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You're sabotaging your own love life.
By Nancy Carbone — Written on May 01, 2019
If you want to know how to have healthy relationships and find true love, you need some relationship advice for how to stop self-sabotaging.
You may feel like life is hopeless and not going the way you want, you may be wondering how to get yourself to where you want to be.
If you have a habit of finding fault or looking for things that go wrong, you're holding yourself back by self-sabotaging your love life.
In this case, your inner critic has taken over, turning you into a self-saboteur by sabotaging and destroying any chances you have of success in finding happiness or having healthy relationships.
You can trip yourself up when you don’t feel deserving of the good things in life.
Everyone is a critic. If you’ve internalized that you’re not good enough, then this can cause you to see the worst in everything that happens to you, when your internal saboteur takes over.
When you were constantly asked "what’s wrong with you?" when you were a child, it becomes the inner voice of self-critic within.
You end up believing that there is something wrong with you.
The only way to protect yourself from criticism is to find a way to escape these feelings...or act upon them by self-sabotage.
Here are the 6 ways you're self-sabotaging your relationships and happiness, and ruining your chances for finding true love.
1. You give up on yourself
When you don’t believe in yourself, you can do everything to avoid failure, including giving up or putting things off because you don’t feel that good things will happen to you in life.
You let your internal saboteur take over the way you see things, letting it control you and sabotage you.
2. You can’t see the bigger picture
You end up seeing the glass as half empty and distort the way you see things as always being negative.
You see things as being a catastrophic disaster, rather than a simple bump in the road.
You can’t take a compliment or feel uncomfortable with praise, thinking it’s untrue.
This is because you don’t see your real self and overlook the good aspects of yourself.
3. You’re self-depreciative
When you make mistakes you give up or beat yourself up, instead of picking yourself up, learning from the mistake and continuing on the journey.
4. You let your fears and anxieties destroy the things that matter to you the most
You end up seeing only the negative in your life. You think your boss doesn’t like you, you expect to lose your job, or you believe your partner is going to leave you.
When you expect the worst to happen, you act-out your fears by not turning up to work or putting off your goals.
You accuse your partner of things to destroy the relationship before they leave you.
You do things to destroy yourself with drugs and alcohol to escape the negative feelings.
You can be jealous for no reason, because you think you’re not worth it, letting your insecurities kill your relationships.
You may attack those you love to release these feelings, pushing relationships away and hurting those you love the most.
You can't take back angry messages or something you said in the heat of the moment.
5. You draw negative conclusions
You jump to negative conclusions and make your mind up before examining the evidence or being open to learning alternative ways of seeing things.
6. You externalize your feelings and blame others for them, being critical of others
Because of how you see yourself, you misread situations and think others have bad intentions towards you.
You think that your partner doesn’t care about you or doesn’t love you, assuming that they will leave you to find better, so you set out to prove this, pushing your partner away.
You are hard on yourself and imagine everyone is criticizing you or having a go at you, so you react defensively.
You blame or accuse others of things that you’ve concocted in your mind.
Your feelings drive loved ones away, seeing only the negative in them and complaining or being critical toward them.
You think to yourself that they forgot to buy the milk because they’re inconsiderate, or they don’t care about you because they forgot to call you back.
You see your wife as attacking you, instead of offering you constructive feedback.
You may become defensive, accusatory, or attacking.
You do this to protect yourself from the feeling unwanted, wrongly accusing others of not wanting you or rejecting you.
All of a sudden your partner feels pushed away and withdraws from you because they do not feel loved or accepted.
You have blocked yourself off from receiving love from your partner, due to your internal saboteur which sabotages love.
A love saboteur is someone who destroys their chances of receiving and giving love by protecting themselves from getting hurt.
You can end up acting-out in destructive ways to alleviate these feeling and repeat the pattern of rejection and feeling alone by doing so.
The real antidote to overcoming the self-saboteur behavior requires accepting the feeling within yourself by recognizing them and understanding how they get in the way of seeing yourself and others.
This allows you to transform the pain, fostering insight and self-awareness.
When you can learn to love yourself and have self-compassion, you can override the self-saboteur and find fulfillment within yourself.
Once you recognize the internal saboteur you can be aware of it, notice your triggers and become more open and curious about considering other ways of seeing things, rather than forming fixed conclusions.
When you overcome your internal saboteur, you can have more control over yourself instead of resorting to self-sabotage.
Nancy Carbone has a M.Soc Sc (Couns) and is a psychodynamic psychotherapist who addresses the underlying feelings that underpin self-sabotaging behaviors. If you want to overcome the ways of self-sabotage contact Nancy for an appointment on her website.
This article was originally published at Counselling Service Melbourne. Reprinted with permission from the author.