Maybe It's Self-Sabotage, Maybe It's A Survival Strategy
POV: You’re a socially-conscious entrepreneur who’s hitting their stride. Your clients love you; you’re doing work that feels both meaningful and fulfilling. You're finally doing the work that you’re meant to be doing, and that big and exciting vision you had for your business feels like it just might be just around the corner.
And yet: you’re not hitting your income goals. Things are not quite sustainable just yet. You KNOW what you need to do to move forward: you’ve invested good money with stellar people who’ve given you all the sales and marketing support you could possibly need. But every time you sit down to take action, you feel the overwhelming urge to take a nap. You're stuck in a state of arrested development.
There must be only one logical explanation: you’re self-sabotaging. You’re getting in your own way. You’re both the secret sauce AND the Achille’s heel in your business.
Because how else would this make sense? That just as your business is starting to make moves and receive accolades, there seems to be this invisible wall getting in the way of where you want to go, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t quite manage to scale it.
I want to offer another perspective: Maybe you’re self-sabotaging, but maybe it’s really a survival strategy.
Your business isn’t failing to progress because you’re bad or broken and just need to work harder; your nervous system is hitting the brakes because success feels like a threat to your safety.
Wait, what? Success, the thing I’ve been dreaming about and working towards for what feels like forever is a THREAT? The fuck??
Actually, it is. And for good reason. But it doesn’t have to be.
In this blog post, I want to peel back the curtain and show you what’s happening in your nervous system when it feels like you’re self-sabotaging, and show you how you can rewire your system for safety instead of protection.
We’ll cover:
How the term self-sabotage is rooted in shame.
A perspective shift that reframes self-sabotage as a protective strategy designed for survival.
Why success feels like a threat to your nervous system.
How to start to build safety for yourself so that your nervous system is no longer hitting the brakes on your success.
The shame in the game
I really dislike the term self-sabotage because it implies that we are willfully standing in our own way. Multiple dictionary definitions of sabotage include the term deliberate, which implies a choice.
And so the story goes that when we’re procrastinating, engaging in perfectionist behavior, or are so paralyzed by overwhelm that we stream an entire season of a broody British detective show instead of writing a newsletter (not that I’ve ever done that), we’re deliberately choosing to obstruct our own progress.
And while I grant that there is a certain emotional resonance to the term self-sabotage–it certainly can feel like we’re our own worst enemy on purpose–this assessment stems from a lack of understanding of how trauma and the nervous system work.
We operate under a dangerous fiction that our minds are in charge, when really our nervous systems are. We like to think of ourselves as rational, reasonable adults making conscious choices in our business based on our values and desires, and yet when we have unresolved developmental trauma, our nervous systems are calling most of the shots. And our nervous systems have, at best, the cognitive ability of a scared and lonely 5 year-old.
As long as we continue to believe that our minds are in charge, and that stopping our self-sabotaging behaviors is all about changing our mindset, we’ll stay stuck in a shame spiral, blaming ourselves when our efforts don’t work. The harder we work on the wrong thing, the deeper the spiral goes, and the harder it’ll be to climb out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves.
Back when we were scared and lonely 5-year-olds stuck in environments that couldn’t meet our fundamental, biological needs for relational safety, shame was, paradoxically, the thing that came to rescue us.
It’s weird to say that now, because as adults, shame causes us so much pain that it’s hard to imagine it ever played a positive role in our life. But back when we didn’t have any power to effect change in the circumstances that harmed us, shame was actually the most hopeful position to take.
Maybe it’s self-sabotage, maybe it’s a survival strategy
In NARM, shame is defined as a process, not an emotion. The story that shame tells is that if we feel bad, it means that we are bad**, because a kid cannot conceive of themselves as being a good kid in a flawed environment. And this is good news, because if we are bad, then we might be able to make ourselves good, and if we’re good, then maybe we can finally get our needs met.
This attempt to “make ourselves good” morphs into survival strategies that, while they helped us survive those early years when our needs for relational safety were not met, are now the literal thing that’s preventing us from thriving in our business (and relationships, and pretty much everywhere else in life.)
Shame represented hope to us as children, because it allowed us to retain a measure of control in a situation where we were otherwise helpless. Similarly, thinking that self-sabotage is what’s wrong with our business allows us to believe that the kind of success we want is attainable if we can just shame and blame and push ourselves (or, “make ourselves good”) a little bit more.
And while that shame-based strategy works sometimes (as in, we might be able to push ourselves to do that one task or thing), ultimately it backfires, because it doesn’t address the root cause of the issue that gave rise to the stuckness we call self-sabotage in the first place.
So, how do we break out of the shame-based strategies that are keeping us stuck in our business? First, we need to identify the actual root cause of the problem. (Name it to tame it, right?)
Here’s a hint: you don’t need to make yourself good or push yourself harder. You need to feel safer.
Your nervous system doesn’t give a shit about your business
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: your nervous system doesn’t give a shit in your business, and yet, if you have unresolved trauma, your nervous system (not your conscious mind) is pretty much running the show.
Here’s how that process works:
Your nervous system’s job is to keep you safe, and when we’ve experienced developmental trauma, safety is largely defined as SMALL and SAME: we can’t tolerate a lot of sensation, and we like sensations to be familiar.
Any change is going to be flagged as dangerous–even if it’s one that your heart truly wishes for, and that you’ve worked so hard toward.
Your nervous system is constantly evaluating your inner and outer worlds for cues of safety or threat. The term for this is neuroception, which is defined as detection without awareness. What this means is that, well before your conscious mind can evaluate whether or not something is safe based on your values and desires, your nervous system can shut down any process that doesn’t fall under its SMALL and SAME criteria.
My guess is that change is likely the #1 reason why you started your business in the first place. You probably want to see change in the world around you, and offer services or goods that can help create that change. You want a change in your finances, your schedule, your lifestyle, and running your own business is a great way to enact that kind of change.
Another word for this is agency. Agency is the ability to effect change in your environment and circumstances. Remember earlier when we talked about being a lonely 5 year-old who felt helpless and scared? Agency was the missing ingredient back then.
Your nervous system might not have developed a sense of safety around you being in charge of yourself and your life. So, while agency, change, and freedom might be the main reasons why you want to have a business in the first place, there’s a good chance that these are the very things that your nervous system flags as dangerous, and causes it to pull a Liz Lemon-style “shut it down” response.
The very response you’ve been blaming and judging yourself for. And trying to push yourself past. And while you’re shaming and judging and pushing and wondering what’s wrong with you, your nervous system is patting itself on the back, saying GOOD JOB!, because it’s saving you from the WORST fate: SUCCESS.
SAY WHAT?
Why success feels like a threat to your nervous system
Let me ask you a question: how do you feel when someone pays you a compliment?
Do you cringe? Do you try to wave it away? To minimize the praise you’ve received? If so, this might be a sign that having the kind of success you want to have in your business (being rooted in values and desires, and affecting change in the world) might feel fundamentally unsafe to your nervous system.
If you’ve learned to survive by staying small and quiet and flying under the radar, taking up space and being visible is going to feel really scary to your nervous system.
Any big feeling can feel like a threat to the nervous system–even really good, positive ones. (Remember, SAFE=SMALL+SAME.) If you’ve learned to do without praise and validation, it may feel threatening to your nervous system to finally receive it, even if you’ve longed for it your whole life.
When you finally land on the real cool shit that you are uniquely meant to do in the world, your old survival strategies are going to show up in a BIG way and do their best to ruin the party. They’re really doing it because they want to help you. They don’t want you to have to deal with the big uncomfortable feelings that being successful would undoubtedly bring.
I imagine those survival strategies as a dog that’s barking like mad at the mail carrier, and then feeling self-satisfied when the mail carrier doesn’t come near the house. They feel like they did a good job of making a big fuss and achieved their goal, and yet what they perceived as a threat was never a danger in the first place. And this process gets repeated over and over again until we interrupt it.
Because here’s the thing: you’re not trying to survive your childhood environment anymore. It’s time for you to thrive (as much as anyone can thrive under late-stage capitalism) and make the big life- and world-changing moves you feel called to make. And the old strategies aren’t designed to help you do that.
Your nervous system hasn’t gotten the memo that you’re all grown-up and no longer depend on your early caregivers to survive. But the truth is, you are now the safe caregiver around these parts. And just as your nervous system evolved to employ survival strategies to stay small and safe to survive your childhood, it’s absolutely possible to rewire your nervous system to feel safe around success.
How to rewire for safety around success
The way to do this work of rewiring for safety is NOT by trying to shut down the old strategies: it’s by introducing the experience of safety into the nervous system, bit by little bit, and to let the nervous system acclimate and adapt to feeling safe WHILE being seen and taking up space.
When you were a lonely and scared 5 year-old (or 3, or 7, or 12 year-old), what did you need from the grown-ups around you that you didn’t get? What messages about your body, your needs, your feelings would’ve helped you feel safe and seen? By being your own safe caregiver now, and bringing these missing qualities into your nervous system, you’ll slowly let your nervous system know it’s safe with you. You’ll help your nervous system wire for connection and success.
However, this isn’t a linear process. You’re probably familiar with the principle that growth proceeds by periods of expansion, followed by periods of contraction. Two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. The same is true for the nervous system: any increase in connection and organization will bring an increase in protection and disorganization.
It’s important that we learn to expect these cycles of expansion and contraction, and that we name and normalize them when they occur. This is a big piece of the rewiring puzzle: to not judge ourselves when our system reverts back to our old strategies in order to find safety.
I call this the “of course” intervention, which helps us reframe the distress we’re experiencing, and redirects our efforts towards dealing with the root cause of the issue (not feeling safe around success) instead of trying to change the behavior (pushing harder against self-sabotage), which is really just the most aggravating symptom.
So we change the story from “I am bad and I need to work harder/better/find more resources in order to meet my goal” to ‘OF COURSE this feels hard, my nervous system senses that success is a threat, and it’s trying to get back to safety.”
“Of course” feels like a big sigh of relief and a warm hug to the nervous system. It helps us feel seen, feel heard, feel validated, feelings that were likely in short supply when we were growing up, and the absence of which gave rise to the survival strategies in the first place.
Learning to be a safe caregiver to yourself is the #1 way to address self-sabotaging behavior from the root. It’s also the most crucial thing that most entrepreneurs are not doing in their business. Because you can have all the most sophisticated marketing strategies imaginable, the most solid sales plan, yet if your nervous system doesn’t think success is safe, it will shut down all of your efforts over and over again.
I’ve put everything I know about learning to be a safe caregiver to yourself into a potent and actionable masterclass, which you can access for free by signing up at the link below.
The world needs your work; and in order for your work to reach us, you need to feel safe.