Are you constantly feeling like you’re standing in your own way? Do you find it challenging to take ownership of your actions and emotions? If so, you’re not alone. In this transcribed episode of The Shrink Think Podcast, we dive deep into the concept of self-sabotage and offer valuable insights on how to recognize and address this behavior.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the ShrinkThink podcast. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. Pretty good for us. Hey, go to the swag shop while you're thinking about wanting to know if you still want to listen to us after that weird opening. It's a very weird opening because we actually, if you cannot see this, it's because you're listening to a podcast and therefore there's nothing to see because it's a podcast. If you do switch over to our YouTube channel, you can see presently that I am displaying a piece of art from our swag shop.
On his body. Yes. It's called a shirt. Thank you.
It's not a tattoo. It's not an art. Like when you said art, I was like, what?
But I actually designed this. Well, actually, that's not true. I took the design and changed the words or whatever, but I made it our own, right? So I kind of designed it. It says, and this is the title of our episode today, you are the biggest problem in your life. Boom. Are you depressed yet?
If not, give us 10 more minutes. We'll get you there. No, I mean, obviously we don't want you to be depressed.
That's why we're therapists. We want to help you not be depressed or anxious or have all these problems in your life. We want you to stop being the problem in your life. However, you always will be, but we want to give you some tools to like mitigate that, And so I know we've talked about this before. It's not a new subject, a new topic, but I want to get into the nuances of it because here's the deal. You can know this stuff that you are the biggest problem in your own life.
You're like, yes, I agree. I know this or whatever. You can even understand what that looks like. And then two hours later, you're in a situation. Somebody does something, maybe it's a family member or a friend or a loved one or whatever. They do something and you get all upset and you're so mad at them and you're like, oh, if they would only blank, it's them.
They're the problem. So it's like the saying goes from I'm the biggest problem in my own life to I am the biggest problem in my own life until you do something stupid and then it's you, then it's your problem.
I thought that was the truth. We know it's not.
And so exactly. So we're creating these little bubbles around ourselves of pockets of not wanting to see ourselves as the problem in every situation, because that would be awful if somebody did something that was legitimately bad, terrible. I can blame them for it, point to them and say they should not have done that. It's really difficult to say inside of that, yeah, but I'm my own biggest problem in that scenario because of my reaction, my interpretation, my blame, my communication or how I participated in that. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. And I think everything's related ultimately to self-worth. So I mean, it's hard to take ownership of something if what you normally do is go, of course it's my fault.
I'm a horrible person. That's not what we're talking about that we're not talking about. Just realize that you're a horrible person and everything will be fine because you are the butt of everybody's jokes. That's not what's happening right now. And if that is you, if that does, I mean, honestly, if that does resonate with you, if that's the kind of thing you find yourself saying, go to therapy, get some help on that because you're not that bad, right?
Not everything is about you, right? And so like this title of this episode might make you think, oh, everything is about me.
I'm the biggest problem. It's no, that's not true. You're not the biggest problem in the sense that you're so bad. It's just that you're getting in your own way. You're contributing to things that you can do differently that can get yourself out of the way to make yourself more available for other people.
Essentially what we're talking about is influence. Who has the most influence over you? I do.
And you do. The Shrinking Podcast.
That's why we're here. You're welcome.
Put your life in our hands. Until you push pause or stop.
But don't do that. Just subscribe and just keep listening. Put your life in our hands.
We'll take very good care of you. Oh my lanta, but this is not therapy. Right, exactly. Also that. So, okay, let's break this down. What does this look like? You are the biggest problem in your life. What this means is that you've got your own thinking patterns, which is like your mindset. You've got your own feelings, like the way that you regulate your emotions. And then you've got your words and your actions, which are your responses. You are solely and completely responsible for those.
Other people can influence you, like you can be a jerk to me. You can call me names. You can criticize me or whatever. And I'm gonna now have certain feelings. I'm gonna have interpretations of what's happening. And I'm gonna have certain reactions that will either, I guess, mitigate that or like buffer that, right? Like insulate me from that or remove myself entirely from that. Or I'm gonna have certain reactions that are going to actually make things worse, that are gonna participate in that and actually like escalate, right? So that things are sort of, maybe I say something critical in return or I say a reaction in return. And then you say something even more critical or reactive in turn, and that's making things worse. I didn't make things better for myself or for you.
I made them worse. And there is, obviously we're talking about this back and forth nature to things. The other component is for you to really be able to understand and know the truth for yourself. So what I mean by that is to know what your feelings, thoughts and behaviors are, what's going on in the moment. So what we're telling you essentially is, hey, you can affect the situation three different ways. And you are entitled as a human being to take up space. You know, like to, hey, look, you are another human being on this planet.
You have value, you have intrinsic worth. So you are entitled to that, literally. It's the space that you're in. That also means that that space is yours. It's not another person's. So when somebody is trying to say something to you, they're trying to influence you, it's your decision whether or not to be influenced by that. And a lot of times, I mean, this is why kind of the shirt comes forward with you're the biggest problem in your life, is we actually don't spend any time thinking of it that way. So everything's more reactive.
We don't take any space for ourself. We just assume like, oh, you jumped in my space and did this for me. When you think about that, that's kind of ridiculous, right? Because it's like, what I'll do, there's an exercise, I haven't done this for a long time actually, where I'll have a person stand in the center of a hula hoop. And that's kind of their boundary and their space. But, and it's not appropriate to like, if you have another person in another hula hoop to just walk over and stand inside of the other person's hula hoop, that space that they're taking up. But what we're talking about is like living in a way in which this other person's jumped inside your space and then is saying all these things. And then they are somehow responsible for everything that's going on in your life. And it's like, wait a minute, no, your problem is your problem. Right, so breaking that down even more, I really like that example because in several ways, we can become the problem for ourselves in that scenario.
One would be if we surrender our space. So let's say somebody did jump inside my hula hoop.
That's not okay, right? That will happen. People will do that maybe accidentally, sometimes on purpose, but usually it's not with like malicious intent, right? Usually it's some sort of self-protective or self-serving thing. Or sometimes it's even, they think that they're doing something good, but they don't realize that it was hurtful or harmful. So they get into our hula hoop and I can make things worse by thinking you're so terrible, you're so awful. And then I like body slam you or something. And I'm like, okay, that didn't make things any better. If I stay in that, so if you're inside of my hula hoop and I feel threatened by that, I feel anxious, I feel dysregulated and I do nothing, I've made things worse for myself because I've not regulated. I can also, if I choose to not kick you out of that, or if I don't move, like I could move away, like pick up my hula hoop and get you out of it essentially and move to another area where you're no longer in my space. If I choose not to do that, then I'm not using my power that I have to move myself away from that infringement, right?
So that's another way in which I'm allowing you to be in my space that you've already violated and I'm doing nothing about it. I'm not using a boundary for myself to protect myself or I'm not communicating something saying like, hey, you know, when you did this, I felt really upset, really anxious, can you please move out of my space? In another sense, there's a way of saying this that we can also interpret things in our heads as being something that they're not. So let's say you, instead of this idea that you physically moved inside of my hula hoop, let's say you say some words, you say something critical or negative that I don't like and maybe I take it personally. If I imagine that you've moved into my hula hoop space but you're physically not standing in my hula hoop space and I'm then reacting like, oh man, you're in my space but you're not really, I can be taking something personally that's not meant to be taken personally and I've now made things worse for both of us because that's not what's actually happening. And then if I react from that, right, and I'm reactive to something that didn't really happen, like you're not actually in my physical hula hoop space but I feel like you are, I feel infringed upon but that's not what's actually happened. If I don't have that mental clarity and mental boundary, I've now also participated in and created a problem for both of us. So what we're talking about here is a way to, once you can kind of acknowledge that the problem that you have in a relationship or with different things, if you start with you, that you are the problem, then you actually start with a lot of influence because now it's like, okay, well, how am I experiencing this?
What's going on? I find it interesting as you're giving me that example, I was thinking of when people will want to, I've got a few folks that I've heard from and these are actually not clients, it's like talking with other clinicians and they're saying something about people that they were working with and there's a theme going on right now where there's people wanting, their impression is they want to be mind read, like mind reading type of thing and I was thinking, you know, that's interesting because it's like this person is saying you're not allowed into my space unless you totally, you can prove you totally understand it without me saying any words at all. And the piece of that is like I, so my piece is like I'm not going to say any words to let you in or to tell you what I'm thinking but you have to find the door, the back door that I've left open for you somewhere. Yeah, and so you're having a problem with people being close to you, right? You just wish they would be close and they would stop abandoning you but you would have to use words in order for them to know like how to be close but you're too scared to put yourself out there for the potential rejection or real abandonment because they actually won't care about what you're saying. Not true by the way and even if you felt that way, that's your feeling. And even if it did happen, that's probably somebody who you don't want to have close to you anyway because if they're actually going to leave you or not be there for you then they're probably somebody that you don't really want that close to you anyway. But the point that we're getting, that we're saying and I want to transition now into these different areas of our lives so we can see what this looks like is that you have a sense of agency over your feelings, over your words and actions, over your interpretations and if we just start there from that point, right?
Like something's happened between you and I Nathan, you know, you said something and I'm like upset or whatever. If I start with what did I do? Did I say or do something that might have impacted you and affected you in some way? If I start there then I'm going to take responsibility over myself, my own agency and if you're starting there at that same point like oh no, like he seems to be apologizing or asking me if something's okay. If you're asking yourself, oh did I do something that hurt you or offended you? Then I can then say well yeah when you said this I felt this way and you can be like oh wow I had no idea that that offended you. I was just saying something else but now I can see how that might have offended you. It's so, it's quick and it's easy to be able to resolve things because we're not pushing blame off of ourselves onto somebody else and then the other person now has to like somehow know and understand and mind read and then take responsibility for something that might not even be theirs. Yeah, it's like a what comes to mind and I hope this, I hope this works, this is my out louder self but this metaphor or analogy of a car. If somebody gave you a car and it's your car and then you walked to work, you didn't drive your car, you just kept walking to work and complaining about the walk like and then somebody was like why don't, what, I mean, I don't, you're, the problem of the walk and all the things you don't like about the weather could be solved if you actually take responsibility for what it is that you've been given and then just use it, you know, in a different way. Right. So anyway.
Yeah, so I have a few different like examples of this because the idea is that I think what we said originally was that we know these concepts and these principles but then something will happen and we will be disconnected from this reality or this truth because we don't see how it's true or we don't want it to be true in this specific example. So, for example, in your health, if we're talking about your health. you might not believe you're worth being healthy or taking care of yourself. You might struggle to prioritize things in your life that will help you with your own health. Maybe you can't say no to bad things or you can't get over certain difficult feelings and say yes to hard things. So, for example, like one of these things might be getting up early in the morning to get a workout in or, you know, when you're tired getting over the tired feeling to say yes to you know exercise or saying no to eating the unhealthy things around the holidays or whatever. So, those might be things in yourself that are your problem that are keeping you those are the obstacles between you and a better health.
More exercise, better sleep, those kinds of things. Yeah, I think actually you it makes sense on the holidays to eat whatever you want but because you said don't do that and that's why you're the biggest problem in your own life. In my own mirror too. Exactly. I'm sure they're not related. Probably not. Yeah, oh my god.
Okay, so here's another one. In your relationships, so maybe if you're having problems, you know, you mentioned like abandonment or maybe you're having some conflict or you've got some repeated cycles or patterns that you're seeing happening in your relationships. It might be based on this principle of you are the biggest problem in your own life. It might be that you don't want to see your mistakes. Maybe you'd rather blame the other person because it's easier to say that the other person is responsible and it's they're more responsible than the things that you're doing because you don't want to see yourself in a negative light or maybe you feel like it would negate the hurt that you have that maybe is perfectly legitimate, right? But instead of taking responsibility for that hurt, you want to put the blame on the other person and say, well, it's their fault.
They should fix it and make me feel better. That doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. And it won't and it really will not happen most of the time. And honestly, the people that it does happen with, that's probably going to be codependency because that's how the relationships can work that way. So the other thing that that comes to mind as you're saying this, Aaron, like to try to flesh it a little bit more is this idea that there isn't really we're not trying to suggest that there is, okay, you identify that like you agree with us, right? And then you're like, okay, I'm going to do it this way.
It's not quite like that. It's more like, okay, what do I actually think? Because it might be like that. You're like, oh, I do want to vote. Like take the workout example earlier. Like, you know, want to get up, you know, in my, okay, I have a worth problem. Do I believe I'm worth getting up in the morning and take and going to work out and all that kind of stuff. And when you start to, let's say that you start to reflect, you're taking this seriously. And you're like, yeah, I totally am worth it. And then there's also the reality that like, but the truth is, I don't really, I'm not a person that's going to work out.
Like, I will not be successful doing that. If I'm honest with myself, it's not about anything other than I don't operate that way. Okay. You're still, you're still trying to figure this out. So we're not necessarily saying, you know, whatever, whatever thing you're identifying as a problem, you just do the direct opposite because you're the problem, you know, type of a thing, right? It's more like, no, we're saying like, slow down. This is the process of, of taking your own self seriously and really knowing like, okay, this is what's happening. And then just being honest with the logical progression, which the here's the thing with that, which I think that we don't have patience for in our society, that takes time. Like you cannot just decide like, okay, well, that's it. I'm gonna do it this way.
No, that's reactive. Still, you're still reacting, you would actually have to take some space. You know, for me, it's good. I have a drive home, that's about 20 minutes, like, it's a lot easier to take time for me while I'm driving to be reflective and that kind of thing. But you still have to find space in your day to do this kind of thing.
If not, it's never gonna happen. You're just gonna wait and wait and wait and wait and still do the same things and still be the problem. But the cool thing is, you'll get to listen to this episode on repeat.
Oh, yeah, I think I got it. Oh, yeah. Now get Oh, yeah. Now. After seven episodes. Yeah, like for just a quick example on this, like, I will talk about working out with some of my clients. And I know there's this one guy that I would talk about working out in the mornings.
And he's just like, I can't do that. I it has to be in the afternoon. I just I can't get myself up in the morning. And I'm like, that's totally okay. That not everybody needs to get up first thing and work out. You know, some people work out in the evening, some people in the afternoon or on their lunch break or whatever. It's fine.
Just know what works for you. You know, part of that too, honestly, to take it one more level, is for you, if you feel like like you should be working out at a certain time, like, you know, like in that way, you, it's probably gonna be advantageous for you to think, why do I even think that? Why do I, why would I think that working out in the morning is somehow better that like I'm, like, I'm supposed to do that? Maybe you have friends and influences in your life that you're like, oh, I'm not as good as them because they do, like, they have these habits. Like, that might, that might just not be your thing. Right. Okay, so two more here quickly.
Another one might be in your parenting. So with your parenting, your kids may have their own individual issues. You know, every kid is their own independent person, which is hard to, hard to remember, right? Because we want to think that it's a reflection of us. Like, I'm, I did something and I have completely shaped this person rather than thinking they also have their own personality and they're making their own decisions. But, so my kids may have issues, but I might not be aware of how I'm contributing to those, right? So, like, am I doing something that's, like, not good parenting? Or is there some reaction or something that I'm having that's causing them to react to me?
Because that's probably part of it. But also, let's say my kid does have some issues. I need to learn how to be a better parent or respond to their needs. So it might be that they've, maybe they've got special needs or they've got a certain difficult personality or a personality that's difficult for me. So I need to find out what is it about me that has so little tolerance, so little patience, so little understanding for what they actually need. And then I need to go do something about that. Go find out, learn, talk to people, get some help so that I can understand how I can care for my children better than I currently am. And maybe it's just as creating some space for them to be how they are and then setting proper boundaries for myself because I can't change other people. I can't change my kids, but I can certainly give some consequences that if they're going to behave this way and make these choices, at least they're going to experience some healthy consequences for that.
And that's as much as I can do with myself. Okay, then lastly, in your work, maybe you're not being honest with yourself about your performance. This is a difficult one, right? You're, maybe you're getting a certain feedback from people and you want to blame your boss, the environment, your co-workers or whatever. But am I being honest with myself about what my strengths and my weaknesses are? Or maybe I'm not setting boundaries for myself of when to stop or when to ask for help if I need it. So if I'm doing those things, then I might actually be creating more of a problem for myself in my work and saying, oh, I'm so tired. There's such slave drivers or I don't get good feedback, but I'm not really asking for help. I'm not looking at my areas of weakness and then saying, hey, I'd like to grow in these areas. I'm recognizing I don't know what to do here or I'm not very skilled in these areas.
I need to go get some help. Maybe it's some training or some coaching or some guidance somehow, but that ultimately is my problem, right? That's not, sure, other people can help with that, but it's my responsibility to take the initiative of that and to bring it to someone that can help me.
We need a head for home here. But just in closing, there's probably one of these areas that Aaron's been talking about that sticks out more to you and whatever area that is, is going to be the hardest one you have. So my... You're probably gonna have like the biggest reaction to it. Yeah, the biggest pushback. I would suggest one way to tiptoe into the tulips where you start this might not be that area. If you, like a lot of times the biggest issue is with a spouse or partner where you seem to be able to do things pretty well.
Or a parent-child. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and you're doing it like pretty well, like you're great with other kids, you know, and for whatever reason your own kid is Satan. Right, in the spawn of Satan.
Not your fault. It's the spawn of Satan, which means actually you're Satan. So try, you could start so in another, in another box is what my point is, to try to see what it feels like. Where it's a little easier and then you can know you're as awesome as you thought you were and and then try to migrate that to the box that makes you a little bit nervous. Because ultimately, okay, I know the saying is you're the biggest problem in your own life, but you are also awesome. You're great. You know, you, you are who you are and there's nobody else like you and we want to help you to be the best you. So that you're not getting in your own way and detracting away from that or taking away from being your best. Yes. So it's obvious at this point. Shrinkthink.com forward slash swag and check out the swag.
Your biggest problem. Have a great day.