I Was Sabotaging My Own Success and Did Not Know It

The pattern was not obvious from the inside because each individual instance had a plausible explanation. The presentation that I undermined by over-preparing and then arriving exhausted - that was just nerves and workload. The relationship that I cooled at the exact moment it was becoming something real - that was just timing and readiness.

The opportunity that I failed to pursue despite being well-positioned for it - that was just uncertainty about whether the move was right. Individually, each explained away cleanly.

By 27, working in marketing in Cleveland, I had a therapist who was patient and thorough and who had been listening to these individual explanations for several months and who, one afternoon, stopped me in the middle of an explanation and said: what is the common thread in all of these situations where things are about to go well?

I could not answer. She said: in every one of them, the difficulty arrives at the moment of genuine potential, not before and not after. She asked me what it would mean if things went well - fully, genuinely, without qualification.

The question produced an answer I had not expected and had not prepared to say out loud: it would mean I was someone who deserved good things. The subterranean belief, which had been running below every aspiration I had expressed for years, was that I was not.

The belief had nothing to do with any rational assessment of my capability or my worth. It had been assembled from things far older than any of the situations I was sabotaging, from a childhood relationship with worth that had installed a ceiling that I had been bumping into and retreating from without knowing the ceiling was there.

The work of dismantling it was the most significant personal growth work I have done. It continues. The sabotage is significantly less common now because I can feel the mechanism starting and identify it before it completes.