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You’re familiar with the idea of subconscious sabotage, right? When you do things that are not necessarily in your best interests, or not in alignment with your true desires, but you do them anyway. As if you can’t help yourself…
Like, I want to be healthy. But I don’t always make healthy choices. I’ve been known to have a burger or an ice cream (or several, over a series of days) when I know that those choices are not good for me.
For many years I was a smoker, too. Even though I knew that was terrible for my health. I kicked that habit nearly twenty years ago, thankfully, but it took me a long time and many failed attempts before I was finally able to give it up.
Cigarettes, food, and occasional binge drinking were all habits that I once used to control my persistent anxiety.
I know I’m not alone… and maybe you can relate too. Like me, perhaps you struggle with anxiety, or depression, or mania. Or other psychological, or even physical, manifestations of dis-ease.
Maybe you know that you make poor choices sometimes, maybe you’re not sure why you do, and maybe you struggle to get yourself onto a better track.
Why is that?
What I’ve found, is that underneath the unwanted behaviour or habit usually sits the feeling that the behaviour is trying to cover up, or numb out. An uncomfortable or unpleasant feeling. And underneath that feeling, often sits the original cause.
Underneath my bad habits of smoking, eating crappy unhealthy food and binge drinking sat the anxiety that I was trying to numb into oblivion. Understanding where that anxiety came from has been the work of a lifetime for me.
Much of it came from my childhood. From trauma, from abuse. Some of it I’ve been able to heal, and some of it is a work in progress still.
I struggle with anxiety to this day. I manage it with meditation, with daily 12 minute sessions of brainwave entrainment (I use a site called evolutioner.com for this) and by using a wonderful therapy tool called Dynamic Spin Release on myself that allows me to reprogram the subconscious roots of my behavioural blockages.
This kind of self-care approach, I’ve learned, is a much better way to handle my anxiety than lighting up a cigarette, eating junk food or going on a bender! But if you’re doing any of those things, I want you to know that I’m not judging you for it. I get it.
We do what we have to do to make it through.
One of the most important things in my process, was to stop beating myself up for what I was doing to my body. To accept that I was doing it in order to numb myself. To accept that there was a deep sense of dis-ease sitting under my unwanted behaviours and to really acknowledge that feeling was there. That it existed. To stop disowning it. And to stop disowning my own need to feel it.
Sometimes the feelings are very intense and scary. But when I become willing to feel them, when I actually face them head on and work with them instead of against them… somehow they start to lose their scary power. They start to shift.
For a lot of people, subconscious sabotage is an idea. It’s a theory. Not for me. I’ve come to learn what it really is: it’s a feeling. At least, the feeling is the portal. It’s the way in… if you follow the trail of the uncomfortable feeling (as I have learned to do with my anxiety)… and you don’t give up, numb out or run away from what it has to teach you… you’ll uncover the true source of your subconscious sabotage. Then you can heal it.
That’s how you grab hold of a tiger by the tail. That’s how you become its master.
As always, let me know in the comments if this post has helped you in any way.
To YOUR Abundance,
Julie Ann Cairns
