Every self help book has been lying to you about self sabotage.
It's not a willpower problem.
It's not a discipline problem.
It's actually the most loyal thing
you've ever done for yourself.
But
you've been doing it for the wrong person
since you were three years old. I know that's a bit confusing,
let me walk you through it. So you know the moment I'm talking about,
the promotion
is six weeks in and you just all of a sudden start showing up late.
The relationship is finally healthy and you pick the fight you swore you would never pick again.
The body feels good for the first time in years and what do you do? You reach for the bottle, you buy the bag of chips,
you grab the food, the phone,
the person that you already know is wrong for you, and you watch yourself do it. You hear the voice in your head saying, you shouldn't send this text and don't skip this workout and don't blow all this up. And then you do it anyway.
Well, take a slow breath in for me and notice your shoulders for a second.
Notice your jaw.
Notice the place you've been holding onto this for a long time. Scan your body.
You're not crazy and you're not broken.
You're just running an emotional program that was installed inside of you before you ever had language
and no one has ever named it for you correctly.
So I'm going to share with you what's really happening.
You see, as a child, you had absolutely no power. You couldn't argue with your parents. You couldn't control the emotional climate of your house. You couldn't decide whether love showed up that day or it got withheld.
And that created an emotional
chemical
imprint in you. That powerlessness
got recorded
into your nervous system
as a defining
emotional blueprint reality.
And your brain
became chemically
addicted
to the feeling
of not liking yourself.
Now you can't stop this process, it happens to all of us. So there's nothing bad or defective about you. This is how the brain and body works when it comes to negative emotions.
So now you're an adult and for the first time in your life,
you get to choose,
but your brain only asks one question
it knows how to ask.
And that question is, what's the fastest way to get my power back?
Well, the answer to that, it's been giving you the same answer for decades and it's devastating.
It's going to choose the things that don't work.
And the reason it does it is because at least this time
you chose it.
Whether it's the bad partner, the dead end job, the binge, the blowup,
none of these things happen randomly.
The reason it happens is it's the only form of agency
a formerly
powerless child
ever found
and it gets repeated by an adult body that never got the emotional blueprint software update
that the threat is over.
And so your brain and body is naturally
chemically designed
to repeat its earliest emotional
experiences,
like
just on autoplay.
It just runs the program unless you update the program.
And because
none of us have been taught this, we're all, if you're self sabotaging,
you're just running that original emotional blueprint program.
And so your brain and body are stuck in what I call the worst day cycle,
which is a pattern of four things. First, the emotional trauma,
then fear, then shame, then denial.
Now the trauma got installed,
installed
the alarm system of,
I can't
make my own decisions.
I can't stand up for myself.
Well, that installed the fear of being hypervigilant
and giving yourself away
and becoming powerless.
Well, that powerlessness
creates the shame that tells you that you're defective for feeling this way.
And then the denial whispers, it was just bad luck and you'll do better next time.
And that it's
not actually my past that's running my present.
And this is where the second mechanism kicks in.
This is a tough one for people to hear, but nobody on this planet has ever been afraid to fail.
Think of it.
And I want to say it again, because it's hard for people to grasp, but it's a lie and a delusion that people are afraid of failure.
And the proof of that is in the mirror every time
you choose not to do the thing
you know you need and want to do.
And when you don't do it, whether it's placing the phone calls, showing up to work on time, going to the gym, whatever,
you know you want to do it, but you choose not to.
Do you see in those moments,
you're choosing failure.
You're not afraid of it.
You're perfectly comfortable with it.
So because
we choose failure,
do you see what we're actually all afraid of?
Success.
Because if I do it, I'll get what I want, I'll achieve it.
But because the brain and body can't tell the difference between fear and excitement,
like there is no chemical signature difference.
That's why a lot of people look at athletes or politicians or successful people and they get to the top and they blow their lives up, they get the excitement,
but it triggers
the exact same chemical
signature
of childhood, it's identical.
And so when success gets close enough to touch,
your nervous system just reads that surge as deep danger,
and it pulls the emergency brake. It just pulls
the worst day cycle in the original emotional blueprint
that you learned, you can't have your needs and wants, you can't speak your truth, you can't live your life, you're powerless,
And it runs that blueprint.
And so people like Besser Vandelkoch and
the repetition compulsion research,
you know, they've been pointing at this for forty years,
but they didn't quite, they didn't complete the process of how
repetition compulsion works. And that's what my worst day cycle does, is it takes it to the next
layer of what's going on and why you're stuck in this.
But unfortunately,
the culture has turned that into a slogan instead of a doorway
out of it.
Now, here's the part that
many people just won't tell you.
Self sabotage
is the collision
between your authentic self and your shame based survival persona that you developed in those original traumatic moments.
And the survival persona panics
for two reasons. And this is why
overcoming your self sabotage,
even as I'm telling you this,
and
you start to get the intellectual truth, there's a deeper
emotional
process going on that makes
overcoming your self sabotage
very difficult for most people.
The first reason is if you actually chose
to pursue success and live in your authentic self,
do you see what happens?
That survival persona you developed as a child to get whatever connection you could with your parents,
it has nothing.
It loses the connection to mom and dad. It's gone. That's the way it feels
is that if I go do this, wait a minute,
I use this so I could fit into the family system. If it's gone, then I'm not in the family system anymore.
Well, that's just half of it. The second piece is if you actually succeed,
do you see what that also means?
It means the survival persona that you developed
was wrong
all along.
And who on earth, whether they're 20, 40, 60, 80,
no matter how long they've been on this planet, they lived their entire life as this survival persona.
And who wants to let that go?
And they've never, and they don't want to admit, Oh my God, never once have I lived as myself.
Well,
that original trauma felt bad and how you couldn't, how you felt so powerless. Well, who wants to admit that? That admission feels like you're dying or that you're a fraud or a failure or dumb or stupid. It's just a huge shame hit.
And so that survival persona does its job. It pushes down those feelings.
It buries
success
to keep you alive in the only identity it's ever known, which is to self sabotage and run the worst day cycle.
So the goal for you is you have to see this,
because now that you see this truth, you can't unsee it.
And so one of my clients is a perfect example of this process.
She started doing better. She started creating real connection with her husband,
real work success,
real peace in her body.
And then like cockwork,
she just destroyed it.
Now she didn't do it on purpose, and you're not doing this on purpose.
It's how the brain and body works.
But because of how the brain and body works in these two deeper underlying processes of, wait a minute, if I claim my authentic self, claim my success,
that means I lose touch,
I let go of the survival persona, which I used to get connection with my family, that's gone, but it also means
I've never lived it myself.
Well,
that just feels too real.
So
she'd have to grieve all of that,
and she just didn't have it. Well, that's not weakness on her part,
that's actually loyalty
to the child
who was brilliant and built that survival persona to keep her safe.
Now this takes time and this takes a lot of emotional work to overcome. We have to remap and rewire that emotional blueprint.
And we do that with two of my processes. The first one is
the
antidote to the worst day cycle. It's what I call my authentic self cycle.
And this consists of truth, responsibility,
healing, and forgiveness.
When we get into truth, we realize I'm not to blame.
And
I'm also the architect of my own self sabotage.
So I'm not to blame that my brain and body were too underdeveloped,
and it developed this emotional chemical addiction to run this self sabotage pattern to fit into the family system. That's not my fault.
That
was a brilliant strategy that worked.
Unfortunately,
I'm still running that program. And so therefore I am now an adult and I am the architect of my self sabotage.
They're no longer doing it to me,
but because society never told me this is what happens, I'm still running that program. And so we have to get into truth and
move into step two, take responsibility.
This is where now that we're an adult, we choose
to stop running that pattern
that the child in us once needed.
And we take responsibility
by doing the healing work, which is grieving
the decades that this has cost us.
And the original wound of powerlessness that we felt in childhood, we have to remap and rewire that original emotional wound that created the survival persona.
And once we do that, that moves us into forgiveness, where we can release that brilliant little child inside of us who picked pain because pain was the only place that power lived.
And we can learn to forgive our parents
because no one's ever taught this. Are
parents who choose to hurt their children actively, but that's rare. Most are doing it just because they're uneducated.
We don't teach about these things. So it wasn't their intent.
It was,
I just got a picture of Bob Ross, you know, if you know the painter Bob Ross,
you know, you talk about happy little accidents.
That's a lot of what parenting is. A lot of
happy little accidents,
but they sure didn't feel happy to that child.
So the goal for you
to do this healing process
is to then run my emotional authenticity method. And the first step of that is to down regulate yourself
somatically.
We have to
start changing the emotional chemical addiction
and
get into the space between cognition
and emotion,
what's called metacognition.
And we do that by spending
fifteen to thirty seconds,
just focusing on what you can hear in your, you know, whatever's in the surrounding area,
because our brain literally can't think and listen at the same time,
all right?
And that's the gate that we need to open that starts to interrupt
this worst day cycle loop.
From there, we can now get into thinking
and feeling,
and we can ask ourselves,
what exactly am I feeling right now? And we do this with real granularity and specificity,
not just that I feel bad or anxious,
but get specific. What is the deeper root feeling you're experiencing?
Once you can name that, you move to step three and ask yourself, where in my body do I feel it? Because we store emotional
pain and emotional moments in our body.
The body holds the memory
of the original wound, not our brain, but the body.
And so now we're reconnecting to our original
selves
and grounding ourselves somatically.
And then we can move into step four, which is what's my earliest memory of having this emotional thought,
which comes from the feeling in my body.
And you're going to see
this feeling is much older than this video. You're not, when you self sabotage, you're not feeling something in the moment,
you're replaying the original wound from childhood.
And that's where your survival persona and emotional blueprint
was built. And that's what we have to get to so we can remap and rewire it.
And we start that process
with step five.
And we ask, who would I be if I never had this emotional thought or emotional feeling in my body ever again? What if it weren't even possible
on this face of this earth to ever think or feel this again, it was completely
wiped off the face of the earth and wasn't possible, what would be left over?
Well, do you see when you're free of that guilt, that shame, that fear, that powerlessness,
what's left is
light
and
confidence and safety
and
empowered,
not powerless.
And you know exactly what you would think, feel, do and believe about,
you know, all of these different situations. It just comes naturally, you can see it and there's no fear of it. There's nothing cluttering the way. It just seems easy and self evident.
Well, that's when you move into step six of the emotional authenticity
method,
feelization.
This is where you sit
in this new awareness because what you just discovered
in step five is your authentic self. This is who you were before
their pain got placed into you.
And so
what that lets you know is you never lose touch with your authentic self. All you have to do is run this process
and with whatever feeling you experience in your life, and you can always reclaim your authentic self. And from there, you know, like I said, you know exactly what you would think, feel, say, believe, do. So you feel that and pull up the situation and go, well, from this place,
I would do this. I would say this. I would think this. I would feel this. And you, this is where we're remapping and rewiring that original emotional blueprint. So when you self sabotage, you're playing the worst day cycle, the original emotional wounding moment,
and projecting it into this moment, you're stuck in the worst day cycle of trauma, fear, shame, and denial. You run the six step process. Now from here, I'd go, oh, I wouldn't do any of that. That doesn't even feel right. Doesn't make sense to me. From here, I would just think, feel, say, believe, do this.
And you sit in that feeling as much as possible throughout the day. Like I tell my clients, run this six step process once an hour.
You'll see if you do that for one day, your life is going to change immediately.
You're going to be in a completely different place.
And I know that's scary,
because do you remember what I said earlier?
Fear and excitement have the exact same emotional chemical
response in our brain and body.
But now you know that,
and if you run that
process,
you'll be able to bypass
that confusion,
all right? But by using the emotional authenticity method,
you're creating a new
emotional chemical addiction
to replace the old one.
And from this place, you can look at how you would respond to pursuing the thing you've always wanted to accomplish from this feeling.
That's the emotional blueprint rewire.
And so
you start going through your life, your file cabinet of all the ways you've self sabotaged.
And you just take one action
towards
the thing
that the survival persona is trying to talk you out of. And the instant you take that step,
the heaviness lifts,
the excitement walks in,
because that was never your gut. That was your wound. Like, to be honest with you, I had to do that today to shoot this video.
My feeling was I do not want to do this at all.
The last thing I want to do, and I realized
I'm just running.
I'm feeling
powerless this morning, just woke up that way.
And so when I get that way,
I just want to shut down.
And I realized
what was happening, and I know from this process, all I had to do
was take one step
towards my authentic self.
And that step was getting up and turning
towards taking a shower.
That's it.
The old emotional blueprint feeling started to drop. The authentic self feeling started to come up. All of a sudden, the weight and
negativity and lack of desire to shoot the video, everything started to switch because I
reconnected to my authentic self and realized, you know what? I'm going to feel so much better once I get this done.
I'm not going to replay that shame loop
that happens when I sabotage myself.
And so that's how you replace the wound,
right?
And so this
explains,
this process explains why
the limiting belief framework or every inner critic worksheet or every mindset reset has fallen apart on you. They were trying to argue with that survival persona shame voice. Well, you can't argue with a child out of a wound
that's still stuck in their wound.
Instead, you have to learn how to feel it, trace it, and then remap and rewire it. Now,
before I go, I just want to say, you know, when I bring this stuff up,
it's tough for people.
They feel like
I'm blaming them or I'm blaming their parents, and that's just not the truth.
Neither one of you are to blame. You're both
doing the best you could with what you knew at the time,
and neither of you are broken.
This is just information
we weren't given.
But now that you have this new information,
you have a choice.
For the first time, have a choice. You can choose to run the old blueprint and stay powerless,
or you can choose to run this new process to create a new blueprint. It's up to you.
What do you want?
You get to stay, but you've never had that choice before. As a child or going through school, no one ever taught you this process.
And so I want you to literally think about it. You're a newborn today.
You didn't know any of this, therefore that's why you're not to blame. Blame requires a conscious choice to do something
that
you know is wrong.
Well, you didn't know this is the way, you didn't know this is how the brain and body works, this is how self sabotage works, and this is the process to get out of it, so you're not to blame,
okay?
So just remember,
you were just programmed, but programs can be rewritten.
So I hope this helped you, and I'll see you in the next video.