Category Archives: Self-Sabotage

How To Be Free & Spontaneous – Without Hurting Yourself

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One of our greatest desires is to be free and spontaneous.  If you look at most personal and social problems, you will see that somewhere along the way we were striving to be free from our physical, emotional and mental constraints.  To be able to express ourselves freely and spontaneously, to be freed from our fearful beliefs and the emotional pains that grip us – these desires are what sprouted the whole self-help and human potential movement. 

But the desire to be free and spontaneous can become a trap.  In our efforts to get unstuck, we can lead ourselves to a place of even greater stuckness.  This does not mean, however, that we shouldn’t strive to be free, for I believe that freeing ourselves from feeling trapped is our spiritual purpose.  The journey of unshackling ourselves is both exciting and rewarding, to be savoured throughout our lives, as every bit more freedom we gain moves us closer to becoming our ultimate self.    

How is it that we trap ourselves when we want to be free?  There are four aspects in the dynamics of freedom and imprisonment which I want to explore:

FREEDOM                                                     RESPONSIBILITY  

                                               VS

SPONTANEITY                                            COMMITMENT

On a conscious level, we aim to be free and spontaneous.  But our fear of being trapped may be so intense that we end up creating the very thing we fear.  It may come in the form of an accident that leaves you bedridden; getting into trouble with the law and consequently ending up in prison; indulging in mood-altering substances to the point of being addicted; being in a relationship with a highly controlling person; or running into financial problems. 

For a balanced person, responsibility and commitment aren’t bad things.  In fact, having a healthy sense of responsibility and commitment helps us to be in touch with our personal power.  But for those with an exaggerated fear of being trapped, the idea of responsibility and commitment can trigger this sense of fear, so they tend to avoid them at all costs.  When we disown these aspects of our power, we create an imbalance within ourselves that drives our psyche to bring back some balance by overcompensating with the other extreme. 

So if you lack responsibility or commitment, you might end up in a trapped and limited situation even as you embark on creating a situation that makes you feel free and spontaneous.  An example of this is when you leave things to the last minute and end up creating chaos around you.  That chaos puts you in stress which limits your resourcefulness.  Your world shrinks tighter and tighter, and you become more and more trapped. 

Another example is when you want to enjoy feeling free and spontaneous by getting into your car, driving too fast without putting on the safety belt and getting into an accident.  You might suffer the consequence of being seriously hurt and ending up in hospital, or having hurt others and being persecuted for it.  In your pursuit of freedom and spontaneity, you have ended up in a situation of being trapped and limited. 

If you find yourself in such a situation, where you’ve created your own prison, consider working on your attitude towards responsibility and commitment (especially if the idea of it makes you recoil).  Responsibility means taking something into your realm of control.  Trust in your capability to effect changes in your world, the power of your field of influence.  Bring in that which you have been pushing out of your field.  See the force in your field as vibrant and dynamic as you step up to own your power in it. 

Commitment means making a pledge to be fully engaged with something instead of having one foot in and one foot out.  Bringing both your feet in to stand firm and solidly in one place will give you the power to reach forward into a place of joyousness.  Both of these power aspects enable us to consolidate our resources and maximise our accomplishments.  Exercised in a balanced and healthy way, they help ensure our freedom rather than limit our freedom. 

Healing the Source

Most of us, when we find ourselves in a trapped and limited situation, tend to focus on changing the symptoms – e.g. how to get more money, how to get out of a controlling relationship, or how to make the bathroom floor less slippery to prevent accidents.  While these strategies are helpful for your immediate security, unless you also work on the source of the pattern, you will recreate the same symptom in one form or another, over and over. 

If you’re aware of having a pattern of getting into a similar type of situations that make you feel trapped, it’s likely that you have a mentality of being trapped.  This means that you consistently see yourself as a person who is trapped; even when you’re out of your ‘down cycle’, deep down you still see yourself as a person whose fate is to be trapped.  It is so entrenched in your psyche that it’s become a part of your self-identity.  This self-fulfilling prophecy will lead you to recreate the pattern.  Until you change your mentality, you will probably end up in the same place again. 

Changing your mentality requires more work than just visualising yourself to be free when your circumstances show you otherwise.  Not only is this level of work ineffective on its own, it is bloody difficult!  You need to go deeper, and confront, address and heal the source of what made you feel you are trapped.    

To truly undo this pattern, you must escape your prison – not your current symptoms of trappedness but your original prison.  It can come from cultural, social or family dynamics.  Where across these dimensions do you experience a strong emotional charge about being trapped?  Make peace with it through forgiveness and changing your perception of your place in it. 

Examine your battle in your original imprisonment.  Even if you are no longer in this context, you are still engageed in an emotional battle.  Whether your battle is taking place in a real or mental place, you can free yourself by finding the little doors that lead you out of your imprisonment.  Where could you be receiving of useful, positive energy that supports you to thrive as a person?  Where could you say no to being belittled, abused, limited, controlled?  How could you assert your individual rights? 

You can take steps now, no matter how long this situation has been around, to reconcile the emotions you have about this situation.  True freedom is when you feel free within you, and this inner freedom will lead you to create more situations that reflect it. 

With the irrational fear of being trapped gone, you will no longer reject responsibility and commitment to gain freedom and spontaneity and end up destroying yourself.  Responsibility no longer means a loss of spontaneity but a way of enhancing it.  You no longer fear commitment because you know how to use it to pull you further into a productive future and make things happen for you (read The Power Of Saying “I Have Decided!” ).  As you stop resisting these previously feared concepts, you gain more freedom, relaxation and creativity.  Life flows, and good things can come to you, because your efforts are no longer being cancelled out by something hidden from your awareness.  

How Good Can You Stand?

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Many of my clients with addiction problems have asked why they often drink or use drugs when things are going well for them.  “I can understand if I’d been feeling bad,” they say, “but why is it that when things are good I’d start using again?”  There are many reasons and I am going to offer my views focusing on the aspects which I find particularly interesting.

Sometimes, we use the excuse of wanting to celebrate to go on a binge and end up abusing ourselves.  This is not what I am addressing; here, the celebratory mood is likely to be forced just because we want an excuse to embark on our self-abusing behaviour.  What I am addressing is when your life genuinely starts to look good and you’re feeling good, and then you choose an unhealthy habit and you end up sabotaging yourself.

A typical description sounds like this:

They’ve stopped using.  They’ve been working out regularly, and their body is fitter and stronger.  People are commenting on how good they look.  They’ve learnt to take time out to relax and meditate.  They feel more balanced emotionally and less prone to anxiety.  They feel inspired and creative, perhaps picking up a project they had abandoned.  Overall, they’re feeling good, probably the best they’ve felt in years.  Their life is ripe with possibilities, all the things they’ve always wanted is within their reach…

Then all of a sudden, a thought comes into their head strong and clear: “I want to have a drink” or “I need to go on a hedonistic weekend.”  With that, they embark on the old road of addiction and find themselves in that awful, familiar place – sabotaging all the good they’ve achieved.  This happens not only for those addicted to substances; people also sabotage themselves this way in relationships and businesses.  What is it that makes feeling good so difficult to bear?

Most of us have been programmed to expect pain.  Therefore, when we find ourselves in the unfamiliar place of feeling good, we tend to sabotage it.  If you’ve been struggling in a painful place for a long time, experiencing abundance would be a new concept for you.  You’re simply not used to the feelings of having abundance.

This is similar to having ‘poverty consciousness’.  You might have read statistics of people who won the lottery only to lose all the money they’ve won within a very short time.  In wealth seminars, one of the things they get you to do is to raise your threshold for wealth – how much you believe you are worth deep down – so that you are driven to achieve more wealth and without sabotaging it.  But what I’m addressing is the feelings itself that come from having good things.  If feeling good is uncomfortable for you, you may need to raise your threshold for feeling good.  To make changes, we need to first know where we’re at – where is your current threshold?  How good can you stand?

If your self-concept does not fit into the concept of someone who experiences good, then you are likely to sabotage your situation so that it fits more into your concept of yourself as someone who is in pain – because no matter how good things have become, deep down it’s not what you’ve been programmed to achieve.

Perhaps you secretly believe that you deserve to be punished, and you’ve been dealing with deep-seated guilt and shame about who you are.  If this rings true for you, perhaps now is the time to take a real hard look at what you believe about yourself and work to change those beliefs.  Changing beliefs isn’t just about uttering positive statements to yourself over and over again – it involves the process of reconciling your relationship with yourself, making peace with yourself through forgiveness of yourself and/or others.

Another reason why we might sabotage ourselves is the fear of being disappointed – i.e. we believe that we won’t be able to sustain the good, so we preempt it being ended for us by ending it for ourselves.  One or even a series of disappointments in the past does not mean that it is the most probable outcome for you now, unless you choose to perpetuate that story.  It is fine to be cautious and learn from past mistakes,  but it is defeatist to expect disappointment all the time.

We do this in our heads long before we act on it – i.e. we note the possibility of a positive outcome but we quickly thrash it down just in case we jinx it.  There’s something almost superstitious about the way we think, as if the chance of us getting something good will be better if we don’t expect it.  Actually the reverse is true: if we don’t hold a sense of expectancy for something good to happen, there won’t be a space for it to happen, because when the good things start to come you’re likely to miss recognising it and continue on a self-defeating path.  Expectancy allows us to expand into the realm of positive outcomes, whereas expectation of disappointment closes off the door to this realm.

We fear the unknown.  The unknown is neither destructive nor expansive, but it stores the potential of both.  That’s why it’s so scary to think of stepping into the unknown.  Yet we must be brave to step into the unknown in order to claim the joyous.  We must allow ourselves to not know what form the positive outcome is going to look like and just expect to be able to experience joyousness that can come in any form.  The form is less important – what we can imagine right now is only limited, but the feelings of good can come from many, many different outcomes.

Every time you catch yourself taking a turn for the worse, through your own chosen behaviours, you mark that line that defines your feeling-good threshold.  In time, you’ll develop a definite sense of that threshold.  Next, you can stretch yourself to stay in the space of feeling good until it becomes more comfortable for you being in that space.  We can get used to anything if we stayed in it long enough – after a while, our tolerance will increase and what used to be uncomfortable will become less so.  With awareness that you’ve reached your threshold and that you are about to sabotage yourself but you’re choosing to stay in the space of feeling good, you can train yourself to stop reacting automatically and thus end up in a far better place for a prolonged period.  Life gets better for you as you learn to enjoy positive experiences.

Diving Into The Inspiration Of Dream-Following

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Recently, I’ve been inspired by a couple of good friends who plunged into the adventure of pursuing their shared dream.  In doing so, they demonstrated their faith in staying true to their dreams.  They’ve reminded me of the value of following the internal compass of desire despite persisting fears.  Moreover, they’ve stirred up my own sense of ambition and adventure around some forgotten dreams which I’ve stored in the back burner as I buried myself in work in the past 13 months.

As I examined my own fears around pursuing my dreams, I realised that a lot of the fears are just excuses.  They aren’t that real once I put myself through an honesty test.  Whenever I spoke to my dream-following friends, I would get a spurt of inspiration to nurture my own dreams.  I knew that this inspiration would not last, so I dived into the energy of Inspiration to set forth some actions.

Inspiration is a powerful force that can turn dreams into reality.  It’s a feeling of being deeply-moved and of spirit dancing with joy.  It releases a flood of ideas and possibilities in our minds.  Dreams get a clearer tint when we’re inspired.  It seems and feels all so possible, so worth pursuing.

Great things can be achieved when we dive into Inspiration.  It supports us in our journey to making our dreams come true by elevating us from the level where fear operates.  What are some of the common fears that stop people from pursuing their dreams?

Dream Killers

Worthiness is a common issue – you may stop yourself from realising your dreams because you don’t really believe you are worthy of them.  Another way of saying this is, your dreams may appear to be too great for who you think you are.  While you want it, you’re not allowing yourself to get it, so your efforts often get cancelled out.  Before you can achieve what you want, you need to work on increasing your self-worth so that your dreams can match who you think you are.

The fear of not being good enough may block you from going after your dreams in case you fail.  Perhaps a history of being disappointed has created a nightmare of having positive expectations and then being let down, or putting effort into something and then failing, that continues to haunt you today.  You shy away from taking a leap into the unknown, feeling safe to step forward only if you’re assured of the outcome.  The downside to this is that you live a less-than-fulfilling life and your dreams remain unrealised because you may never feel safe enough to venture forth.

The way forward is to honour your dream while keeping an open mind about what the outcome may be.  This is the best mindset to adopt around dream-following.  It would not imply failure on your part should the outcome turn out to be different from your dream.  The gift may not be the outcome you envision but something you discover along the way of pursuing your dream; the dream may only be an illusion to drive you to what you really need.

Then there is the fear of being good (which is just as damaging as the fear of being not good enough).  If in the past you’ve been persecuted for being successful, you might think twice today about actualising your potential.  So you minimise your exposure and stay under the rock to avoid any chance of being judged for what you’re doing.  It’s likely that you have overblown the proportion of judgements against the encouragement and support you will get.  A change from focusing on the potential judges to focusing on those who will admire you for pursuing your dream will start to shift your view to a more balanced perspective.

Knowing that those who judge you will tend to be projecting their own inadequacies may help you to take their judgements less personally.  And knowing that people’s perception of you is not set in stone can help you to transcend your current feelings around certain people – sometimes, we stop ourselves from doing something because we anticipate critical reactions from only a few people in our life, not the whole world.  Know that these people may start to feel more respect for you or even find inspiration from you.

If the thought of leaving someone else in pain about their own inadequacies is a major deterrent to your own success, you’ve got to stop feeling pity for them.  The fact that the idea of this person suffering is deterring you from being happy means that you care about the person.  Feeling pity for someone is disempowering and degrading.  Elevate your view of that person.  Recognise their strengths and achievements.  In your mind, raise them to your level so that you can appreciate the existence of unique paths in life, rather than seeing it as a game field of winners and losers.

A lot of our emotional-mental blocks to self-actualisation are fears that are irrational.  They are leftovers from our childhood pains and are no longer valid.  As an adult, those fears are keeping us stuck.  We may need to heal the emotions that are imbedded in those experiences on which we base our current reality.  Then we can move on from that past reality to create a bright future for ourselves.

How Real Are Your Limitations?

There are many people who complain about not having any dreams to pursue.  I don’t know what it is that I want to do…  I don’t have something I am passionate about….  Life is dull and uninteresting…. The sad thing is that many of those who do have a dream that inspires them will then find it hard to move forward with that dream.

Often, what we perceive to be limitations that get in the way of our dreams aren’t that real.  Some of the common deterrents I keep hearing from people are the lack of resources (financial, contacts, market demand), geographical limitations, relationship considerations and work commitments.  If you put every one of those limitations to the test – with brutal honesty – you’re likely to find some creative ways around it.  Also, by stretching your internal resources, you’ll find that you can summon those qualities which you believe are important to pursuing and living your dream.

Staying true to what you hold as important to you is an admirable trait.  Yet sometimes in being too rigid about what we won’t compromise can result in us compromising ourselves.  In dream-following, having the flexibility to consider other options will open doors to being on our path to that dream.

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Lessons On Fear From Bug-Eating

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I finally ate bugs!  Since discovering that bugs are a culinary specialty in Thailand, I’d been wanting to one day taste them.  I had my first experience of eating an assortment of deep-fried bugs today.  My verdict: they are quite chewy and well-seasoned, slightly buttery in taste.  Not bad. 

Several clients at our centre had been talking about trying bugs and I asked the kitchen staff to buy a variety of them from the market so we could all eat them together (it’s always easier to do something challenging in a group than alone).  A few hours later, I was called to join the bug fest.  On my way there, I felt a tinge of regret and fright – there was no getting out of it since it had been my idea!  I had to just get on with it, with as little drama as possible. 

The experience of just-doing-it-despite-fears-threatening-to-creep-in-and-making-a-big-mental-mess-that-stops-you-from-proceeding reminded me of a great lesson in managing our fears. 

In another context, I could have easily made a big drama out of it.  In this environment, where I am constantly helping people to manage their fears, there’s no room for copping out or indulging in silly dramas.  This was my first reminder: it is within our power to decide the state we will be in.  Different environments, and our response to a certain degree depends on what’s and who’s in the environment, but I am a constant in these environments. 

I looked at the platter of bugs on the table.  There was no way I was going to start with a big creature, so I chose, out of the smaller ones, the crispiest, most well-fried and least buggy-looking one.  Once I started chewing, all the nasty associations were gone.  I was just eating.  I felt glad that I had gotten over the hurdle.  I ate three other varieties of bugs.  Second reminder about fear: once you’ve made the first jump, the rest is easy.  You wonder why it took you so long to take that first step.  Bug-eating is probably a once-off experience for me but so often in other instances our fears hold us back from advancing forward, from beginning a chain of actions that allow us to accomplish great things. 

After munching on several of the smaller bugs, I found myself challenging the others to eat the big, more intimidating ones.  I gulped inwardly as the others started to meet my challenge.  It was my turn.  I looked at a bug that looked like a cross between a big grasshopper and a fat cricket, and I recoiled.  Actually, it looked like an alien in hibernation – a big head, eyes perfectly intact, legs like they were arms folded across the body.  With a shudder, I put it back on the plate.  My normally lovely clients turned to cruelty as they said, “If you don’t do it, we will lose all respect for you as a therapist.”  

With that, I popped the big guy into my mouth.  All my senses were screaming, “This is wrong,” as I fought where my mind was going.  I had to stop my mind from going any further in making more and more associations to what I was eating.  With a mouthful of insect, I oscillated between transcending my fears and moving towards a full-fledged terror.  My third reminder on fear: the meanings we attach to things can make a huge difference in whether we move forward positively or stay stuck. 

I was associating the bug in my mouth with a wriggly, dirty cockroach… or worse.  A few days ago, I had watched ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ in which there was a scene where the girl picks up a spider from the floor and eats it.  I have a fear of spiders.  If I had allowed myself to make an association between the bug in my mouth and a spider, I might not have been able to finish eating it.  In reality, the bug was a good protein source, probably packed with goodness and cleaner than other meats.  I was disturbed by the fact that it had been a living creature with legs, but it’s not that different from eating say, a shrimp.  In fact, I was just chewing a piece of cooked meat. 

Halfway through chewing the thing, I blurted out, “The head is good.”  It came out spontaneously and the others chuckled.  From then on, all fears were gone.  Fourth reminder about fear: humour is a good distraction.  It interrupts the progression of fear and breaks up the tension of fear.  It changes the energy or mood of the experiencer such that they are free from the grip of fear. 

The next time I eat bugs, the occasion will be devoid of fanfare.  I will simply pick one up and eat it, if I feel like it.  If eating bugs does not appeal to me, I will simply walk away.  There will be no issue and no drama.  Fifth reminder: the action we take to confront a fear and get to the other side of it breaks up the tension we hold around it.  The breaking-up of that tension frees us to get on with our lives and create many wonderful things. 

But the absence of this tension may feel uncomfortable at first, and we may be tempted to hold on to it or to re-create that tension to give us a sense of false security.  The greatest lesson about fear is that when we are free from it, it presents us with the freedom to create a life that gives us true joy.  Most of the time, however, our tendency is to retreat into the chaos-filled world of fear and anguish.  It takes courage to step into the joyful unknown and to stay there until a new reality takes form, reassuring our minds that what’s there is safe.  It is a realm in which our spirits can flourish and grow. 

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