When You Sabotage Yourself, You Might Feel in Control But You are Not!
Self-sabotage makes us feel like we are in control of our lives. It’s a preemptive strike to the disappointments, heartache, or pain we think we are doomed to experience. So instead of waiting to see how the circumstance will play out, we act before the devastation can materialize, thus giving the semblance of controlling the situation.
The problem with this tactic is that it can create situations that don’t serve our own self-interests and are more difficult for us in the long run. This approach, destroying something before it has a chance to potentially destroy you, might feel like a safe option, but it disempowers you. It destroys your hope for the future, depleting your energy. It’s a suboptimal way to experience your life.
After many years of being alone, I started dating Jean-Jacques. At first it was exciting for me. We exchanged flirty text messages several times a day. We’d speak via video call every day for more than an hour. And I had that butterfly feeling in the pit of my stomach every time he contacted me. But after the first few months, our frequent exchanges by text message became less frequent.
This was something I’d experienced when I first started online dating. My potential suitor and I would message each other often with cute emojis initially. Then we’d go on a date or two. Then we would augment the text messages with phone calls until something changed for him. Without warning, the phone calls and text messages would diminish in frequency, and the contents became less personal. And then suddenly, they stopped completely. Instead of being frank with me, he would disengage by degree until he felt it suitable to stop messaging me altogether. It was a telltale sign that the end was near.
During my search for love, prospective partners lost interest and dropped me in this immature and disrespectful way. Being respected is something I value highly, so being dumped with a candid conversation feels more manageable than being ghosted. However, I became accustomed to this behavior after it happened a few times.
I started to get a complex of sorts and conflated a decrease in text messages with a loss of interest in me, a sure harbinger of the beginning of the end. Being dropped in this way did not feel good. But I thought that if I prepared myself for it, perhaps even disengaged before the other shoe dropped, I could protect myself from the pain of feeling undesirable. So this is how I dealt with this behavior. I put up my guard, became less approachable, and my belief became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was dumped again and again.
When Jean-Jacques stopped text messaging me as often as he had at the beginning of our relationship and our daily video calls, which would last between 60 and 90 minutes, had shortened to about 45 minutes, I saw this as a sign. In my mind, I believed that I was about to be dropped. My instinct was to put up my guard, disengage, and begin my emotional exit from the relationship. Fear of what might come tempted me to break it off with him before he had the opportunity to do it to me.
But there is something different about Jean-Jacques. We weren’t in the first month of a brand new, non-exclusive relationship. It was six months into one that had become more serious. I’d explicitly asked him should he have a change of heart about me or our relationship to tell me face-to-face because I could take it.
He said, “Yes, baby. Should that happen, we will talk.”
So my reaction to disengage and end it on my own was not rational. The control I felt in thinking about exercising this option felt safer than continuing on or even asking him what’s going on, however. Self-sabotage of an auspicious relationship was an option for me. But it was one I knew I did not want to employ because there was so much potential in our relationship.
The honesty, the attention he gave me when we were together, the deep conversations, and the shared hobbies we enjoyed doing together were all things I’d dreamed of for years and which I’d struggled to find during two years of searching. Could I afford to toss it away without being frank with him myself?
Previous conditioning and the belief that all men ghost when they are ready to leave a relationship made me believe that I had no alternative but to disengage. That would have been the difficult answer to the situation. Instead, because there was more at stake in this relationship, I chose to look for an alternative approach. And I landed on the idea of merely asking Jean-Jacques how he felt about me and where our relationship stood. I could share my observations with him in a nonaccusatory way and find out why the frequency of his messages had fallen and why our conversations had shortened. In this way, I could find out the truth and allay my fears and insecurities, one way or the other.
So that was what I did.
Come to find out that he did not realize that his messaging was less frequent. “No, honey. I think about your even more now than before.” He’d responded. The shorter calls were just something that happened over time. He felt that video chatting 45 minutes every day was still a considerable amount of time. In hearing that, I’d had to agree.
The look in his eyes and the gentle touch of my hand assured me as he said, “Baby, I want to continue to see you. I want to get to know you better. I want our relationship to progress.” His sweet yet passionate kiss that followed affirmed the sincerity of his sentiment.
Had I chosen to follow my conditioning, my situation would have become more challenging. Instead, I asked, Jean-Jacques answered, and I became more secure in our relationship.
Sometimes the answer is simpler than we make it.
This idea came to me not after this incident with my boyfriend, but after I’d felt something uncomfortable in my shoe during my morning walk. When I didn’t find anything inside my sneaker, I immediately went to the worst-case scenario. I thought that my shoe was defective and that I’d have to buy a new pair or put them in the shop and be without them for days.
But the explanation to that situation was more straightforward than that (as was the solution with Jean-Jacques). All I had to do was dislodge a rock that had become wedged in the rubber part of the sneaker, and I felt immediate relief.
How are you making circumstances more difficult in your life? Where are you self-sabotaging because of prior experiences and conditioning? Remember, sometimes the answer is simpler than we make it!
