Do you sabotage yourself in order to avoid failure?

Post Reply New Topic

It is mostly in relationships with other people. Either platonic or romance.

I think people may do this and not realize it.

Do you believe that you do this?

I would say sabotaging your relationships ensures failure, it doesn't avoid it.

Typically, people do that when they fear what might happen if the relationship works well.

I think it's more that I never really quite believe that the future is going to come.

It is called pre-empting failure, but call it what you like. it is all about not having to wait for an unknown results, dealing with uncertainty, which you think is likely to result in failure. So you ensure you get the predicable result you want.

I'm divided as to whether it is unhealthy it really depends (you could view it as a sort of survival mechanism in time of stress). Realistically most relationships will end at some point. What is perhaps not healthy is that you see this as a bad thing when it really isn't.

I can definitely relate to the fear of rejection thing. My view is you have to give people a decent chance, but also balance that with not getting taken advantage of.

You do need to move on from relationships to get over this. Pre-empting failure isn't necessarily about moving on. The rejection and pasts rejections is still in the back of you mind. Resilient people, probably get rejected more they just don't let it bother them as much, to which they owe their success.

I can talk from experience on platonic relationships. Something that managed to learn at a late age. Fist you need to get used that feeling of not knowing. It may take moths before you know they are you friends, but that is totally normal. You may mistakenly think that friendship just happens, but in reality it I very gradual. I have a couple of good friends but in order to get them I learn the hard way you can't put all you eggs in one basket, you heed to hedge your bets so to speak.

My son and I both have failure sensitivities. If we don't see our selves succeeding at something, we shut down and don't even try. The more pressure there is, the more we self sabotage. It's a fear of failure and we're both working on it.

I think I'm that way too. This book called The Clutter Diet says not to make goals of perfection and to go with "good enough" otherwise we tend to fall into the all or nothing and not attempt to start something because of that, or give up for the same reason.

I've been known to do this, on occasion. Although I more consider it knowing when to walk away. I react very, very badly to failure, even for things which shouldn't matter. It's better for me, rather than to pour everything I've got into something doomed to failure, to just walk away. Although I'm sure sometimes I genuinely do sabotage myself from something that could have worked out. If the risk is too high, I'll often just walk away rather than risk the mess that results from failure.

I once sabotaged a friendship with a guy because he said that he liked me in a romantic way. I thought that he was going to want sex and I didn't want to.

Sabotaging myself = guaranteed failure. Failing to avoid failure does not make sense. I prefer to succeed to avoid failure; it's far more effective.

I avoid possible friendships and talking to people, and avoid relationships in general because I would rather people think me rude than end up in a relationship or friendship that I have to maintain and upkeep and cause myself stress from worrying about it. They always end anyway ( not on my terms).

Like, what? I really needed to think about this for a moment.

You mean that people quit a friendship to avoid it failing because they're afraid or something that it might fail?

No, that literally never occurred me. 'Not trying' doesn't have a place in my life.

No, I don't believe I sabotage my own stuff to avoid faliure - though of course if it's unconscious, I wouldn't know I was doing it.

I'm certainly aware that I avoid trying a lot of things that I could probably succeed in, and part of the reason may be that if I don't try, I can't fail. I hate it when I get pushed into a task that I don't feel able to do well, and of course that happens all the time in the workplace. Sometimes with my own stuff I'll decide to go against the grain and just take pot luck on something, and that can be quite exciting. All to do with taking reasonable risks instead of setting mediocre targets that I can't fail to achieve.

Definitely failure scares me. Even a 99% success in something leaves me feeling bad about the 1% I failed to achieve, and I can't understand people who label half-baked results as "good." Aspie perfectionism, no doubt.

Somewhat related to this sabotage issue - Erice Berne used to say that people played "games" in order to avoid intimacy (he didn't mean intimacy as in sexual encounters, he meant real closeness with people, which he thought many of us were unconsciously terrified of, and so would always scupper the chances of intimacy whenever we felt it starting to happen. I think Susie Orbach has said the same thing, that people are deepdown scared of real intimacy. Here are a few of Eric's "games" - though there's nothing there about the reasons for them:

http://www.paulstips.com/brainbox/pt/ho ... eople-play

NB I don't recommend any of the other stuff they're peddling - to me the whole place reeks of insincerity, guesswork and oversimplification, but then I'm quite a cynical guy. Let's not forget that although Eric looks very knowledgeable about loving relationships in his books, his own love life was pretty messy and tragic. Food for thought, though, at least.

I sabotage myself HOWEVER my friends continue to be m friends because they know I tend to run because I am scared of getting closer to people I guess if yor bestest of friends who know you really well see that you try to sabotage they react but not in a bad way with relationships YES I have sabotaged one I knew it was going to fail and I wanted it to end so my friend ended up sleeping with her I knew it was going to happen and I ended it because thats what I foresaw

People are afraid of being intimate with themselves let alone OTHER people. If I admit I'm not the Mask I Wear, what if other people realize it! Oh no the house of cards is falling down! Well no, it really isn't, everybody already realizes you are not the Mask. The question is whether or not your Mask is Sincere. You don't need to reveal everything about yourself to everybody, you don't even know everything about your own self. What you do choose to reveal should always come from a place of honesty and sincerity inside of you. In order to be honest and sincere about your Self with others, you have to be honest and sincere about Self with Self. This can be Painful. Admitting to myself I was as much an abuser as I was abused was not pleasant. It was necessary to my growth and ability to continue being. I continue to be a less abusive person every day with every breath because I have a sincere desire to be so.

You are not the clothes you wear, you are not the car you drive, you are not the food you eat, you are not the part of you that you share with other people. You are a being that is. That is all you will ever be and you will only be it until you are no longer. Success and failure are artificial constructs. They only have meaning within the subjective containment of task completion. Life is not about doing the absolute best that could possibly be done, it is about being a sincere individual who puts in a motivated effort and sets reasonable goals that utilize ones abilities in a maximized fashion in pursuit of being a better individual tomorrow.

If you can only be 99% successful the failure is not in not being able to do that last 1%, it is in setting a goal you weren't able to accomplish in the end. Setting goals too high is not so different from setting goals too low. You want to set them just high enough to challenge yourself, but it should be an achievable challenge. You will grow stronger and be prepared for a greater challenge tomorrow. Accepting that you did good enough is essential.

There will always be another 1%. You start the project at one ability level and by the time you are nearing completion of a challenging project, you have a greater ability. You look back at the project with your new greater ability and say hey, I could now do this entire thing better. You scrap it and start over with a new more challenging plan you are now prepared for. You near the completion and working on this new challenge has again increased your ability, why you could do this EVEN BETTER! The cycle will go on until you burn out. You have to just accept the standards you set for yourself, meet them and move on.

A project can be a task at work, going on a date, meeting somebody new, shopping for a new water heater, picking out a couple books to read at the library, anything.

And destroying or abandoning things rather than struggling to attain mediocrity is another element to it....the underlying reason why I abandoned fine art. All or nothing thinking I suppose, however I am getting that way with science sometimes.