There isn't currently anything in my life that I'm calling self-sabotage and there hasn't been for quite a while. Back when I did think in terms of sabotaging myself, it was never very clear to me what I was doing. What it generally looked like was, it was important (or at least a good idea) for me to be doing A but I'd find myself doing B instead. I couldn't seem to come up with a satisfactory reason for why I was doing B instead of A so I'd wonder, "Is this what they call self-sabotage or something? How come, even though I know what I'm supposed to be doing, I can't get myself to do it? Am I nuts? For that matter, how come there's always so much stuff I'm supposed to be doing that I don't like to do?" I seldom liked doing homework, and there were lots of people reminding me I was supposed to do my homework. I loved going camping but there was hardly anyone telling me I was supposed to go camping.

Nowadays I tend to take a very different view. Whenever I'm not sure what I should choose to do, I watch and see what I do do. For instance, suppose it's morning and I could get out of bed right now or sleep for another hour -- which one should I choose? Who cares! An hour from now, we'll know which one I actually did choose.

I'd like to know how you actually experience that. For instance, do you sometimes find yourself thinking, "Uh-oh! Things are starting to go well! It's bringing up stuff for me that I'm not comfortable with. I can see that the only way to get relief will be to **** it up."

Or is it more like: a month ago you said you were going to lose weight, clean the house, and get rich. Now you notice that you weigh a little more, the house is a little messier, and you're a little poorer. When someone asks you what happened (or you ask yourself), you don't seem to have a good answer so you say, "Gee, I don't know. I must've sabotaged myself or something."

In other words, how real is it for you? Is it something you're aware of doing when you're doing it, or do you just infer at some point that you must have done it?

When I find myself trying to make something happen and it just isn't happening, there are about three things I can think of doing:

1. Try harder. The usual result for me is that I'm trying harder than ever to make something happen and it still isn't happening.

2. Get away. I go do something entirely different for a while, then take a fresh look at whatever I was trying to do. For instance, when I used to do carpentry occasionally, I'd regularly find myself making the same kinds of mistakes over and over. I might notice, for instance, that I'd always end up cutting a piece of wood about 1/16" longer than I meant to. Next time I'd try to allow for that -- and it would still end up 1/16" over. For whatever reason, I'd end up doing no carpentry at all for about six months and when I'd resume, it would be as if I'd been away from it for so long that I'd forgotten to make my usual mistakes. Somehow I'd measure and cut a little differently from before, and the piece would end up the length I wanted.

3. Try doing the opposite. I can remember one time when I'd been struggling for weeks not to feel bad about myself but I still felt bad about myself -- worse than ever, in fact, because now I could also feel bad about not being able to stop. The heck with it, I said. If I'm unable to make myself feel better, am I at least able to make myself feel worse? I stopped trying to feel better and started trying to feel worse -- and it didn't seem to make a bit of difference. "You mean..." (I said to myself) "... I can give up struggling to make myself feel better because no matter what I do, I'm just going to feel whatever way I feel?!"

I'm only half kidding here: if I were ever to decide that I wanted to gain some weight slowly and painfully, what I'd do would be to announce that I was going to lose X number of pounds in the next Y months, enlist everyone I knew to nag me to reach my goal, and then put myself on a diet that included lots of carrot sticks and such. I figure that the occasional binging I'd be sure to do would gain me about 10% more weight than the carrot sticks took off. Seriously, when I'm not trying to lose weight, I don't tend to gain weight either. It must be close to five years since I last pulled the scale out from under my bed, and my clothes still fit me.