“Sometimes people self-sabotage when they’re so used to things taking a turn for the worst in their lives.  They become anxious in peaceful relationships and environments because they’re anticipating the bad.  They’re not used to calmness or healthy energy so they create their own chaos unintentionally or leave,”  Soulmuva.  Guilty.  There are days I still don’t know how to function if something isn’t going wrong.  I’m constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.  The thing is this: we can understand it but we have to change the energy. It took a lot for me to see all the ways I self-sabotage—no one likes to admit when they are their own worst enemy or the cause of their own problems.  I think that’s one thing we can all agree on is that we are used to playing the victim in this world.  For as much as we are attracted to strength, we glorify when things happen to us—even if something is blatantly our fault, we like to find ways to say someone made us do it.  Here’s the thing: when we take ownership for those events, we take back the power to change it.

We have a tendency to judge ourselves and get caught in the labeling of a situation.  So if we admit we make a mistake we take it further to that we are a mistake, we are bad, etc.  That isn’t the point of taking ownership of the situation.  The point is to take back power and direction over where the situation goes.  Instead, we get comfortable playing the victim and it makes it easy to constantly look for the way things AREN’T our fault.  It becomes an unintentional (or intentional for some) way to get things, a manipulation tactic.  Even if it isn’t something we are consciously using, we become used to it, we get used to the feeling and, as humans, as animals looking for safety in familiarity, we repeat the patterns we know.  There is safety in the known even if it’s something that hurts us.  When we grow up around chaos, we anticipate chaos.  It’s challenging to cultivate a different mindset when we are so used to it being a certain way.

I think the best advice we can give each other is this: we need grace for where we are and for where others are.  We need to give change a chance and understand that there are certain circumstances (most circumstances) where people’s behavior is so habitual that they don’t even realize when they’ve repeated a pattern, let alone that they’re creating the same circumstance.  It takes a lot of work to settle and redirect the heart and the mind and even more when we are in a circumstance that would trigger us to go down a certain thought pattern.  It can be difficult to accept that we are worthy of changing the story and the patterns we’ve become accustomed to.  We need to understand that we are all looking for familiarity and comfort to some degree, that just looks different for each of us.  Give people time and space to grow, to learn to feel comfortable under new circumstances—and to react differently in familiar circumstances.  Do the same for ourselves and soon the barometer of what feels good, what feels normal will begin to shift.