Guest Post by Stephanie Newman, Ph.D. (with Wednesday Martin, Ph.D.)
Things were finally falling into place for Lucy after several dead-end jobs and at least as many bad relationships. She and her boyfriend of fourteen months were in love, starting a business together, even adopting a puppy.
Lucy was over the moon. Yet somehow she felt uneasy. She found herself mostly alone on weekends and holidays while her boyfriend was upstate taking care of his ailing mother. She wanted to call the house but had only his cell-phone number.
And Lucy had fronted all of the money for their business venture. Though she and her boyfriend had agreed to partner up, Lucy seemed to be doing all the financial and emotional heavy lifting. When the business soured, Lucy discovered that her boyfriend had been married all along. She had invested the last year--and all of her money--on an unavailable, untrustworthy man.
Jen, a smart, ambitious attorney, might seem to be Lucy's polar opposite. She landed a job at a white shoe law firm shortly after graduating from law school. The money was great, but the hours were long, and the mentoring in short supply. Jen felt vulnerable and lonely--until she met Ellen, a senior attorney who became the big sister Jen never had, sharing gossip and counsel about firm politics. Naturally, Jen asked Ellen for advice on getting ahead at work. When a new-hire told Jen about volunteering to work all weekend, Ellen told Jen, "Whatever you do, don't be pushy and ask for work. I'll put in a good word for you with the partners." Soon after, Jen was fired for failing to log the required number of billable hours.
Months later an ex-colleague offered Jen an explanation: Ellen. Every time a new female was hired, it turned out, Ellen felt threatened. "She acts like her ‘BFF' but secretly sabotages her with bad advice and nasty gossip." Things always ended the same way with Ellen, a backstabbing workplace frenemy.
Jen felt humiliated and vowed never again to fall victim to the Ellens of the world.
Jen and Luch are two very different women with one thing in common: they fell into the trap of a sadomasochistic re-enactment. Both engaged in self-sabotaging or self-defeating behaviors, so as to unwittingly recreate a past trauma and inflict present suffering upon themselves.
Now in English, please. And what does all this mean for you? If you repeatedly trip yourself up at work or in relationships, if you see yourself as someone who is prone to persecution and suffering, you might be regularly sabotaging yourself in your day to day life.
Sounds ridiculous--who would actually want to suffer? Here's where it gets complicated. Sometimes the sufferer may know she has brought the pain upon herself, and may even feel ashamed of doing so. Other times, the sufferer has inflicted pain upon herself by making poor choices and repeating old self-defeating patterns because deep down she feels she deserves punishment.
Whether or not they are aware, those who self-sabotage often do so out of strong feelings of guilt, and a deep sense they are unlovable and unworthy. Some may even imagine themselves being hurt or beaten--though no physical beatings have actually occurred--rather, these individuals have a sort of regular day dream about succumbing to "deserved" imagined beatings.
Why defeat your own conscious aims? Why feel you deserve punishment? While there is no one explanation for why some engage in long-standing patterns of self-defeating behaviors, there are some common threads. Sometimes holding onto a bad relationship represents a desperate attempt to hold onto a parent, even a bad one. For some, it's better to be psychologically beaten than left alone or neglected. Self-sabotage could also represent an individual's attempt to control and master old traumatic situations by bringing about pain in the present. While this sounds counterintuitive, it makes sense--the devil you know (and manipulate) is less terrifying and threatening than the one you don't. Though a self-inflicted loss causes you to feel pain, it might be preferable to know what to expect--that way you feel less helpless. So for many, the illusion of control allows them to tolerate the pain they have self-inflicted and believe they deserve, and evade an unknown situation they fear would be worse.
In other words, if a parent left you in the past, you might hook up with a serial cheater and unwittingly provoke him to leave you in the present. Remember Lucy? She ignored the signs that her boyfriend was married and then handed over her insurance money and financial security without any investigation.Lucy is typical of someone who grew up in a chaotic household in which her parents were too emotionally compromised to work and lacked the education and training necessary to support the family. Lucy's parents felt out of control and acted in a critical and attacking manner towards their children. Everyone felt scared and insecure.
But, somehow Lucy interpreted the chaos as her fault. She was angry at her parents for their limitations and ashamed of her family's poverty. At the same time she felt guilty about her anger and decided she was bad, so she internalized her parents' attacks and criticism and developed the belief that she deserved to be punished. Giving away all her money in the present was an attempt to control and master old anxieties about her unpredictable and chaotic past.
Lucy also acted on feelings that were threatening to her because she was unable to know them. Meaning, since she was uncomfortable with her anger and self-critical feelings, she learned to deal with them by flipping them outside of herself, ascribing them to an unkind cheating boyfriend who became her outside persecutor.
With all this talk about self inflicted torture and suffering, one might worry that there could be disastrous results for those in whom the cycle is not broken. And one might ask who is prone to this sort of self-sabotage. The answer: any and all of us. Internal dilemmas and intrapsychic conflict are part of being a human being. We all wrestle with conflicting thoughts and feelings--all the time. Now you've had a crash course in sadomasochistic re-enactments. Next up: how do you identify such behaviors in yourself or someone close to you? And what can you do about it? Read Part 2...
Stephanie Newman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst who practices in Manhattan and Westchester, New York.
