Never Again Feel Like Your Own Worst Enemy
By Laura K. Connell.
Do you feel like your own worst enemy? It’s common for survivors of dysfunctional families to label themselves that way.
You keep getting in your own way and can’t figure out why. And regardless of how many “proven” techniques you use to stop self-sabotage, it won’t go away.
Self-sabotage can look like:
- Poor boundaries
- Procrastination
- Perfectionism
- Relationship struggles
- Underachieving
- Avoidance
- Addictions
- And many more
These are the self-defeating behaviors that keep us stuck. They lead you to believe you’re your own worst enemy because you can’t seem to get on your own side.
But what if I told you all these strategies are a way to keep yourself safe? They’re evidence of how far you’ll go to protect yourself from harm.
The truth is every part of you is on your side. You developed these coping strategies as a child to survive a very toxic household.
Poor boundaries let you stay on your parents’ good side so they wouldn’t abandon you. Procrastination lets you avoid making mistakes because those weren’t allowed. And so on.
Unlike a child who grows up in a normal home, your brain got rewired to focus on threats. Instead of curiosity and exploration yours became preoccupied with immediate safety.
That’s why you might notice that long-term success eludes you. Instead you go for the short-term fix of an addiction or other coping behavior.
Why you’re not your own worst enemy
The child inside isn’t concerned with your long-range goals. It wants to keep you alive in this very moment. That’s why you feel like your own worst enemy, when that’s not the case at all.
You never got the chance to develop healthy adult coping behaviors because no one taught you them. In addition, you had this brain obsessed with real or perceived threats.
That prevented you from calmly and steadily pursuing goals that would make your life better.
The relationship struggles come when you abandon yourself for the other person. Or you handle conflict badly because no one taught you how to navigate it.
In dysfunctional homes conflict is either ever present or never present. Neither of these is helpful in solving problems, creating intimacy, and getting your needs met.
In fact, they are anathema to intimacy and that is the whole point. Fear of intimacy prevails in dysfunctional families and you’ve likely been punished for seeking it.
Honest emotional expression is shamed in these families and that’s one reason your relationships don’t work today.
To you, surviving in a relationship means shutting down your emotions or expressing them in a dysregulated fashion. This only serves to sabotage relationships of all kinds.
But it’s still not evidence that you’re your own worst enemy. It’s just you using a coping skill that may have worked in childhood (especially the shutting down part). But now it has become maladaptive because it’s preventing you from having the love you crave.
What can you do?
So, how can you stop this painful self-sabotage in all areas of your life? Now that you know you’re on your own side, how can you leverage that to get better results?
- Educate yourself about the connection between what happened to you in childhood and your negative adult outcomes. Resources like The Body Keeps the Score, Complex PTSD, the ACE study, and my book It’s Not Your Fault are a good place to start.
- Recognize that the part of you that appears to be ruining your life is only trying to help. Instead of criticizing this part and pushing it away, thank it. Express gratitude to this part for all the hard work it’s done to protect you over the years. But you are an adult now and it’s time for you to take care of yourself.
- Receive support while you do this inner work with someone who can guide you through it. You might have trouble letting go of the part that wants to keep you safe and it might not trust you to navigate life without it. Promise that you won’t discard it but simply find something else for it to do. One that’s more appropriate to the age you were when this part started to protect you.
Laura K. Connell is a trauma-informed author & coach who helps you recover from the devastating impact of narcissistic and family scapegoat abuse. Take the Dysfunctional Family Roles quiz here: https://www.laurakconnell.com/dysfunctional-family-roles-quiz
