Self-Sabotage: Why You Do What You Shouldn’t, and How to Stop
01:15:12 Share

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Have you ever had that experience? You know, that feeling where you are almost watching yourself make a bad decision. You've got something important coming up. There's that deadline looming. But for some reason, you are deep in a YouTube rabbit hole about, I don't know, beekeeping. Or maybe you have that moment where you catch yourself. Again, third-person perspective.

almost like saying something incredibly stupid to another person. And there's this part of you that's going, "Oh no, please stop." But you can't stop. It's already happening. This is self-sabotage, and it's a great example of the kinds of internal conflicts that we talk about on the show all

all the time. It's a topic that's come up a lot as a piece of other episodes, but I don't think we've ever done a focused episode on it. So that's what we're doing today. We're going to be talking about what self-sabotage is, why it's not as irrational as you might think, and how we can do it, hopefully, a little bit less often. So to help us do that, I'm joined by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist, he's a best-selling author, and he's also, hey, you know, my dad. So dad, how are you doing today?

Really good. I don't know. Every single time I've done... How many have we done of these? 500? Together, probably like 300. Total. Yeah, or together. Oh, over the whole course catalog, I think we're over 400 episodes. Yeah, about 100 of them are guest interviews. Yeah. You would think it would become stale or old or something. No, I just noticed every single time I do this with you, I'm just delighted and happy to see you and

I think it's you, actually. You're the common feature. Oh, thanks. Wow, you're just buttering me up to start this. I love this. And the feeling's totally mutual. I still love doing this with you, which I think is kind of a novel part of the experience of the show for people, like a father-son situation where they're legitimately happy to see each other most days, which I think is quite novel, just in family relationships in general. Maybe particularly in a working relationship that's run for six years at this point. So I still love doing it.

There's a beginner's mind to it. Truly, I think for both of us, each one is fresh and we sort of don't know. And I think somehow that is useful related to self-sabotage. And I'll think about that and probably work it in down the road a little later. Good transition there, dad. Good transition. Good podcasting from you. You're right. I mean, I've got a sheet in front of me with some stuff on it, but when we start, I never really know where we're going to go. So okay, before we get into it today, I want to give you guys a

quick reminder about Rick's online course focused on how to change your mind. It focuses on helping us learn how to break old scripts, get some distance around the thoughts that aren't helping us out so much, and act in a new way. So it's actually pretty relevant to what we're talking about today.

The six-week course starts on June 21st, and you can learn more about it at rickhansen.com slash changing and use coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25% off discount if you decide to join the course. So what's self-sabotage, particularly in the context of how we're talking about it during this episode?

Self-sabotage is when we act in a way that undermines the things that we've said that we want. So these are our conscious desires and our stated goals and best interests. So I say that I want thing A over here, and I might even feel like I want it inside of myself. That's like most of my personality is going, yeah, Forrest, you want that thing.

but I'm acting in a way that makes it harder for me to get that thing. Really common examples of this at a mild level may be procrastination. You're putting off those tasks that you know that you should do, including forms of procrastination that are maybe a little bit less obvious to people like perfectionism or over-preparing.

Then at the medium level, self-handicapping. This is actually a really common one. I've seen it a lot in the dance community where I have a lot of hobby engagement. That procrastination gets so intense that you never actually end up doing the thing, which makes it harder for you to do well. I barely studied for that test. I didn't practice. Oh, I stayed up so late the night before the big thing. And then maybe at the top level, you've got full-on self-destructive behavior.

So we're sabotaging a healthy relationship. We're abruptly quitting this job that is going pretty well for us without having much of an idea of what we're going to do. So those are some common examples of self-sabotage. Dad, big picture, why do you think we do this? Because everybody does this. There's not a person alive, I believe, who has not self-sabotaged. Yeah. Well, I think that this topic actually is a fantastic window

into the fundamental structure of the psyche and the deep, intimate experience of our own interior.

What's it like to be you? What's it like in there? And there are these currents that tug us and pull us in different directions. There's a term neural Darwinism. The voice, the subpersonality, the part, the impulse that is the most powerful sort of takes control of the overall executive process and leads us to do one thing or another. So this gets into our own sense of inner conflict,

of ambivalence, of layers of us, more adult layers want X, but that inner child really wants Y, maybe because that child did not get the Y when they were young. So this is kind of a framing for me. And inside that framing, I want to kind of call out one kind of self-sabotage is in which

let's say two or more parts of us in a very deliberate way, one of them thinks that it's in our best interest to go north, even though the rest of us is yelling south, south, south, right? But it is really thinking that that's in our best interest. And then how do we balance that? There's a different case that the word sabotage gets at. It's beyond just inner conflict.

in which there can be parts of us or forces inside us that are basically inimical to us. They just want to tear us down. They just want to punish us. Now, maybe at some level because they think that's good for our survival, but it can take really on a life of its own that's deeper than any functional purpose it serves. So it's getting in touch with

are there any parts of you that just want to destroy you or tear you down? And then a subset of that is that aspect in many of us, I think, that just wants to burn it all down and see what happens.

Maybe that's Freud's thanatos. The inner anarchist. Death instinct, I don't know. And then we apply that to ourselves. We just wreck things. Okay, so I'm done. I'm just kind of naming some of the territory. No, I think that that was a great overview. And I agree that I spend most of my time thinking about that first category.

I don't know if this is because I've got a little bit of a psychoanalytic tendency or if I'm focused on that middle 80% of the distribution or whatever it is, where most of my thinking has been about avoidance coping and psychological defenses and self-sabotage as basically a form of psychological defense or avoidance coping. But I think those other two categories are really interesting in part because they're very evocative.

They have this real feeling associated with like, wow, why would I have this aspect of myself that kind of, to use a loaded term, that kind of hates me a little bit or that really doesn't want

me to do well. Whoa, where'd that come from? How does that make sense psychologically for a person to have that aspect? And how did it kind of get into them in the first place? And so maybe we'll talk about that a little bit during this episode, Dad, as well, because you're just kind of bringing it in here and I think it's really alive. So to do the first category kind of first a little bit here, we're thinking more in terms of the stuff that really pushes your life forward.

The big domains, your work, your relationships, the stuff that's really fulfilling to you. If you remember the 90-10 episode, the different circles that people might have in their life. The bigger the domain, the bigger the emotional stakes associated with it, right? In a funny kind of way, it's actually hardest for us to do well at the stuff that we really care about because we've got the most wrapped up in the outcomes, right? We're so entangled on it.

And just because we want this thing that's good for us and would lead to us kind of in doing better in some general kind of sense, that doesn't necessarily mean that we approach it. But that feels kind of like a, God, what's the word that I'm looking for here? That feels like a contradiction in terms. Why wouldn't I want myself to do better? Well, let's think about that a little bit. First, when you do well, you raise the stakes for yourself.

In most jobs, the reward for good work is more work. Winning sets up this other kind of hard battle. You were talking about the inner anarchist there, Dad? Yeah. It's sort of a way to get off the ride. Yeah. Kind of a way for people. Just blow up the hamster wheel. Yeah, blow up the hamster wheel. I don't need to worry about what's going to happen tomorrow if I just get fired today. So there's this weird kind of internal logic to it. I think another huge piece of this for people is change avoidance.

You see people often self-sabotage around these really critical moments in life where there's an opportunity for something to be really different for them. They're achieving a level of success in their work, their relationship is kind of advancing to a particular stage, and so there's this depth and change that's happening along the way, and your brain doesn't really like that. To the brain, change is just exposure to new and more interesting forms of threat, right?

You've done so much work on the negativity bias and how we pursue survival over fulfillment and the big problems that that creates for people. So I think that that's a huge piece of it as well. I also want to make it a little bit of a distinction related to this example between self-sabotage that is fairly conscious and self-sabotage that is either

Mostly unconscious, if not entirely unconscious. Okay, yeah. Could you give examples of each? Yeah, exactly. And related to standing out and risking being hammered down in the Japanese proverb. Tall poppy syndrome. Yeah, yeah, totally. One example would be you need to produce some piece of work, and yet you keep finding yourself procrastinating around it. You keep putting it off.

And you have a kind of awareness of this procrastination. And you're aware of that and you start to wonder, why am I doing that? And what you start to become aware of is the so-called dreaded experience, which we talk about, which you don't want to risk, that once you push sand, you can't improve it any further. And oh my gosh, the dreaded experience of being criticized for what you left out or that missing comma that

or misspelled word. That's scary. And then another potential dreaded experience would be, well, what if they really like it? And then ask you to make a talk, give a public presentation about it. Oh, no. Or hold you up above your peers as someone really great and your peers are going to be envious of you and tear you down. I had a lot of fears of that growing up in school.

So whatever, those would be fairly explicit understandings of why I'm not doing it. And you can become more aware of what the whys are. Then there's this other example, which I've really experienced, where you're wanting to do something, but you just start getting really sleepy. It's like your mind, the fog starts rolling in. You're in the early stages of dissociation. And when you dissociate,

You are disassociating from the parts of you that notice you're dissociating. It's kind of global, right? And so that's a different kind of self-sabotage. It's very murky and kind of just sort of you feel like you don't know why, but trying to move forward is like walking uphill against a mud flow coming down. You just can't do it, and it's a lot easier to go to sleep.

Totally. No, and I think it's a really important distinction for people. Whenever we talk about

It's funny that I'm thinking of this. I had a conversation with somebody recently about OCD, and we just did an episode on it. And we were talking about these kinds of compulsions people have or different forms of intrusive thoughts. If you've never experienced an authentic compulsion or an intrusive thought or different kinds of hallucinations like auditory hallucinations or something like that, if you've never had an experience of it, it's extremely difficult to explain it to somebody.

Because it doesn't make any sense when you talk about it. It's like, well, of course you just knew that the voice was not a real voice, right? It's like, no, they do not know that it's not a real voice. It sounds like a real voice. It sounds like a person is talking to them. It is an extremely authentic experience and it's difficult in the moment of that to kind of get

what you can see from the outside. And I think that what you're describing has some similarities to that actually a little bit here, Dad, because it's hard to put your finger on until you've had an ability to sort of step out of it and you have this moment of recognition like, oh, this is the kind of process that I've been involved in. Oh, that fatigue was not just me being fatigued, it was a kind of defense against an experience or whatever else is going on. So yeah, I think it's a great example.

I want to keep rolling about some of the ways in which self-sabotage occurs, like how it's self-reinforcing, for example. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things about self-sabotage that is so tough is that it puts you in a position that just recreates its existence. You don't build the skills that you would have built by actually facing this challenge, doing this hard thing, taking the next step. And then you reinforce inside of yourself that this feared experience that you have actually isn't manageable to you.

You couldn't do it. You had to retreat. You had to self-sabotage around it. And so then this naturally kind of increases the stakes associated with it. When we put things off, when we defer them, they grow inside of our mind. We failed once, so the second time is going to be even bigger and scarier. And then over time, this just leads to more of all the stuff that you're avoiding, more anxiety, lower self-trust, more shame around it, all of that.

There's a piece of this that I'm really curious what your take on is here, dad, because it's such a you topic. I wonder about the existential part of this. If you are able to do stuff that moves your life forward, what that means is, guess what? You can keep on doing stuff that moves your life forward.

This means that you're kind of responsible for whether or not your life moves forward. And this can be a really terrifying realization for people, particularly when it's combined with an understanding that we don't actually have total control. So we're both responsible on the one hand and not totally in control on the other hand. So I wonder about a self-sabotaging aspect as something that kind of defers our realization in a way that it is kind of all about us at the end of the day.

So is this a kind of dreaded experience, existential accountability? Ooh, yeah. I mean, I think you could frame it that way. One of the great refuges for me from a very, very, very, very, very young age was this really deep sense that I was on my own and whatever life I had, I needed to make myself.

It's a little challenging for me to try to understand a fear of existential accountability because a little bit like you said earlier about people who don't have auditory hallucinations, it's hard to get how real that can be. For me, existential accountability is a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, I think that responsibility can be scary for people to really simplify it down. And the higher the stakes of the thing that you're responsible for, the scarier it gets. And it's hard to have higher stakes than the

this one wild and precious life, to quote the line. So I do think that can be activating for people, yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I acknowledge my own privilege due to multiple factors, including just the genetic lottery, being capable of fulfilling reasonable responsibilities, like you're a kid in second grade, right? Or I lived in a

a home environment in which you know i had to keep my room really tidy but i knew what that took and get my mom off my back and so i could do that you know people in other situations or with other backgrounds could not have the same sense of kind of comfort with hey it's it's sort of on me

That said, I wonder if this existential accountability topic also gets into something that's maybe less philosophical and subtle but important and real and more visceral, the fear of being big, the fear of being loud, the fear of taking up space. I've worked with a lot of clients, and they're usually women who were trained early on, don't be so big. You ask her too much.

You fill the space too much. Sure. Yeah. Right? And you can just feel like they would live in a very- Classic gender socialization. They would go in a fairly small, yeah. Totally. Suit of armor in life with maybe occasional explosions in which they got really big and then kind of horrified themselves and others afterward, which then kept training them in staying small.

So what do you think about this way of looking at it? Because if you are doing what you're saying, if you're doing stuff that advances your life and to realize that- You're getting bigger and bigger, kind of to your point. Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that could totally be a part of it. And there's a fear if it gets so big, I'll just plop.

Maybe there's an internal sense where there's a deep down uncertainty about your ability to perform at a certain kind of level. Maybe due to socialization factors like you're describing here, maybe just other stuff that's going on in your life, there's this fundamental question like, "Am I really good enough?" I've definitely had to deal with a certain amount of that and I'm still dealing with a certain amount of that vis-a-vis my work and writing. And there's kind of this question that runs in the background of like, "Is this any good actually?"

And that can definitely stop a person. It's stopped me at times from putting something out there or really taking a big crack around something. And that can become a form essentially of self-sabotage because

Like I was saying, the better you do, the bigger the stakes get, the bigger the stage gets. And so it's just kind of a bigger and bigger platform on which to eventually stub your toe. And what I think is really great about what you're setting up here, Dad, is that this way of thinking about it motivates the self-sabotage in a way that we can actually understand. Yeah. Yeah.

When we're just in the world of why am I doing this illogical thing that's screwing up my ability to do well on the test or performance or whatever it is, it's very difficult for us to wrap our minds about. But when we can create a model of it where this is the motivated behavior of an aspect of who we are, that actually kind of makes sense.

I get why that part is doing what it's doing. It's trying to keep me safe. It's trying to keep me alive. It cares more about my survival than about my fulfillment. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

Headspace is a meditation and mental wellness app used by over a hundred million people, and I'm one of them. When they reached out to sponsor the show, I thought that it was a perfect fit, because they've been helping people feel better for over a decade. Headspace offers guided meditations, calming exercises, breathing techniques, and science-backed practices that support mental clarity, emotional balance, and better sleep. Whether I've got 20 minutes or just a couple, there's always something in the app that fits for me.

I use it when I feel anxious, when I can't sleep, or when I just need some time to myself. They have these quick, on-the-go meditations that are short, grounded, and unsurprisingly effective because everything is taught by experienced meditation teachers. And honestly, it helps. I sleep a little better, feel more clear-headed, and notice I'm just a little bit more here.

Feel good and mean it when you say it. For a limited time, get Headspace free for 60 days. Go to headspace.com slash beingwell60. That's H-E-A-D-S-P-A-C-E dot com slash beingwell60 to unlock all of Headspace free for 60 days. Headspace.com slash beingwell60.

One of the most empowering things you can do is stop waiting for permission to launch the idea, start the side hustle, or build something that's truly yours. If you've got a product, a vision, or even just the gut feeling that there's something there, Shopify helps you bring it to life. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that makes it possible to build, launch, and grow your business on your terms.

Whether you're selling handmade ceramics, or coaching packages, or digital downloads, physical products, whatever it is, Shopify gives you the tools to build a beautiful storefront, reach customers, and manage the nuts and bolts of running a business. And Shopify's point-of-sale system brings together your in-store and online operations, whether you've got one location or a thousand. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient.

Now, back to the show.

So here we're talking about a lot. Basically, these are well-intended parts of us that are trying to accomplish some function. And the function often is organized around avoiding the risk of a dreaded experience. Okay, that's their trying to accomplish a function. And so what's really helpful is to bring mindfulness to this process.

and in particular, becoming aware of the function, you know, the payoff, in other words, that this part of us is seeking through, quote-unquote, sabotaging us, and then see if there's another better way to accomplish that function, including reducing risks of dreaded experiences, but in ways that preserve the broad forward movement of our life in love and work and other domains that we're really seeking.

Right? That's kind of a summary, in a way, of what we're talking about here. And one thing I think that is really in the service of that, that I've still been kind of mulling from the very start of this episode, had to do with my comment in the beginning about beginner's mind, don't know mind, looking freshly. When we're sabotaging ourselves, we're in a kind of trance. One version of that is what Tara Brach calls the trance of unworthiness.

Gurdjieff talked about people sleepwalking as they go through their life. It's kind of a trance, right? If there's any kind of dissociation in it, as I talked about earlier, that adds to the trance-likeness of it. And one of the great things that don't know mind does is that it's like a circuit breaker. It snaps us out of the dream, snaps us out of the trance because we're, aha, we're looking newly. And in that reset, we kind of look at it all and we realize,

actually, if I look newly with Don't Know Mind, would it really happen that they are actually going to cut my head off if I flub a little giving a talk? No, it's not true at all. People will smile knowingly, whatever, and I'll keep going, for example. It won't be such a terrible thing. If I perform well,

Is my boss going to keep raising the expectations to the point that I can never meet them and it's all going to be a collapse? Or is my partner, my romantic interest, are they going to keep raising expectations? No, they're actually going to like it and keep rolling.

big deal. So that looking newly, that reset which wakes us up out of the trance of self-sabotage then can create an opportunity for us to understand ourselves better and to make a better choice. Totally. And in all the examples that you're giving, which I really like here, these are all examples of seeing the world in a way that brings the perceived threat down. How bad is the bad outcome really?

And how likely is the bad outcome to happen? Because we can look at the motivations of this part a little bit. So we've got this aspect inside of this model that we're building that really believes that it's keeping us safe by stopping us from getting the thing that we say that we want, right? So why does it think that it needs to keep us safe? We can ask a really honest question about that. And so there are two levers that we have to help that part out.

The first lever is exactly what you're describing, Dad. We get a little better at perceiving threats out in the world. We go through a process of having more don't-know mind about it. We say, "Hey, the threat's probably not that big. It's not actually that likely to get me. If I mess up during the presentation, how bad will it be really? Everyone will forget within an hour. Who cares?" Okay, so that's one version of it. But there's another question for me, which is not about how you perceive the world. It's about how you perceive yourself.

What is the internal narrative that you have about who you are? Do you think of yourself as the kind of person who can deal with challenges, overcome obstacles, do hard things, take on different aspects of who you are? Do you feel flexible on the inside? Do you feel rigid on the inside? But that's a piece of it that I think is really interesting. How can we change our relationship with self-sabotage by changing our view of who we are?

This gets a theme for you that's common: identity. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, how can shifting the sense of identity be a way to manage some self-sabotage? Okay, so can I give you an example? Great. So there are people in my life that I know, I believe, would really benefit from getting out there and dating people on a path to... Oh, okay. Yeah, relationships, sure. Yep, ending up with a life partner.

which they want. And I look at them, I know these people, and I think, yeah, you'd be a great life partner. You should have a life partner. You want a life partner. I support that virtue. But they're doing some self-sabotage related to it. They're not doing those things. They should be doing those things, all of that. Yeah. That's exactly right. And let's say that it shows up as fears of rejection, really standard. Another version of that is

They're going to like me more than I like them and I'm going to hurt their feelings. And I hate hurting people's feelings. That's a dreaded experience for me. More sort of avoidance-oriented. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. And then based on that, I'll just let one more day go by before I put up my profile on this dating site. Okay. Classic avoidance. Okay. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. Okay, doctor.

How would? I'm about six years of school away from being a doctor, but no, I appreciate it. How would a person like this shift their identity?

as a way, maybe with a little don't know mind dropped in as a way to help themselves. Okay. I will do my best and then I will put myself up for commentary from my actual clinical psychologist father. My first question for this or going through a process, not necessarily a question for this person but just a question inside of myself, what's the actual fear of the part? So is the fear of the part

that no one will ever love them? Or is the fear of the part the actual feeling of intimacy itself because that exposes them to emotional threat?

Okay. Is it a kind of loss of sense of self or loss of identity by transitioning from being one individual independent person who gets to call all the shots and decide what they're doing every single day to the movement into a situation where there's somebody else who really cares about that? Is it a kind of an avoidance of control? So these are all examples of what somebody could be concerned about. So that's what I would start to investigate. Okay, what's kind of the fundamental fear that this person has? What's the actual dreaded experience?

The second thing that I would wonder about is what are the beliefs about the self that that dreaded experience is based on? So if I have a belief about myself that I can be close or I can be far and I get to regulate that distance, then being in a relationship is not so threatening because I know I can take a step back, I can take a step in, I'm flexible in that way. But if you have a view of yourself that, no, when I get into relationships, I only ever become enmeshed with my partners,

Wow, really hard to get into a relationship because that's a really high bar. That's a very scary thing. Do you want to expose yourself to that kind of a risk? So I would wonder about the beliefs that that avoidance is based on. Then from there, I would wonder, and this is the meat and potatoes part, I would wonder about what would help that person actually expand and create a more flexible sense of who they are.

I think that don't know mind is a huge piece of that, as you mentioned at the very top. Could they frame themselves as less of a fixed thing and more of a work in progress? How do they feel about saying something like, "Yeah, I was that way in the past, but I don't feel like I have to be that way in the future"?

including in a really intimate and soulful way where you could even do more of a voice dialogue sort of thing with this person or a kind of direct access parts work thing, maybe if they were working with an IFS therapist, where you're really trying to personify what the part is that has this belief about the person. And can you have a conversation with that part that's more about really communicating to it

you're heard, you're seen, I get where you're coming from. And also, hey, I'm growing, I'm changing. This is a part of life. Can we kind of feel the pain about that? It can even be kind of emotional. Even talking about it, there's a part of me where I'm like, oh, you start to feel some feelings around it. And can you just sort of lighten the hand, unclench the fist a little bit about it? So I think there's a lot from there, but that would be, I think, the first

stage of the process. How does that check out that? That was awesome. And for the audience here, I'm going to turn to the audience now. I just put Forrest on the spot right there. Live fire demonstration. Extremely good. Let's try this too, just for fun. I don't know, a way to kind of illustrate something. Let's do a little role play. So you are that person. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I am

And we might even imagine this, that I am a wise and nurturing part of you. Okay, great. Or I could be your wise and nurturing father. So you're doing it to yourself. Yeah, totally. But let's imagine it like that. Okay, good. So here's a question for you. It goes into sort of a reflection about identity that I think could resolve a lot of issues with self-sabotage, maybe. We'll see. Here we go. So in terms of your identity,

Are you a catch? I feel pretty good from a self-worth standpoint about myself. But inside of the context of this role play, I think a lot of people would have sort of a fundamental question about that. So I would bring that question at this role play. I would say, you know, I feel really good about some things. There are other things I honestly don't feel so great about. Are you working on the stuff you don't feel so great about? Oh, you know, I'm really thinking about it.

Yeah, I'm aware of it. I listen to some podcasts like yours occasionally. It helps out. But yeah, so I'm doing some stuff. Go to the gym. Yeah, every once in a while. Yeah. And then- Kind of lukewarm. So a possibility here, which we might take some time, of course, in the real world, would be to try to establish the identity of yourself as-

You know, not perfect, but you really have a lot going for you. Yeah. Are you a loving person? Are you fundamentally lovable? That's a big question. And I was modeling some of the comment. Yeah, but maybe you really are. So we're trying to nudge identity here. Yeah. You know, you may not be...

stunningly attractive, but you're plenty good enough in a lot of ways. So one movement of identity is to realize, okay, I have worth in my particularity. So now we're going into the ways that you're particular. Yeah, for at least some people out there, I would be someone that would be very appealing to them. Would be really interesting with them. Yeah, totally. I'm bringing a lot of oomph to the table here.

I have some bargaining power, as it were. Okay? So identity has a catch. We're just kind of working on that. All right. So you're trying to open up to that and help yourself believe it. Right? The voices of self-doubt will never get enough food. They will always be voraciously hungry. And that's a really important thing to understand inside ourselves. There are parts of ourselves that you can never prove you're worth to because their mission is to

leads you to doubt your worth for your own good, they think. So you can't propitiate them enough. There's no offering you can give those angry gods that will satisfy them in the belly of the beast. That's really important to appreciate. I think this is a great point, Dad. Yeah. On the road to just realizing you're good enough. You're freaking good enough to have a boyfriend or a

something friend. You're good enough. That's identity. So you're trying to help yourself move into that identity. Okay. So let's suppose that with fairy dust, you have now...

adopted that identity. Hey, I'm plenty good enough. I'm X years old. I'm out there in the market. I don't need to be, I don't know what, an Olympic gold medalist or Oscar movie star. In order to be worthy of having a relationship. Yeah, I'm a catch. Absolutely. I'm a catch. Okay, good. So now that's part of your identity. Now we're going to move away from particularity to universality, common humanity.

Can there be a simple understanding that in humanity, not everybody thinks that person X is a catch? In common humanity, it's normal for many people to be aware of a person and think various things about them, but not be particularly drawn to them in a romantic dating context. That's just part of common humanity. Not everyone is going to pick you.

So it's not personal because it's universality time here as your identity. There's an impersonality aspect of our identity.

So it doesn't mean anything about you. It's not a ding. It doesn't need to be a dreaded experience that someone doesn't swipe left or right or up, I don't know what, when they see your profile. If anything, they are clearing- You are pre-dating app, dad. I know. You were not on the market when these things came along. Right. Them not picking you does you a service because it clears the decks of prospects that are disqualified.

they are not qualified prospects for you in this frame of the impersonality of your identity in some sense, right? So it doesn't mean anything if they don't pick you. Flip the other way. In common humanity, we respect the rights of people to not be that into somebody. So when you pop up to the universality perspective, you realize as well, oh, if they are hurt

because I'm just not that into them, I can have compassion for that hurt, but it's part of universality. It's part of we are all in the soup here as common humanity, and it's not my fault. I'm not a bad person if I just don't like kissing somebody, you know? Or they're just, we're just not my cup of tea. It's okay. It's not a moral fault.

And you can get, so that you see what I'm kind of getting at here in terms of identity as an individual who's really a catch, but also identity as a member of a universal common humanity who doesn't need to feel bad if they're not into you or you're not that into them.

And you can imagine applying aspects of this to an issue that isn't relationships. Yeah, job performance. A job hunt is a perfect parallel. But even just performance in different kinds of arenas of life, not everyone's gonna like your work. That's right. For me, not everyone's gonna like my writing. It's the old line, "Write for your fans, not your critics." You just have to be willing to bring in that kind of an openness to not being everybody's cup of tea

while still retaining that inner sense of, hey, I'm a good person. And I think a piece of this that gets really complicated, Dad, are two things that are true at the same time. The first thing is what you were saying earlier about how there's a part of us that will probably never be satisfied. It'll just never be satisfied. It'll never be good enough for that inner critic. So it's not so much about satisfying the inner critic,

It's about either figuring out what the inner critic's real problem is fundamentally and trying to deal with that real problem, or building up enough other stuff that it keeps you kind of okay and keeps your self-esteem afloat even in the face of that inner critic. So that's totally true. The other thing that is sometimes true for people though is that the part has a point. The part has a point.

There has been an issue in the past about consistent effort, expenditure, and that has left you a little behind the eight ball in a particular arena of your life, right? The problem is not so much what the part is saying, because the part might be seeing something that's true. It's the messy communication that it takes toward that end, excessively punishing, too personal, exaggerated, all of that. Can you sort all of that excessive criticism out

and find one or two useful things in it where you go, okay, I'm going to leave 95% of this self-critical bullshit over here, but I'm going to look at that 5% and I'm going to go, okay, that is kind of an edge for me. And I'm going to do A, B, and C in order to get a little better at that 5%. How do you feel about that?

And the part will not like it because the part is unsatisfiable, but there might be a little space there. And then if you're actually able to do that thing, I got to tell you, if you're able to do that little 5% and take it in in like a real way, that can be such a transformative experience for people. Because the content that we criticize ourselves related to is typically for people their most vulnerable, self-shaming stuff.

A title of a book about how to do therapy that was in my grad school back in the 1980s has always stuck with me. It had a psychodynamic perspective. I forget the author, but the title was Psychotherapy, the Art of Wooing Nature. And when we get down beneath the words we're using,

to the actual feeling of this, it's a little bit like, and people can almost do this as they listen, if you imagine a sort of a central process inside yourself, a sort of a central core of wisdom and insight and choosing that is looking out at your own psyche,

And for me, I'm visualizing it because that's how I am, as this sort of like rolling green meadow in which various creatures are seated, spread out, nature, right? And some of them are really feisty and some of them are very sweet and attentive and some of them look like big bunny rabbits. That's my imagination. And here you are, this central, the you that is sort of the core of the big picture you of all that you are as a person.

What's your relationship to those various characters, those various creatures inside you that are all part of you? Are you encouraging? Are you regulating? Are you guiding them? Or is it just a kind of chaotic mess and you're

you're controlled basically by one or two or three of them that just sort of drag you in a certain direction. That's sort of what we're getting at in the intimacy of it all. What's the felt sense underneath it all? And I think

Part of it is that the louder portions of our personality are the ones that are, we'll say, sabotaging us. On any given day, they are choosing a lesser happiness over a greater happiness. And it is very often the most quiet, the sweetest, the most distant around the circle, there we are in the meadow here, right, of our inner creatures who actually have the most wisdom for us.

for us and the most yeah the most clarity about what would be the greater happiness that we could seek and the greatest clarity about how to actually attain that greater happiness and so part of the process then is to woo them you know and so how can you woo those voices forward and listen to them more and count on them more and a lot of them have to do with

the effects for the future because very often the self-sabotage has momentary gain it just leads to long-term pain you know it gets you through a certain situation you can avoid a certain feeling maybe you can act out a certain emotional reactivity you can

get buzzed with drugs or alcohol. You can overeat. It kind of gets you through the moment, but it creates a debt in your future. It's not good for your future. Whereas these other voices that really have your best interests at heart and are trying to help you get to that greater happiness, they're very clear about the trade-offs between short-term pain and long-term gain. In other words, they're very clear that, hey, if you really want to help the person you are becoming,

This is what you need to do. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment. How did you learn about money growing up? And how did those lessons prepare you for the real world?

If you're a parent, you probably really want to help your kids build some money skills, but hopefully without the painful experience that developing those skills usually takes. And that's why I'm excited to be working with today's sponsor, Acorns Early. Acorns Early is a smart money app and debit card for kids that helps them learn the value of money. Acorns Early's chores tracker helps kids learn the value of a dollar. You can set up chores in the app, set a payment amount, and tick the chore off when it's done.

Acorns Early lets parents pay allowances automatically, and kids can spend what they earn with their very own debit card. The Acorns app was the first financial app I ever used years ago. I still remember getting it on my phone, and I'm really excited to be working with them as a sponsor. So you can head to acornsearly.com slash beingwell or download the Acorns Early app to help your kids grow their money skills today.

Acorn's Early Card is issued by Community Federal Savings Bank member FDIC, pursuant to license by MasterCard International. TNCs apply, monthly subscription fees starting from $5 per month unless canceled. With the new Zoe Health app, you can understand which foods are actually healthy for you, with just one quick photo. It's free in your phone's app store right now, and you can download it by the time this ad ends.

Modern food marketing can be incredibly confusing. One label says heart healthy, another says no added sugar, another says whole grains included, and you're somehow supposed to make sense of what they actually mean by that terminology. It's frustrating. That's why I really appreciate Zoe, the science-first company behind the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast, and now the new Zoe Health app. The

The app's been developed using the world's largest nutrition study. You can scan a barcode or take a photo of your plate, and in seconds you'll understand more about what you're eating and how processed your food really is. Zoe scientists have developed a processed food risk scale to tell you instantly if you're about to buy a high, medium, or low-risk food. Zoe shows what the label won't. Download the new Zoe Health app for free. Search for Zoe Health in your phone's app store today.

That's Z-O-E and the word health. Now, back to the show. So I don't know if this stretches your metaphor here to its breaking point or not, Dad, but I'm wondering about how you think about aspects of this in terms of what you were talking about at the very beginning of the episode. So, so far we've operated inside mostly that first bucket that we were talking about. Yeah.

where self-sabotage is a kind of avoidance mechanism. And there's this part that really believes that it's in your best interest to stay just the way you are right now. So these things that you're doing to improve your life, they're actually kind of risky and scary, and we don't like that. Okay. But then you mentioned two other parts. The first is the burn it all down part, which I think is interesting, but we already talked about it kind of a little bit. And then the other one that you mentioned was just the more destructive...

Yeah.

What do you think's up with that? Where do you think that comes from? Does it have a certain kind of function, or is it just a random aspect of personality that some people just have for whatever reason? Well, it's a bit of a warning for the territory we're about to get into maybe, because sometimes it's really grounded in trauma. We internalize how we were treated very often. I was wondering if you were going there, that this is more of like an internalized oppressor sort of thing.

Yeah, I think that's one source of it, or a version of it is that we, going back to our notion of how do you propitiate an angry God, that there are parts of us, and some people certainly, that you can give them the fatted calf, your firstborn, whatever, whatever, on any given day. They're going to want more tomorrow. Actually, I want to digress on that, which may be a bit of a left turn here, and I'll be quick. Sometimes it happens that

We feel that there are parts of ourselves that are devouring. They're endlessly hungry. You know, they want that offering. Feed me, feed me, right? And sometimes, and don't do this if it's not working for you, but sometimes it can really help to just give up and jump into the mouth.

In almost like a visualized way? Yeah, a visualized way or to surrender to it. You have to be careful about this if you're vulnerable in certain ways, but if you can do it with one part of you kind of maintaining a lifeline to object of reality and all the rest of that, to just surrender and just kind of ask, what do you want? What do you want? Is it annihilation? And if you can go through this

experience, for example, of feeling annihilated, so completely disorganized, but still you're conscious while that's happening, and you get through to the other side, sometimes there's an incredible release, like you're no longer afraid of it anymore. You give over to it, and in that, sometimes you discover that, oh, it represents highly disowned parts of yourself that can now be reintegrated. So I'm just kind of tossing this out.

With regard going back then to the self-destructive part, sometimes people learn to punish themselves to prevent being punished by others. And you can think of the religious forms of that, the Leonardo da Vinci code, the da Vinci code kind of stuff. These people wearing their self-punishing, boom, boom, self-flagellating. Yeah, the self-flagellating aspect. Yeah, totally.

to prevent a greater punishment in the pits of hell and so forth. So people can do that sort of a thing. Another version of that is if I make myself sick, which means if I incapacitate myself, that will then bring in care from others. And then I think sometimes just in the broad id primal landscape, Jung's description of the archetypes was that they're the images of the instincts.

He meant that kind of broadly. So these instinctual processes, I think in some people there's an instinctual process that is just self-destructive. It can be other-destructive and self-destructive. It kind of has a life of its own. It doesn't really have a functional purpose for the person altogether. It's just...

No, it's part of you, but you got to be careful about it. It's kind of simple. That's the main takeaway. Yeah. What I'm wondering with this is the extent to which it's a distinct aspect versus a super volume turned up version of some of the more functional processes that we're describing here.

Richard Schwartz and IFS and all of that, his whole take on it is that all of these parts have a functional purpose and they're just playing bad roles. And as we push them into worse and worse roles, their behavior gets more and more problematic. I don't think that that's a silver bullet explanation for everything in psychology, but it's an interesting take on it and maybe that's sort of a version of what you're describing. I wonder about

those really self-destructive behaviors that you're talking about all the way up to desires for annihilation as a way to avoid other kinds of pains that you're talking about. As that the lesser pain, this is actually the lesser pain sort of take inside of the psyche. And I would imagine that's probably a piece of it. Yeah. I'm wondering pragmatically if somebody is listening to what we're talking about here and they're going like, oh yeah, I know that feels pretty alive for me.

What would you do with that person? What guidance would you give them? Is there stuff that you think could really help them out? Or is this just in the world of, hey, be aware of it and be very careful and conscious and skeptical of that part? I think awareness, yes. And

being careful about any imminent danger from these raging parts or these self-destructive parts. You think about certain aspects of eating disorders like, for example, bulimia or people who are anorexia, let's say are cutting, or sometimes children or even adults will bang their head against walls to punish themselves. So is there any imminent danger? We want to protect that. Got it.

The main thing really is to feed the wolf of love inside yourself is how can you strengthen and grow those other parts of you that are loving guides?

encouraging, who recognize, yeah, you're a work in progress. You could use some improvement. I think there's Suzuki Roshi's line, right? You are perfect as you are, and you could use a little improvement. The both end of that. So in that context, you want to strengthen those parts.

And that does have to go, that also relates to what I was trying to get at with identity. Identity as your own particularity, your own uniqueness in the entire history, literally of the universe. There has never been and never will be another being that is forest.

or Sue or Bob or whoever, ever. There's that part of it. That's identity, and it's pretty cool to be who you are. And also, we are all just ripples in the surface of the sea of time. It's

part of the one fabric, and that's common humanity and its universality. So I think that helps too. We build up that perspective and that creates a balance for the parts of us that are destructive and raging. I think this is one of those things where because I'm not a clinician and I don't have a lot of personal experience with this feeling, it's very difficult for me to speak to it in terms of what I think would be helpful for a person other than frankly just offering a lot of empathy around it. That sounds hard.

That sounds really rough. That sounds like a painful part to have churning away inside of your own ecosystem. And I guess my instinct is to ask questions about, is it possible to form something resembling a loving relationship with that part? Even if we're using the word loving in a

extremely general way and sort of non-specific way, is it possible to hold that part in awareness and not feel a lot of shame or self-criticism around the presence of that part where it doesn't make you a bad person just because this part of you that you perceive as bad exists? And I would imagine that that could be really helpful for a person if they were able to develop it. I would also imagine it's hard to do that.

Yeah, I think, I mean, my own sense of, I've had occasions where I really needed to drive safely and there was this ongoing arising part that kept undermining driving safely late at night while tired on the freeway. And, you know, there are other versions of that.

I think that annihilation-seeking parts are totally real. Absolutely. Yeah. And they're kind of all over the place for people. That's right. The Buddha talked about three kinds of attaching, if you will, leading--three kinds of craving, three kinds of attaching leading to suffering and harm. One is attaching for sense pleasures of various kinds, many different kinds. Second is the attaching for becoming,

Who are we becoming? And then there's the attaching to third category, not becoming, non-becoming, annihilation, ending it all, like getting off the wheel, getting off the hamster wheel, world weariness on steroids, get me out of here. So yeah. The extremist form of self-sabotage, if you want to put it that way. Yeah, sometimes can be suicidal. We have to be really, really, really careful about that. That's why, again, I

I can say very sincerely for us, from my own journey, which has included quite a lot of unhappiness, especially when I was younger, that there's a simple shift. It's not always easy, but it's a simple shift, and it's rarely sustained, so it needs to be reiterated again and again and again, where given everything that's going on in your life, at any moment, any moment, we can do this shift. At any moment where we are in the path or

in the storm, where we just pause for just a second inside. It's that beginner's mind reset, where you just kind of ask yourself and you open to the answer coming from the wise depths inside, "What would be in my best interest right now?" And then there can be basically there's a feeling of that in your body. A kind of feeling comes over you of like, "What's my identity as someone who acts in one's own best interest?"

What's that? What is that best interest? Is it to turn off the TV, get off my phone and go to sleep? What's in my best interest? Is it to disengage from this no-win argument? Is it to get off my butt and get on the treadmill? What's in my best interest right now? And then surrender to it. Pause, get in touch with what's in your best interest, surrender to it.

again and again and again. And that sounds very modest and people go, yes, but, yes, but. Actually, no, most of us do know in the moment when we pause what's actually in our best interest. And we have a sense of that inside ourselves. And we could in the moment

Let it be the animating force of our life, the current that carries us forward for the next few seconds at a time. Most people can do that. If you're really demented or psychotic or delirious or have had a serious brain injury, you probably can't do it. Or right in the moment, really fragmented, really dissociated or in shocking pain, okay. But most people, most minutes, most seconds, they really could do that.

That's kind of the heart of existential choice, isn't it? Yeah. And I mean, I wasn't going to say it, but I think that that's kind of the tree that you're barking up here, Dad. And also the related self-belief that's associated with thinking that you are the kind of person who can do that, understanding that there will be challenges for you along the way, that it's not always going to be easy, that you're going to have to sustain attention, that you're going to need to keep on doing this thing sometimes even when you don't want to be doing this thing.

All of those pieces, which we've done a million separate episodes around each of those individual topics. But just getting that, A, this is going to be hard. B, you can do it. And that's the movement back and forth. Yep, this is going to be hard. Yep, I can do it.

Yeah. What's the part of you that knows what is in your best interest and then surrender to that part? Yeah, totally. And getting good and discerning about which part that is I think is a big part of this process too. So I really enjoyed talking about this with you today. Oh, did you? This was a really rich one. Yeah. I think over time there's a kind of familiarity with that part, right?

You get to like, yeah, I know. It's like there's certain voices inside us that one voice is sort of like the press secretary for the North Korean government. You know they're lying to you. If their mouth is moving, they're lying to you. That's part of ourselves, right? But then there are these other parts. They just have a certain tone or feeling or matter-of-factness, like a nurturing matter-of-factness. Can we let them be in charge one breath at a time?

I thought this was a really interesting episode with Rick today where we talked about self-sabotage and we began the conversation by exploring what self-sabotage is. So this is when we go against or act in a manner that isn't going to get us any closer to the things that we say that we want. And it's really important that these are our stated interests or our conscious desires because a theme that emerged throughout this episode is how self-sabotage has a kind of logic to it.

Some of us wants this thing that we know intellectually or consciously is pretty good for us, or we really should study for the test or whatever it is for you. But there's this other aspect of personality that's kicking along in the back that's going, wait a second, not only do I not want to do this thing, like this isn't just a procrastination because I don't want to do the work of studying. It's that achieving this thing that I say that I want

is actually going to create some problems for me. It's actually going to expose me to more risk. It's actually going to raise the stakes for me. It's going to force me to change in ways that I'm not sure that I want to change. Maybe it's surfacing some deep uncertainty that I have about whether or not I'm good enough at X or Y in order to accomplish this task that I've set out for myself.

Common forms of self-sabotage at the mild end could include procrastination, more in the medium range, self-handicapping, this is where you don't get enough sleep the night before the big test or you don't study enough, and then all the way up to forms of self-destructive behavior. And the most helpful way that I found personally to understand my own self-sabotaging behaviors is this kind of conflict between parts. You are not one coherent you.

You are all of these different inner aspects, all of these different desires and fears that are all just kind of swirling together that have competing priorities and interests, and they really are tugging you in different directions. And when we understand our behavior in this kind of motivated fashion,

And I think it becomes a lot easier for us to understand ourselves when we see things in this way because the behavior of those parts is, well, it's understandable. You get the fear that they're trying to protect you from. It's not that you made some totally bizarre choice or a head-scratching decision. It's that you had these two competing interests inside of you that were each acting in a way that made a lot of sense to them.

And this conflict between parts can be very painful for people, in part because it feels very confusing. I want this thing, why can't I just act in a way that gets me closer to it? The easily accessible parts of our mind, the parts that are more conscious, more closer to the surface, they are typically much closer to that manager or very should-oriented part of our personality.

So, that part of your personality is almost witnessing you doing something that seems totally nuts given what you think that you care about. And this is how we get those almost out-of-body experiences of watching ourselves as we metaphorically drive the car off the road in our relationships. And the fear that an aspect of our personality is caring

is often at least somewhat rational. It's based on something that's called a threat appraisal model. So what's the severity if something bad happens? What's the probability of that bad thing happening? And then how good would our coping response be if the bad thing happened?

And most people, due in part to the negativity bias, have a model where the bad thing happening would be really bad, they don't have a very good grasp of the likelihood of it, so it feels very uncertain and scary, and they don't really trust that their coping response would be particularly good. In other words, they don't have a lot of self-belief. So the point here is that we can do hard things if we think that we have the resources to face them effectively.

And that took us to the part of the episode that we spent a good bit of time on, which is how can we build up more of a sense of ourselves as that strong, dynamic, effective person? How can we build this new identity? And so Rick asked me a question, how would I actually do this with somebody? And so I'm going to expand this out in the outro to the episode to give you more of a map here.

First, I think it's important to figure out what the tip of the root is for you. What does this fearful part actually want? What is it really afraid of? What's it trying to avoid? Is it trying to avoid effort? Is it afraid of overwhelm? Is it afraid of failure? Is it afraid of closeness inside of your relationships? We talked about that. So you can go through kind of exploration of what are the actual fears of this part.

Then second, what beliefs or thoughts is that fear based on? Does it fundamentally believe that you're the kind of person who cannot sustain a given level of effort?

Does it think that you aren't good enough to achieve at a certain level? And so it is very, very invested in keeping you below that level. Does it have a kind of belief about the external world where other people just won't help you out? Like no one will ever come to save me, so I can't risk anything where I'm not sure if I can keep myself safe or not.

So we go through this kind of exploration of the beliefs or thoughts that the avoidance is based on, and then we get to the third, fourth, and fifth step that occur in some kind of murky order. I'm not sure what the exact order of these things are.

First, we're working around expanding our identity, including framing ourselves as more of a work in progress as opposed to a static, perfectly figured out being. Then second, we're normalizing and accepting fear. And then third, we're building up related resources.

So first, expanding identity. We're trying more flexible, more exploratory language in how we talk about who we are. I like language like, "I'm experimenting with," or, "I'm trying this on," or, "I'm working on fill in the blank."

We're not radically transforming. We're not deleting the old identity. We are playing around with growth, and we're really playing around with a kind of beginner's mind, which we talked about a lot during the self-concept episode that we did recently. How can we have more of a beginner's mind about who we are?

then we're normalizing and accepting the fears of that part of our personality. If you've ever done any kind of parts work, this is the "Hey man, you've been heard" section basically. So you're understanding what's happened in your past that could lead to the reasonable beliefs of this part. You're trying to get why it thinks and feels the way that it does.

Now, part of this can include changing your relationship with fear or with feelings in general. Fear is a normal nervous system response to any kind of perceived threat. It's a good response. It's trying to keep you safe. But just being scared is not a good enough reason to not do something. We need to get comfortable doing things kind of scared if we're going to be functional in life. And this takes us to a big question. How can we convince that part that things are going to go different this time?

A big part of this can be coming into the present for people. Often, the fears of that part are linked to a different moment in time. Typically, when a person was younger, they had fewer resources, less good stuff was going on inside of their life, they had punishing caretakers, you know, whatever was going on for them. That other stuff happened back then when you were a very different person. Remember, work in progress.

malleable sense of identity. You're becoming more flexible. You're becoming more resourced, all of this good stuff. How can we include that in our sense of who we are and therefore make projections about the future from this new belief about ourselves? And this is then how we get to building up related strengths and skills. Sometimes we're actually fine as we are right now, and we just have to wake up to that fact again typically by coming into the present.

We know enough, we're capable enough, we're strong enough. And there's just this aspect of our personality, like Rick was talking about, that is never going to be satisfied. It's going to be critical of us regardless of how good we get at something or regardless of how capable and resourced we become. And at that point, it's not actually about satisfying that voice inside our head. It's about learning to ignore it.

it. Or at the very least, learning to wave at it from a distance and go, you've been heard, it's okay, I got you, but I'm going to kind of do my thing over here now.

But sometimes that part has a point. There is some aspect of the communication that it's making that is based on fact, that is based on reality. And in order to convince that part that things are going to go differently, you maybe do need to do a little work around something, or you do need to do a light exposure around something, have a different experience, and really internalize that experience. You need to have a sense of yourself as being different this time around.

If you want to say, "I'm working on being more studious," you have to actually try being more studious. You can't just say it and hope that that will do enough on its own. For me, the change process often starts with that kind of a thought or a feeling that leads to an action in part because I got a lot of practice doing that. But for many people, that is just not how it works. They need to do something called behavioral activation.

They have a new action that then leads to a new thought or feeling. They have a hard time starting with, I'm working on becoming more studious. They have to start with, hello, actually studying more. We need new ingredients to cook a new soup. And the only way to get new ingredients is by trying things that you haven't tried yet. And this can be really tough for people, in part because it means decoupling what you do from how you feel about it.

If people only started working out because they really, really, really felt like going to the gym that day, no one would ever go to the gym.

What we find is that after we make ourselves do something for a long enough period of time, we often start to enjoy it. The behavior has activated this new feeling or this new thought, this new belief that we have about ourselves. And as we talk about all the time, good exposures are graded. You want to find something that's the right amount of hard for you here.

So that's probably not trying to study for five hours in a row. Maybe it's studying for 15 minutes. Maybe it's saying to yourself, "Hey, okay, at X time, I'm going to pick up the book and I'm going to read it for five minutes and then I'm going to put the book down." And what most people will find is that if they start with five, it'll become 15 pretty easily. And if they can get to 15, it'll become 30 pretty easily. It depends person to person, but you got to start somewhere.

If you pick a good exposure and you are reasonably dedicated about trying it on and you're willing to do it more than once or twice, you're willing to take your lumps a little bit, you're willing to have things go sideways, and you're willing to kind of keep on engaging with the behavior even when that happens for you,

Over time, you're probably going to have some good experiences. And even if you don't have good experiences, what you are going to have is more of a sense of belief in yourself that you can do this thing, regardless of how it goes. The important variable was your effort. You know that changed for sure.

And then what you can do is you could really let that land. You can let that update this old model that you're carrying around because those well-intentioned but self-sabotaging parts that we have are typically operating off of that old data. And you have to go really far out of your way to convince your brain to use this new information. Then finally, have a plan

for managing suffering, relapses, setbacks, all of the problems that have come along the way. Things will not go well. You will have a shame hangover a couple of times here. You will have sudden urges to blow it all up or not get out of bed. This is normal. It does not mean that you're doing anything wrong. It is a typical part of the process.

The goal is not to never self-sabotage again. It is to grow your sense of capability and possibility and openness to change so that you can risk more experiences that seem at the edge of your comfort zone. This will then let you do all these cool things. You will build up these related skills. You'll get a better sense of who you are these days. That will let you update your internal model, and that will probably reduce the frequency of self-sabotage.

So that's my map for most people. But Rick raised something really important during the episode. He talked about how some people don't have a well-intentioned but self-sabotaging part. They have a not very well-intentioned part. This could be a kind of internalized abuse based on some painful experiences, or it could be a kind of self-punishment as a way to avoid perceived greater pains

It could even be a kind of instinctual process that's self-destructive in nature. And he had some really interesting advice for working with that aspect of self-sabotage in the back third or quarter or so of the episode. What I want to call out in it in particular is the part that's about inclusion, that's about seeing the whole field of who you are on the inside and getting a good sense of all the characters who are involved. What's going on in there?

Who are the major players? What do they really care about? Why do they feel the way that they do? And if you're able to have that more spacious, even kind of warm relationship with all of the aspects of the interior, including the ones that seem more weird or problematic or self-destructive, that can help with the shame aspect of it and the self-criticism aspect that's associated with just knowing that you have those parts of who you are.

My very limited experience with this is that that can be really helpful for people. I'm also curious about this generally. So if you are somebody who has more of those thoughts and feelings, if you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a comment down below and tell us about it. I'd be very curious about what your experience is and what's really helped you out.

If you're listening on Spotify or on Apple, you can leave a rating and a review. And as a part of that, you can include some comments about this question. I'm honestly really curious about it. You can also send us an email to contact at beingwellpodcast.com. You can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show in other ways. If you've somehow made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please subscribe. It really helps us out.

That's it for today's episode. I always really enjoy recording these with Rick. It's a great time, as he was talking about. Somehow it has remained fun and engaging for us both after six years or so of doing this. And that itself is such a cool thing. And it just brings so much great stuff into my life. So I really appreciate that people take the time to listen. Until next time, again, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.