Self Sabotaging Stories That Keep Us Stuck

Self-sabotaging stories that keep you stuck are rarely obvious villains. They come masked as common sense, as truism, as gratitude or kindness, as protection against future pain. We carry them like sacred truths, hardly seeing how what is designed to self-sabotage is actually leaving us feeling hollow and disconnected.  “Others have it worse, so I should not complain.” “My parents did their best, so I cannot be upset.” “If I accept love, I will only be disappointed later.” These beliefs feel noble, even virtuous, yet they trap us in cycles of emotional suppression and self-abandonment. Self-sabotaging beliefs often disguise oppression as morality. They sound rational, even noble, yet they are nothing more than outdated schemas that keep us small.

Self-Sabotaging Stories Masked as Truths

One of the absurdities of human psychology is how frequently we self-sabotage with ideas that appear, on first inspection, to be entirely sensible. Many of us carry heavy baggage from the past, in the form of unexamined beliefs and embodied schemas, without knowing. They weigh us down, hold us back, trap us in cycles of suffering, yet we continue to worship these self-sabotaging stories as if they were some kind of gospel truths.

Self-sabotaging beliefs are usually acquired early, before we had the words to articulate our feelings, before any intact energetic boundaries were formed, and certainly before any critical thinking abilities could save us from ludicrous doctrines. Beliefs that self-sabotage are particularly insidious in how they come disguised as some form of truism, or even wisdom or virtue. They sound rational, even noble, yet they are nothing more than outdated schemas that keep us small.

Emotionally intense and gifted individuals are particularly susceptible to carrying these patterns diligently and stubbornly for years. Perhaps it is their strong sense of justice, or their loyal nature, that makes them hold onto what they were taught as right and good. They might have mistaken limiting ideas for moral imperatives, yet their tenacious nature also means they tend to persevere with these beliefs long after they have outlived their original purpose. Their very strengths become tools of self-sabotage.

In this letter, I want us to see if we can expose some of these hidden self-sabotaging beliefs, see them for what they are, and re-examine if we truly want to carry them for the rest of our lives.

“The truth.” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling 

 

“Others Have It Worse, So I Shouldn’t Complain”

We might recognize the constant humming sound made by this belief; it has been with many of us since childhood. The belief typically emerges from a combination of cultural messaging and, sometimes, religious maxims that teach us what emotion is allowed and what are not. Happiness and gratitude are always ‘good’; expression of disappointment or anger is always ‘bad’. Many of us learned early the erroneous idea that since we were so ‘blessed’ to have what we have, we must surrender all our rights to complain or express discontent. Perhaps a parent responded to our tears with reminders about suffering elsewhere in the world, or we were repeatedly reminded of how privileged we were, and that complaining would almost be blasphemous. It is as though there were some kind of objective measure or universal benchmark for what qualifies as legitimate suffering.

Some of us were constantly reminded of how grateful we should be for having food on our table, a roof above our heads. Some of us were guilted every day to think about poverty and tragedies elsewhere in the world. “Think of those who have less,” they said. Some of us were told explicitly or implicitly how our parents never had the opportunities we have and what they had to sacrifice to provide them. When you were young and hurting, you were met not with mirroring or comfort but with redirection that sounded like a way out but actually just invalidated your experience. In the end, you internalized the idea that your tears needed justification, that you needed permission to just say you were hurt. From an attachment perspective, it was a failure of emotional attunement (Winnicott, 1965). Instead of showing empathy, your caregivers forced you to move outside of your heart into your head and replace raw emotions with intellectualization and rationalization. Whatever felt unpleasant, inconvenient, or would cause discomfort to your parents, you had to suppress. Thus, you learned to step outside your own experience, to view your feelings through distant intellectualization instead of simply feeling them. Even if only inadvertently, your parents trained you to self-sabotage by constantly talking yourself out of your emotional truth.

The absurdity of this self-sabotaging belief becomes clear when we examine it closely. How is it that suffering has become a zero-sum game where speaking your pain somehow diminishes the validity of another’s? In what way is acknowledging your honest pain a sign that you are somehow narcissistic and ungrateful? Why cannot gratitude and pain co-exist? The truth is, owning your right to cry does not take away from someone else’s; speaking your truth does not silence others. There is enough oxygen in the world for everyone’s pain to be aired, enough space for everyone’s tears to be shed. If anything, denying your own struggles reinforces the toxic narrative in society where those who suffer silently must continue to do so. By extension, this perpetuates global hermeneutical injustice, where oppressed groups lack the conceptual resources and social recognition to articulate their experiences of harm.

When we suppress our legitimate struggles under the erroneous belief that our pain must be ‘bad enough’ to be valid, we deny ourselves the basic human need for expression and support. The pattern is self-sabotaging because it creates a peculiar form of self-abandonment where we become complicit in our own emotional neglect. Having internalized capitalist society’s or our dysfunctional family’s values, we automatically enroll ourselves in treating ourselves like a machine that must always be rational, productive, and predictable, instead of the gloriously messy and spontaneous human being we actually are. We become our own harshest critic, perpetually self-sabotaging our health by dismissing our emotional reality as insufficient or unworthy.

The irony is that your suppression does not create any benefit for those “worse off.” On the contrary, it breeds unconscious resentment and emotional numbness, which erode your capacity for genuine empathy. When we suppress our own pain, we lose the ability to sit with it, and as a result, we struggle to stay with the pain of others. Instead of offering true comfort, we might default to hollow platitudes or rush to find silver linings, simply because we cannot tolerate the discomfort of witnessing pain. As Simone Weil aptly observes, “Attention is the rarest form of generosity.” But it is not your fault that you find this challenging. If true attention was never demonstrated or gifted to you, of course, you would now struggle to give it to yourself, and by extension to those you love and care about. If your pain was rarely acknowledged without someone rushing to fix it, dismiss it, or hide it away, it is understandable that this becomes the only way you know. Without that experience of being seen, you would not have learned how to hold space for your own pain.

The right to feel your pain and express your needs is not a finite resource requiring careful rationing. Your admitting that you are ‘not waving, but drowning’ does not somehow steal recognition or resources from anyone. Letting yourself speak your truth or cry does not steal from anyone else’s happiness. On the contrary, by attending to your own struggles, you become capable of genuine compassion for others. A person who has processed their own grief can hold space for another’s tears far better than someone who has buried their sorrow under layers of performative gratitude. Your processed pain can become a bridge to understanding others. You can become an enlightened witness, a healthy “wounded healer” whose painful history has become a sacred tool for empathy and connection.

“The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled’unfortunate,’ but as a person, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction” (Weil, 1949).

“My Parents Did Their Best, So I Cannot Be Upset”

This self-sabotaging mind trap that says, because your parents did their best, or had good intentions, you would be stripped of the right to be upset. It rests on two psychological mechanisms that work in tandem. The first is the desperate need to preserve significant attachment bonds at all costs. The primitive, innate need for attachment is deeply rooted in all of our psyches from the day we were in our mother’s womb. As children, we could not survive without our caregivers, so our psyche would do anything, using all our life forces and imaginative ability, to maintain the illusion that they are fine and good. Since our caregivers were all that we had, and the mere thought that they were abusive or inadequate would induce intolerable terror in us, we must not allow ourselves to admit how they hurt or harmed us. We literally needed that for our sense of ontological safety. We would do everything we could to deny our own anger towards them, even if that meant we blamed ourselves instead. Psychoanalyst Fairbairn observed that children would choose to see themselves as bad in a world that makes sense instead of acknowledging they are helpless in the care of unpredictable adults.

The second mechanism that comes into play is splitting, or black-and-white thinking. Our young minds divided the world into absolutes: if our parents “did their best,” they must be good; if they hurt us, they must be bad. While severe splitting is associated with developmental stagnation, a mild form of splitting as a cognitive error is common and does not mean we are psychologically immature or unintelligent. We all engage in self-sabotaging splitting at times, and it becomes worse when we are stressed, when we have a lot going on, and our brain simply lacks the capacity to resolve painful cognitive dissonance. It also makes sense that we are more prone to using a primitive psychological defense when it comes to emotionally charged subjects like relationships with parents. In healthy development, children eventually learn to move toward less black and white thinking about their caregivers. However, in cases where we experienced parental neglect or abuse, we get stuck in loops with our survival strategies. Perhaps when we tried to express anger or disappointment, we got the door shut on us, and we were threatened with abandonment or punishment. So we learned to mute ourselves just to keep the attachment. Carrying our childhood protective mechanisms into today, we still do not want to face the painful truth of our parents’ fallibility and the overwhelming feelings that may bring, so we compartmentalize, lock our feelings away, and “get on with life” as productive, seemingly rational human beings that our family and society need us to be. We bury the hurt, we tell ourselves that good intentions erase harmful impact. Splitting and denial of our truths help us survive childhood, but create problems in adulthood when we need a more nuanced and realistic view of human relationships and when we need to learn to set boundaries. What once protected us becomes a form of self-sabotage in adult relationships.

Your parents could have tried hard and still caused you pain due to their own unresolved trauma, lack of awareness, neediness, or immaturity. Perhaps your mother’s anxiety, born from her own childhood instability, made her love so engulfing that it stifled your growth and stunted your search for independence. Perhaps your father’s emotional absence, learned from his own distant father, left you constantly seeking validation. Patterns often cascade through generations, each parent inadvertently passing on what they could not resolve. Seeing these patterns is important, but the goal is not to excuse or rationalize their behaviors, or to intellectualize everything away with jargon like “transgenerational trauma.” There is a fine line between understanding and compassion for them and finding excuses or intellectualizing things away. It takes work, but the goal is to hold both, and to find that delicate balance point where you are not slipping into endless blame nor denying your truth. Ultimately, recognizing the inheritance of trauma is not about blame but seeing reality lucidly and giving yourself a doorway out of the chain and the cycle.

The fear that examining parental imperfections means we are “bad” or “ungrateful” children keeps many people stuck in self-sabotaging patterns that no longer serve them. But genuine gratitude can coexist with honest acknowledgment of harm. In fact, the most profound appreciation often comes after we have worked through our anger and disappointment to arrive at a place of understanding. Real human relationships are complex and contain multiple truths simultaneously. Your parents can be kind-hearted people who have tried their hardest. Yes, they might have sacrificed a lot for you and genuinely loved you with all they had, but that does not negate the fact that what they did hurt you deeply. These positions are not mutually exclusive; if anything, both love and hurt simultaneously exist in an honest and real relationship. The ability to see and admit to the complexity is what distinguishes mature love from childish idealization.

For those who are emotionally intense or gifted, the dynamic can be particularly complex. Your heightened sensitivity may have made you more aware of your parents’ emotional needs and vulnerabilities, and your natural competence means you quite easily slip into emotional caretaking or parentification. You might have intuitively sensed how fragile their ego strength was, so you would choose to play small and silence yourself to preserve their fantasy of perfection and protect their self-esteem. You self-sabotage and deem your light so that others could shine.

Yet blind idealization and self-denial are not ultimately sustainable. Cracks of chronic self-sabotaging do eventually reveal themselves after some years. Maybe your suppressed truth emerges in resentment and rage that break out from time to time. Maybe you find yourself increasingly impatient in their presence. Finding interactions intolerable, you might start avoiding family gatherings, cutting conversations short, or feeling overwhelmed and dysregulated when they call. Perhaps you notice yourself becoming hypercritical of small things they do, or feeling an inexplicable urge to flee when they start sharing their problems like needy children. Since the body keeps the score of what the mind tries to deny, your inner need to rebel and be free may also show up as chronic fatigue, unexplainable pain when you know a family event is coming, or a sudden inability to tolerate their particular way of chewing or breathing. The psyche finds ways to protect what consciousness refuses to acknowledge.

On the path to freeing yourself, you will come to realize that admitting to the truth is not betrayal; it is emotional maturity. The truth ultimately sets both parties free. It allows you to see them as whole human beings while also honoring your own experience. Integration often leads to deeper compassion for them and for yourself. When we can say, “My mother loved me deeply and her criticism hurt me,” or “My father provided well and his emotional absence left marks,” we step into a more truthful relationship with our history. The resolution of thesis and antithesis into a higher truth allows us to hold both love and disappointment simultaneously. Ultimately, it is the mature capacity to see our parents as whole, with both good and bad qualities integrated (Klein, 1946), that allows for the most authentic, loving, and sustainable relationships.

“A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
― Pope John Paul II

“If I Accept Love, I will Only Be Disappointed Later”

This protective mechanism usually develops when we are exposed to too much loss, abandonment, or betrayal too soon, when we are not capable of digesting and healing from the traumatic experience. As a way of protecting ourselves, we decided to shut our hearts’ door. The unconscious logic runs: if I never let myself fully receive love, I will never feel the devastating pain of losing it. It is a form of preemptive grief, a constant bracing against future hurt. To avoid big highs and lows, we would rather live with low-grade depression that runs in the background. In the language of attachment theory, this is an avoidant strategy, where you maintain distance more than is healthy or necessary to prevent the activation of the attachment system and any feelings of vulnerability.

Often, this pattern begins in childhood with inconsistent caregiving. Perhaps love was given and withdrawn unpredictably, teaching us that attachment equals danger. Or maybe we experienced a significant loss — a death, divorce, or abrupt abandonment — that left us with the bone-deep knowledge that love can vanish without warning. The child’s mind, in its wisdom, creates a defense: stay slightly removed, never fully surrender to connection, maintain an escape route.

The self-sabotaging manifests in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We might choose unavailable partners, unconsciously ensuring the distance we claim not to want. We might escape from relationships that become “too good for comfort,” and cannot help but create conflict when intimacy threatens our defenses. Or we might simply maintain an internal reservation, a part of ourselves held back even in our closest relationships: present but not fully present, loving but not fully surrendering. For the gifted, this might show up as having only intellectual connections with others without revealing any emotional vulnerability, or a swing between intense initial infatuation and extreme disappointment and sudden withdrawal when the initial idealization breaks.

Our attempts at emotional protection often fail to protect us from pain. They actually become elaborate forms of self-sabotaging. Instead of the clean grief of loss, we experience a chronic, low-grade depression that comes from half-muted existential guilt that knows we are not living fully.  It morphs into toxic envy that makes us want to hide away from humanity and cut out childhood friends. It puts us in a muddy pool of suffering filled with longing, regrets, and life without color. We might avoid the acute pain of heartbreak, but we inherit the haunting question of “what if?” This is what I might consider “ontological guilt”: the guilt of an unlived life, of potential unrealized.

The calculation behind this mind trap is fundamentally flawed. Yes, opening ourselves to love means risking future pain. However, the net benefit of experiencing connection, even temporarily, far outweighs the periods of disappointment. Living with emotional walls means existing at such a diminished baseline that we never experience the very thing that makes life meaningful. It is like a form of emotional anorexia where we never allow ourselves the essential nutrients to live; we might just be surviving, but we are not living.

The mathematics of the heart operates differently than we might imagine. The pain of loss, while acute, is temporary and survivable. The chronic ache of disconnection, however, accumulates over the years, creating a hollowness that becomes harder and harder to fill. We end up deepening the very existential void we sought to run away from, and giving ourselves a steady state of disconnection instead of risking the natural rhythms of intimacy and loss that characterize a full life.

“There is No Point Dwelling on the Past”

This belief often masquerades as pragmatism but may actually be another sophisticated form of avoidance. It may have come from cultural messages about “moving forward” or from families where showing emotions was discouraged or seen as weakness. “Do not cry over spilled milk,” we might have been told. The hidden message in this statement is that time spent being with our raw feelings itself has no value, and we should instead reallocate resources to go and be more of a ‘human doing’, not a human being. In our productivity-obsessed culture, this belief is reinforced everywhere. Eventually, we hold it like a kind of common sense truism when it is not.

The attitude of needing to maximize productivity and not waste any time on emotion is probably a fruit of the neoliberalist, capitalist regime. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes how we have internalized the logic of an achievement society, where we become our own taskmasters, relentlessly pushing ourselves toward optimization and efficiency (Han, 2012). We no longer need external authority figures to exploit us because we have learned to exploit ourselves. In this system, emotions become inconvenient interruptions to our productivity, something inconvenient that we should erase rather than honor. By having internalized this belief, we become what Han would call ‘both the exploiter and the exploited’. We carry around an internal drill sergeant who constantly tells us we are wasting time, we are not doing enough, and any time we spend regretting or grieving over past sorrow is slowing us down. Anything that does not produce measurable results immediately or contribute to advancement in the world has no value. The insidious nature of this conditioning is that we genuinely believe this emotional suppression is good for us. We have internalized the capitalist imperative so completely that we mistake our own self-exploitation for virtue. We pride ourselves on being “resilient” and “moving forward quickly,” not realizing that we have simply absorbed the market’s demand for human resources that never break down, never need maintenance, and certainly never require time off for something as unproductive as feeling our feelings.

This belief creates a particularly cruel form of self-sabotaging, as we deny ourselves the very processing that would set us free. When we do not spend time reflecting on or processing what has happened to us, it creates unexpected and confusing problems that seem unrelated to our past. We may begin to project past wounds onto current people: perhaps seeing your critical father in every boss who gives feedback, or experiencing your unpredictable mother’s chaos in a partner’s minor mood shifts. The undigested past also shapes our future choices through repetition compulsion, where we unconsciously recreate familiar patterns even when they had once traumatized us. A person raised by an emotionally unavailable parent might repeatedly choose distant partners, or someone who grew up walking on eggshells around an explosive parent might find themselves in workplaces with volatile colleagues. Repetition compulsion drives us to unconsciously recreate familiar relationship dynamics because our unconscious psyche really wants something to be different this time. Consider how many of us choose partners who recreate our early relationship dynamics, or find ourselves having the same conflicts in different jobs, or notice familiar feelings arising in new situations. We return to the scene of the crime, hoping this time we can rewrite the ending. The abused child becomes the adult who chooses abusive partners because they hold the unconscious belief that if they can finally make this type of person love them properly, they can heal their original wound. Of course, this strategy never works because we are trying to heal old wounds with the very dynamics that caused the injury. However much we want to rewrite the story, without conscious awareness and insight, the compulsion to repeat is simply that, a compulsion; and it is more likely to retraumatize us than to liberate us.

It is true that we cannot change what has actually happened, but that does not mean we cannot change how it affects us now. When we finally stop self-sabotaging and turn toward old wounds with softness and openness, something shifts in our neurobiology. If our bodies would let us, we might finally let the tears that needed to fall decades ago be shed, or scream the anger that was too dangerous to express as a child. This is what “working through” means. We are finally metabolizing previously indigestible experience. The hope-giving thing is: when we give our brain a new experience, it does not actually know the difference between past and present. We may not be able to go back and change the actual past, but we can give ourselves the emotional experience of having someone stand up on our behalf, or give us a hug when we were tortured and abused, or take us away from a toxic home, even just metaphorically or in our imagination. In other words, it is actually possible to neurologically give ourselves a ‘new childhood’ by providing the emotional experiences we missed.

Another erroneous belief that sustains our denial is that if we process the past, we will dwell on it, drown in it, become so angry and resentful that we cease to function. The fear of “dwelling” is actually a fear of feeling. We are convinced that if we open the door to old pain, we will be consumed by it. But the opposite is true. Feelings, when truly felt and witnessed, move through us like weather. What actually gets stuck and haunts us is the unprocessed trauma. ‘Time heals’ is only a partial truth. Unprocessed emotions, especially those associated with severely traumatic memories or chronic and early wounds, do not simply disappear. They lodge themselves in our bodies as chronic tension or mysterious ailments. Our bodies have memories; our nervous systems do not distinguish between dangers that happened twenty years ago and threats we imagine today. From a neurobiological perspective, traumatic memories are stored differently from ordinary memories. They remain frozen in time, unintegrated, ready to hijack our present moment awareness. To pretend “all is fine” when it is not is often just a form of spiritual bypassing that keeps us trapped in unconscious repetition. It is like trying to build a house on shaky ground: no matter how beautiful the structure, hidden sinkholes will eventually make themselves known. As Jung noted, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” The paradox of emotional processing is that the fastest way out is through: avoidance prolongs suffering, while facing it transforms it.

The invitation here is to stop endlessly intellectualizing or justifying the utility of facing our trauma, but to admit that we do not want to do it for fear of drowning in it, or of it never ending. This fear may feel real, but the truth is the worst has already happened; it is in the past. Plus, we can always process our hurt in a careful, controlled way. We do not have to ‘dive all in’ and let all the floodgates open. We can find a trusted professional or a friend to create a sacred space for that to be contained. We can build a safe space for ourselves before we do anything. We can equip ourselves with grounding techniques and crisis plans. We can gradually dig inside for the longing to finally be seen and heard, and to summon the courage to feel what needs to be felt. It is possible to undo self-sabotaging patterns. Many who have come before you have done it, and I have no doubt that, being the survivor you are, you can do it too. Perhaps next time, when old patterns surface in your current relationships, when familiar triggers activate your nervous system, when you find yourself inexplicably stuck in cycles you thought you had outgrown, pause and ask: what from my past is asking for attention right now?

The past stops controlling us when we stop running from it. Only then can we truly move forward, no longer as fractured beings carrying invisible wounds, but as integrated humans who have made peace with where we came from and can consciously choose where we are going.

“When in doubt, choose to live.”
― Terry Pratchett

 

To Stop Self-Sabotaging Traps From Hurting You

Self-sabotaging mind traps, whether conscious or pre-conscious, were first developed as protective strategies, often in response to overwhelming circumstances. They were our psyche’s best attempt to keep us safe in situations where we had limited power or understanding. They might have persisted because they contain kernels of truth, but they have been twisted into harmful absolutes. Recognizing this allows us to appreciate their original purpose while also seeing how they now become tools for self-sabotage. We can thank these old protectors for their service while gently retiring them from duty.

You may also notice they all somehow align with what our society demands of us: that capitalist machine that requires us to be endlessly productive, never complaining, always grateful workers. These beliefs serve the system perfectly and are perfectly designed to turn us into self-exploiting machines who never make demands, never take time off, and most importantly, always blame ourselves rather than acknowledging systemic failures. They are all crafted to suppress what makes us human for the sake of sterile productivity, the convenience of caregivers, or for the system to run smoothly and quickly.

The truth is, we are human, not machines or artificial intelligence. Yes, gratitude matters, but not at the cost of inconvenient truths. Acceptance is a sacred spiritual practice, and we cannot do that when we are spiritually bypassing. Resilience may be what we all want, but we do that so we can live life with joy and equanimity, not so we can become more efficient workers for the system.

The path forward requires us to hold complexity rather than retreat into simplistic rules. We need to develop the ability to hold apparent paradoxes; to feel grateful while also acknowledging pain, to love while also setting boundaries, to hope while accepting risk, and to savor our present while honoring the past that shaped us.

The ultimate irony is that the very ‘inconvenient feelings’ we avoid in the service of so-called productivity or defense are what would eventually lead to our liberation. By turning toward what we have always run away from, we discover our deep resilience and the fullness of our own humanity. With awareness and compassion, we can gradually loosen the grip of these self-sabotaging false truisms and become the authentic human we have always deeply yearned to be.