Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pat Pearson, M.S.S.W., is an international author, speaker, and clinical psychotherapist. Her company offers seminars, audios, and books to clients and corporations worldwide. (www.patpearson.com)

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

STOP Self-Sabotage

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Every man born has to carry his life to a certain depth or else.

—Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

Self-sabotage: we all do it. Old or young. Rich or poor. Famous or unknown. All of our talent, intellect, knowledge, and experience cannot help us, because the enemy—the conspirator that whispers in our ear and keeps us from our dreams—is ourself. But there is hope. When we face our own fears and practice the techniques of change, we can stop sabotaging our hopes and dreams.

"I just don't understand why I can't find a good relationship. They all start out terrific and then ... no one wants to make a commitment. Is it bad luck, or is it me? What am I doing wrong?"

"I'm in sales. I've made $45,000 for the last three years. I feel stuck. Why can't I break through to make $50,000 or more?"

"I'm constantly on diets. I go up. I go down. But nothing ever seems to truly work!"

"I work all the time at my home business, but can't seem to get anywhere financially."

If you see yourself in any of these people—and I've talked with all of them—or if there are some important goals you haven't yet reached, you are sabotaging. You may not realize it (none of us do) because sabotaging is unconscious.

If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be? Why don't you think you have it? Many people tell themselves it's bad luck, it's the economy, it's their mother, or that diets don't work. The truth is, each of the people I just mentioned—and every one of us as well—practices self-sabotage.

None of us wants second best. Our sabotaging causes us to do things that get in our own way, but the good news is that you can identify and correct those things. And it's easier than you ever thought.

One fascinating aspect of self-sabotage is that we often recognize it in our friends and loved ones but have a hard time seeing it in ourselves. The fact is, we worry most about sabotage in our children, friends, or mates. Will they make their careers work? Will they stop choosing the wrong relationships? Will they take better care of their health? These painful issues concern all of us.

Throughout our lives we've heard the message, "You can't have it all." Translation: if we really have—or become—everything we want, we will lose something important. Well, it's time to stop the old tapes and listen to something new. In this book you will find the stories of men and women who faced their limiting beliefs and moved around, over, under, or through their own self-imposed barriers to have the kind of life they wanted. I hope you'll find the stories not only inspirational, but motivational, and that you'll be sharing the story of your own triumph over self-sabotage very soon.

As a therapist listening to the unhappiness of my clients, I was often troubled that so many bright, interesting people weren't getting what they wanted in their lives. The kind of question I heard most frequently was, "Why is it taking me so long to get what I want?"

It's not because you don't deserve it.

It's not because you don't want it enough.

It's not because you aren't intelligent, attractive, or successful enough.

It's because you are self-sabotaging. You have conflicting thoughts and beliefs about actually having what you say you want. You are in resistance.

"I want to be a success in my career, but ..."

"I want to lose weight, but ..."

"I want a happy relationship, but ..."

You are "yes, but"-ing yourself into self-sabotage. This book will teach you to name and change the sabotaging of your dreams and get out of your own way. By stopping self- sabotage, you will come to know you truly deserve what you most want to have or be in life.

And if you have even the tiniest fantasy that certain people are magically exempt from self-sabotage, please note: our culture is mesmerized by celebrities who sabotage themselves. The latest celebrity sabotage du jour makes headlines on the daily and nightly news shows. Beneath their glitter and glamour, celebrities are real people with personal struggles just like you and me. Their unresolved emotional baggage can wreck their lives and careers. It may be Louis Vuitton, but it's still baggage!

What Does Deserve Mean?

The Webster's Dictionary definition of deserve is "to be worthy of [merit]; deserves another chance; to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital: to become recognized as they deserve."

My definition includes both an unconditional part—being worthy of what you want—and a conditional part—doing something to earn it. Your "Deserve Level" is composed of conscious and unconscious beliefs about what you deserve to be or have in your life. In other words, it is made up of a combination of four psychological issues:

• Your beliefs

• Your self-esteem

• Your self-confidence

• Permission from your past

And they all come together to form your Deserve Level script.

I'm using the word level in its metaphoric rather than its literal sense. Just as your IQ, your intelligence quotient, is an indicator of your level of intelligence, your Deserve Level is a gauge of the degree to which you believe you deserve to have what you want in various areas of life. Though your Deserve Level is based on the messages you learned as a child, Deserve Levels are self-chosen and can be changed.

You may consciously tell yourself you deserve to feel happy, financially secure, loved, and free of inappropriate guilt and negativity. But your Deserve Level unconsciously becomes your internal glass ceiling. You can't let yourself achieve or keep what you don't believe you deserve.

Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotage is the way we regulate our Deserve Level to keep ourselves within our self- chosen—and surprisingly comfortable—boundaries. Self-sabotage is how we trip ourselves up when we're running to the finish line. No one is immune, and all of us do it to some degree.

In this book, you will learn how to stop self-sabotaging and raise your Deserve Level. You can't get and keep what you want if you don't believe you deserve it. We get what we believe we deserve. No more, no less. We never exceed our own expectations, at least not for long.

You were probably taught the myth that if you were kind, obeyed orders, and used your head, you would get what you wanted out of life. In other words, your good behavior would be a down payment on your heart's desires. Conversely, if bad things happened, it was probably your fault—"you should have thought about that before you did it"—and so you deserved what you got.

This concept of earning or controlling all the outcomes of our lives is flawed. You cannot control major acts of God, the economy, or other people's feelings. That's the bad news.

The good news is that you are in charge of your own choices, feelings, and behaviors. That is where you can make a change.

As opposed to one-time events which, while unpleasant, do not recur, self-sabotage is a repetitive pattern that shows up in the guise of various events and people and diets and experiences. The net outcome is that you're chronically frustrated and unhappy about where you are.

As a psychotherapist, I work every day with people who want more in their lives. In the early years of my practice, when I noticed some people never seemed to get what they wanted, I tended to think, "Well, they didn't commit to therapy, didn't really work for it." Yet some of them worked really hard and still were not able to achieve what they wanted in their lives! With all their genuine motivation and sincere application of techniques, why didn't they improve?

The answer, I came to believe, is that they didn't believe they deserved to get what they said they wanted. There was some kind of invisible shield between their wants and their ability to satisfy those wants. Every day they ran full speed into this shield, fell down, picked themselves up, then did it all over again! This repetition was the most frustrating pattern in their lives.

Then I became aware of this pattern in my own life.

My Own Self-Sabotage and Deserve Problem

I grew up in a small Midwestern town in the standard 1950s and '60s way. My father was a successful national book salesman. My mother was a college professor.

My father had very high standards; he was very critical and difficult to please. He was charming, handsome, and witty, and seemed fun and accepting to those outside the family. Behind closed doors, however, he was demanding and perfectionistic and led me to feel I could never quite measure up.

My mother, on the other hand, was loving, supportive, and accepting. Dad would yell and she'd cower; then she'd come back to me later and reassure me I was good and loved. Out of this mix I developed my own patterns of self-sabotage.

I first experienced my own Deserve Level issues after college. Near the end of my senior year I fell in love with my young, brilliant college professor. He was everything I believed I wanted in a romantic partner; I was truly swept off my feet.

After graduation he suggested I travel with him and his family to Europe for the summer, then move to Boston to be with him when he started his new job at Harvard. I said yes without a second thought. Surely I had won the emotional sweepstakes; Cinderella had nothing on me!

Friends and family had expressed concern about both my prince and the demanding nature of his plans. But I joyfully went off to Europe and on to Boston, ignoring their cautions about the man as well as the move.

Within weeks I was living in a new city with no job, no friends, and a newly printed degree in political science. No one in Boston was particularly impressed with my undergraduate degree, so I ended up selling clothes in Harvard Square.

Then one night I found the professor with another woman, and I was shattered. It was one of those moments when the world stops, when a single experience is stamped forever in your memory and changes your entire perception of the world. I had believed we'd be married and live happily ever after in Cambridge, but my personal fairy tale had vanished. After a very intense scene full of accusations and tears, I called my parents, and they sent me the money to move back home.

I went back in despair, and for several weeks I sat: literally sat. I was in excruciating emotional pain, had no interest in friends or family, lost weight, felt nauseated, and couldn't sleep; or if I did fall asleep, the nightmares were exhausting. I walked around with my shoulders pulled almost to my ears, like a tortoise trying to withdraw her head into her shell. My neck and back were in constant spasms from muscular tension. I was deeply depressed.

My family became very concerned. The daughter whom they had raised and spent thousands of dollars educating was becoming a vegetable in her room. They took me to internists, family friends, clergymen—anyone they thought might help snap me back to normal functioning. I wouldn't be helped. They even began talking about surgery because my shoulders literally seemed frozen and would not come down from around my ears.

Finally, something in me snapped, and I said, "Wait a minute. I think this is all emotional."

I remembered a psychotherapist I had met through friends at college. I called him and we talked on the phone. That phone call, which became my first therapy session, changed my life.

During the call I started to cry and talk about the dream I had lost. After the call, my shoulders came down about half an inch.

I called again the next night. This time I got angry and talked about betrayal and rage. My shoulders dropped another half-inch.

By the end of the week the tension and pain were gone from my shoulders, neck, and back. I felt saved. I knew that what happened to me in Boston was something I never wanted to experience again.

I decided the only way I could make sure it didn't happen was to learn everything I could about myself and my pattern for choosing men. I returned to Dallas and entered therapy with the man who had helped me on the phone.

In therapy I reviewed all my past romantic relationships, and that's how I discovered I had a wonderful ability to sabotage myself by choosing witty, charming men who would never commit to marriage. I fell in love with their "potential" and completely denied the reality that they didn't want the same outcome I did. It always became my goal to figure out ways to make them change—and once they did, my worth would surely be confirmed.

When they continued to resist my attempts to change them, I simply tried harder. Yet not one of those relationships was ever changed by my attempts at psychic urban renewal. In time I came to understand that, at a very fundamental level, I didn't believe I deserved what I'd been seeking.

Raise Your Deserve Level

Before you can have more in your life, you have to follow the ancient maxim "Know thyself."

That means making changes at a deep and profound level. You can make some of those changes quickly and easily. Others will take longer, will not be easy, and will require a commitment to the evolutionary process that is change.

The rewards can be summed up in one sentence: you can have more in your life than you have ever had—and truly enjoy it!

You are the only person who is entitled to decide what that "more" will be. Perhaps it's more income, more loving relationships, more of a sense of safety, more spiritual development, or more health and energy.

You already know about the stress and pain of deeply wanting someone or something, yet feeling chronically blocked from getting it. There is such frustration in trying, and the painful irony is that trying doesn't work anyway. You probably know someone right now who is trying to quit drinking, lose weight, or give up a destructive relationship. The only way to stop feeling the anguish of that frustration is to fully understand and resolve the "how" and the "why" of sabotaging behaviors.

Your final decision regarding what you deserve is influenced by all your beliefs and feelings, conscious and unconscious. There are specific Deserve Levels for every area of your life: love, work, friends, health. Paradoxically, it is possible to have a high Deserve Level in one area (career, for example) and a low Deserve Level in another (for example, relationships).

Low Deserve Levels can live inside of us no matter how rich or famous we are. Elizabeth Taylor is a perfect example. She made millions as a successful movie star yet had seven failed marriages (relationship self-sabotage). There can also be a domino effect if one area is seriously out of balance. Robert Downey Jr.'s alcoholism and drug addiction (health self-sabotage) almost ruined his movie career. One sabotaged area can topple an entire life; conversely, one area of sabotaging can be dealt with effectively if the others are in balance. This is why some people handle a career loss well and others don't.

Use this bar graph (see Figure 1.1) to rate your Deserve Levels on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest rating. Your rating should be subjectively based on what you feel right now about your life.

Fill in your Deserve Level for each area.

Look at the area you rated the lowest: that's the Deserve Level with which you need the most help.

You Deserve Life's Good Things

You were born with the fundamental right to believe the best of yourself. This entitlement is basic to every human being. Somewhere along the way, though, we begin to have doubts about just what and how much we deserve.

Babies have no question about their right to be loved or held. When they're hungry or wet, they scream to let the world know of their basic needs. They feel no need to apologize or justify—they just feel it! They ask for what they want and respond spontaneously when they don't get it.

Then something happens. It happens subtly and over time, but it happens. Our innate sense of being worthy to express our feelings and needs starts to get lost as we mature. Instead of believing we deserve love just for "being," we lower our self-esteem and try to earn approval and love by "doing." We begin to think we must earn love, and so we give up our real feelings to meet the approved image.

A two-year-old confidently attempts almost anything. He may not accomplish it, but he will darn well try if the adults in his life don't prevent him. As we get older, we start to shrink our beliefs about our own abilities. Somehow the other guy can make the higher grades, get the big sale or promotion, go after the advanced degree, win the beloved. But not us.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from STOP Self-Sabotageby PAT PEARSON Copyright © 2009 by Pat Pearson. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.