hands but deep down we felt helpless. Later in life we don’t connect to that feeling at all when we think about our overworked parents who didn’t give us enough attention.  However, there is an underlying fear that if we are not being productive, we will fall behind. We create a strategy to not fall behind by always keeping ourselves busy or becoming an over-achiever, a workaholic. In times when our organism is asking us to rest because it needs to recover, we will not listen to it but instead push harder. 

We might then take on behaviours that depletes us even more and we might even become aware of them. Surprised, we look at ourselves and ask “why am I doing this even though I so clearly need to do the opposite?”

 

When it comes to changing some of the bad habits we have or simply adjusting our pattern of behaviour, we need to see those habits for what they are. A survival strategy that our extremely capable mind developed a long time ago in order to help us.

Nothing is random, everything we do has an intention. 

We might not be aware of it and it might seem counter-productive to the naked eye. 

But if we want to deal with it properly and make sustainable changes, we have to see ourselves clearly or we’ll just relive the trauma over and over. 

 

Whether it’s psychotherapy, taking the yogic path or adopting the Ayurvedic lifestyle : these are all systems that help us to elevate ourselves. They allow us to bring our mindless rituals into the light of awareness and then consciously replace them with chosen new ones that bring us balance and wellbeing on a physical, mental and emotional plane.

 

This is exactly what my online program does to you : we start off with looking at what you do know right now and want to change. We then implement all three systems : approaching the mental state, the emotional state and the physical over 8 weeks of work together.

Get in touch with me for more information or even check the landing page of the program here.