My first introduction to self-sabotage came when an anesthesiologist/hypnotherapist gave a presentation at the Leicester Royal Infirmary (U.K.) where I worked in the early 80s. He shared a story about a woman who had experienced a pain in her arm for a very long time—more than a decade if I remember correctly. She had been to see many specialists, all to no avail. When asked under hypnosis to go back to the source of the problem, the patient remembered a traumatic event. This was an emotional event, not a physical event, and involved being told something that she found hurtful. Once out of hypnosis, the patient did not understand the relevance of this particular memory to the pain in her arm, and went home not expecting to feel any differently. A few days later she phoned the hypnotherapist and expressed her amazement that the pain had gone! Why would an emotional event cause a totally unrelated physical pain?
Subconscious Strategy
Over the past 25 plus years, I have encountered a number of stories that are just as strange. In Eldon’s book, Subliminal Learning (currently out of print but we are hoping to bring this back soon), he tells a story of a young man who was bedridden. Eldon collected a lot of history on this young man and his affliction and came up with the following theory. The boy had enjoyed being the baby of the family and all the attention that brought him, when he was ousted from his prime position by the birth of a younger sister. Not long after, the boy became sick and needed a tracheotomy, but during the process, he regained his position of being the most important child in the family. Some time afterwards, the boy became sick again and this time his condition just continued to degenerate until, by the time he was in his mid-teens, he was almost totally confined to his bed. His father had taken him to see lots of specialists but no one was able to find out the cause of the problem. Based on the history, Eldon theorized that the illness was a subconscious strategy to regain importance in the family hierarchy and created a custom program to address this. The boy’s parents made sure the custom InnerTalk program was played for the boy on an almost 24/7 basis. After just a short time, the boy created a medical crisis by turning up his oxygen, which led to the need for an emergency tracheotomy. However, after this event, the boy’s recovery was so remarkable that just a few months later he was back to being a normal teenager, including passing his driving test and chasing girls! Eldon believes that the second tracheotomy was a true regression that led to the boy’s healing.
Same Symptoms Different Issues
But these are not just anomalous events. Self-sabotage is something that we will all experience at some time or another, and I have my own story about this. I do not generally suffer from seasonal allergies but one year I found myself waking up each morning feeling sneezy and snuffly. I therefore started to play the InnerTalk program, Freedom from Allergies in the mornings, and within 10 minutes I could breath better, and within about 20 minutes the allergy seemed to have gone. This went on for a couple of weeks until one morning I woke up feeling clear and totally free of the allergy.
The following year I had a similar experience but this time the program did not work for me! Just as I advise everyone else, I started looking around the issue looking for other causes. Of course I tried the Accelerated Healing program, which I have used to get rid of colds, flues and even rheumatoid arthritis, but while it helped, it did not give me the ‘cure’ I was looking for. I tried Soaring Self-Esteem and Freedom from Fears with similar kinds of results. The sneezing and stuffed up feeling was having a huge impact on my life—it’s really hard to be romantic and cuddly with your partner when you have to get up every 5 minutes to blow your nose! This went on for about 6 months when I decided to play End Self-Destructive Patterns all night long while I slept. I had the most interesting dream! In this dream, I was feeding myself something that was causing the allergy—I was kind of poisoning myself! It is not unusual for me to get answers to problems in my dreams when I play the appropriate InnerTalk program, and it did not take me long to figure out what the dream meant. I was in a catch-22 kind of situation and, in the absence of a resolution to the issue, I subconsciously decided to punish myself. However, once I saw the situation in the cold light of day, it lost its power. I had been suffering with this supposed allergy for about 6 months and it disappeared immediately as soon as I realized the problem. You see, our subconscious can do all of these things and we are consciously unaware of it. As Carl Jung notably remarked, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”The
Roots of Self-Sabotage
From my experience, both personal and from all the people I have spoken with over the decades I have been assisting with customer service at Progressive Awareness (the parent company of InnerTalk), Self-Sabotage always has its roots in a subconscious desire to protect you from being hurt again. Oftentimes it can feel more like a punishment but when you look closely at the situation, you will find that the ‘problem’ prevented you from entering a situation where you could be hurt again. Fear of public speaking can keep a person from performing his best so he is skipped over for the promotion that would mean he has to do more public speaking. A person can have a weight issue just so they can avoid dating and having another failed relationship. A comment from a teacher saying that someone will never be good at math can create the self-fulfilling prophecy, for why should a person try at math if they are going to fail anyway?
If there is any area of self-improvement that seems to defy your every attempt to overcome, I would suggest that you look at self-sabotage. If you find yourself repeatedly in situations that do not support your highest best, I would suggest that you look at self-sabotage. In all of these situations, I can guarantee that you will find feelings of being unworthy, angry, inadequate and undeserving. This is why we created the Eliminating Self-Sabotage album, and why I believe that this is something everyone should have in their self-improvement arsenal. Click here to get your copy today. Enjoy!
Wishing you Love, Light, and Laughter, always!