[vonmoxie]

I mentioned this on another thread, but would welcome further discussion of the idea without the derailing it would represent there, so here it is..

Something I've always found to be an emotional black hole is when people accuse me of self-sabotaging, being afraid of success, being addicted to being depressed, or any number of such constructs which when considered only make me feel more incapable and increasingly worse about myself. They've always felt inauthentic to me, even while striking at the heart. Maybe there was a reason.

Apparently there is a scientific basis for the idea that it's not even us that chooses negative feelings (which is how it always seems to me), because paradoxically, it's not the conscious mind at all that causes us to "choose" negative feelings:

Despite their differences, pride, shame, and guilt all activate similar neural circuits, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and the nucleus accumbens. Interestingly, pride is the most powerful of these emotions at triggering activity in these regions — except in the nucleus accumbens, where guilt and shame win out. This explains why it can be so appealing to heap guilt and shame on ourselves — they’re activating the brain’s reward center. (2015 Time magazine article)

This says to me that the questions of wanting to feel bad, and of self-sabotaging, are the wrong questions: these impulses are natural, subconscious, hard-wired, and telling ourselves that we are self-sabotaging or feeling sorry for ourselves (or having anyone else tell us) is in my opinion, tantamount to arresting the innocent while letting real criminals run free.

I've found this to be immensely validating. Narrowing these instincts down to being simple neurological impulses takes the snowballing negative emotion out of it for me (feeling bad about why I feel bad, and why I don't do something about it, and why have I still not done anything about it, and why I keep staying negative, and so on and so on ad infinitum).

I guess I see it as an opportunity to stop the bleeding, to be able to address my actual actions in the moment, without all the layers of feeling bad about those actions, and about feeling bad about feeling bad about those actions etc. etc. Because I feel like those layers are what end up killing me. They bury and re-bury the real feelings so that they become progressively more difficult to locate and deal with directly.

[DechanDawa]

CBT? Might help clarify...

[CANDC]

Hi vonmoxie. I really do not understand self sabotage well enough to comment. I know I have done it because I was proud and would not listen to my own inner advisors. I was a know it all and you could not tell me anything. I got over that disease.

But I did find some interesting articles that might be of interest.
Out of Control. Am I Self-Sabotaging? | Ask the Therapist

Taming Your Outer Child: Overcoming Self-Sabotage & Healing from Abandonment | Psych Central

My Own Worst Enemy: Hidden Signs Of Self-Sabotage In Recovery | Addiction Recovery - Part 3

[vonmoxie]

The contexts in which I've heard the self-sabotage terminology have generally signified the conscious self, as in "why do I [the conscious I] do these things to myself?" However, in my experience it's especially hard to get the conscious self to alter a behavior that subconscious forces are actually responsible for while ascribing that same responsibility to the conscious self.

The idea of a more conscious self-sabotage just never rang true for me. However, we humans can be absolute experts in the act of demonizing ourselves, demonizing our traits, our actions, our personalities, and ultimately I think I've suffered much more the act of demonizing my supposed propensity for self-sabotage, than by any conscious self-sabotage (of which I think there has been precious little). Therefore, while I'm not suggesting that conscious self-sabotage can't exist, I am suggesting that as a doctrine (which exists in many places) it can be counter-productive, due to the existence of the aforementioned neurological hijacking -- the demonization of which becomes ironically anthropomorphic.

I always get so much more out of looking at what's really with me, instead of what's supposedly wrong with me, such as this idea of conscious self-sabotage which haunts our cultural experience but which I think is a rabbit hole of a premise with no reasonable exit.

I believe that in CBT, one is meant to workshop what negative thoughts arise in regard to specific events, cataloguing them etc. I haven't found that level of dissection to be helpful for me personally. However convinced my conscious self might be, the neurons were still firing. I've always preferred just to let the negative thoughts go by, like credits at the end of a movie, and knowing better that it's just my neurological structure doing its thang seems to me to make it that much easier.

[DechanDawa]

Raising my awareness (via CBT) of when, where, and how I might be feeding negative thought patterns has been helpful.

[vonmoxie]

Originally Posted by DechanDawa

Raising my awareness (via CBT) of when, where, and how I might be feeding negative thought patterns has been helpful.

Actually, I have to revise something I said earlier; it was not quite accurate of me to say that the ideas in CBT have not been helpful to me, because many of its ideas align with my own and have indeed been helpful. It's only that I could never reach its goals for me completely using conscious thought, and so there is some release for me in learning of this internal design flaw (or vestigial evolutionary remnant of a former psychological or sociological need?) that may to some extent be better accepted and loved as a foible of the brain, than fought as a distortion.

[ScientiaOmnisEst]

Originally Posted by vonmoxie

I mentioned this on another thread, but would welcome further discussion of the idea without the derailing it would represent there, so here it is..

Something I've always found to be an emotional black hole is when people accuse me of self-sabotaging, being afraid of success, being addicted to being depressed, or any number of such constructs which when considered only make me feel more incapable and increasingly worse about myself. They've always felt inauthentic to me, even while striking at the heart. Maybe there was a reason.

Apparently there is a scientific basis for the idea that it's not even us that chooses negative feelings (which is how it always seems to me), because paradoxically, it's not the conscious mind at all that causes us to "choose" negative feelings:
This says to me that the questions of wanting to feel bad, and of self-sabotaging, are the wrong questions: these impulses are natural, subconscious, hard-wired, and telling ourselves that we are self-sabotaging or feeling sorry for ourselves (or having anyone else tell us) is in my opinion, tantamount to arresting the innocent while letting real criminals run free.

I've found this to be immensely validating. Narrowing these instincts down to being simple neurological impulses takes the snowballing negative emotion out of it for me (feeling bad about why I feel bad, and why I don't do something about it, and why have I still not done anything about it, and why I keep staying negative, and so on and so on ad infinitum).

I guess I see it as an opportunity to stop the bleeding, to be able to address my actual actions in the moment, without all the layers of feeling bad about those actions, and about feeling bad about feeling bad about those actions etc. etc. Because I feel like those layers are what end up killing me. They bury and re-bury the real feelings so that they become progressively more difficult to locate and deal with directly.

Aw, I hoped the excerpt about guilt would copy, but I mainly wanted to reply to that.

It took getting set back into the guilt trap maybe half an hour ago to realize that's the main thing that's going to kill me: guilt. I feel guilty about everything it seems. And after a while I realize how narcissistic this guilt is and then I feel guilty about being guilty. It's so compulsive I have no idea what it's like to live without it, or to not have the same kind of panicky internal reactions I do to things. And let's not even talk about shame. I don't even know where any of this came from.

Hearing now that it's a neurological issue is certainly interesting. Though some might see it as negative people making a copout: "oh, I can't get better, there's nothing I can do, it's purely biological, you see". Not sure how to reply to that, other than neuro circuitry certainly makes habit change harder.

Originally Posted by vonmoxie

I mentioned this on another thread, but would welcome further discussion of the idea without the derailing it would represent there, so here it is..

Something I've always found to be an emotional black hole is when people accuse me of self-sabotaging, being afraid of success, being addicted to being depressed, or any number of such constructs which when considered only make me feel more incapable and increasingly worse about myself. They've always felt inauthentic to me, even while striking at the heart. Maybe there was a reason.

Apparently there is a scientific basis for the idea that it's not even us that chooses negative feelings (which is how it always seems to me), because paradoxically, it's not the conscious mind at all that causes us to "choose" negative feelings:
This says to me that the questions of wanting to feel bad, and of self-sabotaging, are the wrong questions: these impulses are natural, subconscious, hard-wired, and telling ourselves that we are self-sabotaging or feeling sorry for ourselves (or having anyone else tell us) is in my opinion, tantamount to arresting the innocent while letting real criminals run free.

I've found this to be immensely validating. Narrowing these instincts down to being simple neurological impulses takes the snowballing negative emotion out of it for me (feeling bad about why I feel bad, and why I don't do something about it, and why have I still not done anything about it, and why I keep staying negative, and so on and so on ad infinitum).

I guess I see it as an opportunity to stop the bleeding, to be able to address my actual actions in the moment, without all the layers of feeling bad about those actions, and about feeling bad about feeling bad about those actions etc. etc. Because I feel like those layers are what end up killing me. They bury and re-bury the real feelings so that they become progressively more difficult to locate and deal with directly.

Great post. I have been self sabotaging all my life. But it wasn't pointed out to me... it's something I conceived myself. Maybe to keep the thread focused you should have another post to discuss your theory that these things are hardwired. Because I want to hear about that.

[vonmoxie]

Originally Posted by George H.

Great post. I have been self sabotaging all my life. But it wasn't pointed out to me... it's something I conceived myself. Maybe to keep the thread focused you should have another post to discuss your theory that these things are hardwired. Because I want to hear about that.

Well, I can't claim personal ownership over the theory. In fact, I didn't even know what the nucleus accumbens was until I read the article I linked to in the first post, but I swear that when I found out it let out a happy little squeal up there.

However, broader evolutionary purpose for the emotions of shame and guilt is talked about in terms of social psychology (such as in Willard Gaylin's "The Perversion of Autonomy"), that they are collective traits which we carry as a species, which serve our groups and social structures more than they serve individuals.

I do think they are somewhat vestigial in nature at this point.. or at the very least there are complications to their design as it relates to modern society. But natural biological evolution can hardly be expected to keep up with the speed of manmade change represented in society today.

If we are hard-wired to experience some neurological pleasure upon feeling guilty or shamed (which explains a lot about the bedroom interests of some folks, but that's another story entirely), it stands to reason that part of the collateral damage would be persons erroneously performing acts to achieve those feelings, so called self-sabotage, even while feeling confused about why they would since there are subconscious draws in play which are not even related to their own personal histories and conscious motivations.

To me, it turns a confounding mystery into a matter of course non-mystery.

As a society we tend to label many emotions within many contexts as being non-rational (even if we don't genuinely perceive them that way), which is such a non-productive stance, especially considering one of my favorite points in the book I referenced above (in a chapter called "Irrational Man"), which is the way in which emotions are actually...



Food for thought, anyway. Strong emotions aren't bad, negative emotions aren't even bad, and they're certainly not irrational; they are conjunctive, a necessary part of the system.. albeit a system that wasn't designed for the weird manmade world in which we live.

[unaluna]

Thanks for starting this thread! I was blown away when i saw your post yesterday. The link got annoying though after number 2. For a minute there, i thought bananas were the solution!

This makes so much sense. People LOOOOOOOVE their shame, dont we? Heck even in animal-shaming photos on the internet, the dogs dont look THAT upset. Just cuz they got caught maybe! It kind of answers a lot of SI and eating disorders, doesnt it? Everybody knows i eat cupcakes.

I cant wait to see more books and research on this. Good job finding it and bringing it here.

!

[Fuzzybear]

Originally Posted by vonmoxie

I mentioned this on another thread, but would welcome further discussion of the idea without the derailing it would represent there, so here it is..

Something I've always found to be an emotional black hole is when people accuse me of self-sabotaging, being afraid of success, being addicted to being depressed, or any number of such constructs which when considered only make me feel more incapable and increasingly worse about myself. They've always felt inauthentic to me, even while striking at the heart. Maybe there was a reason.

Apparently there is a scientific basis for the idea that it's not even us that chooses negative feelings (which is how it always seems to me), because paradoxically, it's not the conscious mind at all that causes us to "choose" negative feelings:
This says to me that the questions of wanting to feel bad, and of self-sabotaging, are the wrong questions: these impulses are natural, subconscious, hard-wired, and telling ourselves that we are self-sabotaging or feeling sorry for ourselves (or having anyone else tell us) is in my opinion, tantamount to arresting the innocent while letting real criminals run free.

I've found this to be immensely validating. Narrowing these instincts down to being simple neurological impulses takes the snowballing negative emotion out of it for me (feeling bad about why I feel bad, and why I don't do something about it, and why have I still not done anything about it, and why I keep staying negative, and so on and so on ad infinitum).

I guess I see it as an opportunity to stop the bleeding, to be able to address my actual actions in the moment, without all the layers of feeling bad about those actions, and about feeling bad about feeling bad about those actions etc. etc. Because I feel like those layers are what end up killing me. They bury and re-bury the real feelings so that they become progressively more difficult to locate and deal with directly.

Thanks for that very thoughtful explanation. My own self sabotage seems to aim for results different from those mentioned so far. Your insights on the mechanics of self sabotage may be helpful though.

Originally Posted by vonmoxie

Well, I can't claim personal ownership over the theory. In fact, I didn't even know what the nucleus accumbens was until I read the article I linked to in the first post, but I swear that when I found out it let out a happy little squeal up there.

However, broader evolutionary purpose for the emotions of shame and guilt is talked about in terms of social psychology (such as in Willard Gaylin's "The Perversion of Autonomy"), that they are collective traits which we carry as a species, which serve our groups and social structures more than they serve individuals.

I do think they are somewhat vestigial in nature at this point.. or at the very least there are complications to their design as it relates to modern society. But natural biological evolution can hardly be expected to keep up with the speed of manmade change represented in society today.

If we are hard-wired to experience some neurological pleasure upon feeling guilty or shamed (which explains a lot about the bedroom interests of some folks, but that's another story entirely), it stands to reason that part of the collateral damage would be persons erroneously performing acts to achieve those feelings, so called self-sabotage, even while feeling confused about why they would since there are subconscious draws in play which are not even related to their own personal histories and conscious motivations.

To me, it turns a confounding mystery into a matter of course non-mystery.

As a society we tend to label many emotions within many contexts as being non-rational (even if we don't genuinely perceive them that way), which is such a non-productive stance, especially considering one of my favorite points in the book I referenced above (in a chapter called "Irrational Man"), which is the way in which emotions are actually...



Food for thought, anyway. Strong emotions aren't bad, negative emotions aren't even bad, and they're certainly not irrational; they are conjunctive, a necessary part of the system.. albeit a system that wasn't designed for the weird manmade world in which we live.

[vonmoxie]

As I'm in a bit of a depressive relapse at the moment, brought on by an unfortunate sequence of events (sinus infection that had me sick for two weeks, which brought on a migraine that I'm still not free from), I had occasion to reflect on this topic in a personal way.. was asking myself the question of why what constitutes the premise of self-sabotage exists, and it occurred to me that maybe the actions I take (or don't take) that could be characterized as self-sabotaging, are also a result of self-confidence. If my subconscious is inclined to throw monkeywrenches into the works perhaps it's also because I'm overconfident I can work them out, or confident based on having done so similarly in the past, or because I want to be valiant against odds befitting greater power I know myself to possess. Maybe I want more from myself, so I test myself as I do others -- except I don't get the same exchange rate of interplay because it's just me in here.

I certainly don't have any science to back this idea up, but being an idea built purely of psychology it would be difficult to prove elements of its validity anyway. It could be absolutely true for some people in some cases, and absolutely untrue for others. We are as different from one another as the days are long, and that's what keeps it so interesting. But I think it's an interesting idea to consider how self-sabotaging has the potential to be more positively reframed as self-testing.