We often fight for our limitations. For convictions that don’t serve us. Consciously. And we can be quite assertive about it. Have you ever heard someone explain so passionately how they can’t possibly change because their mother was horrible to them as a child? Even when they’re well-aware that they want to change? We are often likely to rationalise why something is limiting us, than to look for ways to overcome the limitation.
One of the most deeply-rooted and less obvious reasons why we sustain self-sabotage is in order to stay safe. The irony, of course, is that it’s self-sabotage that makes us feel unsafe.
Letting go of our belief systems is disorienting
We are identified with our minds and our belief systems. We find stability and comfort in our notions about ourselves and the world because they are the foundation upon which our current life is built. Even if our current beliefs are standing on the way of our aspirations, they give us a sense of stability and safety. They are the map we’ve been using to navigate the world, and even if this map isn’t taking us to where we want to be, it’s safer to move when we have a map rather than when we don’t.
We avoid uncertainty
We are also afraid of the unknown. This gives rise to our fear of change, which really is fear of suffering. For all we know, the experience on the other side of this life may be amazing—but we’re afraid of death. We see death as an end to our current experience, and as such, we dread it even if our current experience is rather miserable.
We tend to imagine that the alternative is worse
This ties in with our propensity for loss aversion: the fear that things may get worse trumps our belief that they’ll get better. Even for those of us who are not religious, I wonder what effect the idea of the ultimate judgement, of life as a force of punishment or reward, has played in forming this biased evolution of our thinking.
Letting go of the old map
Each of these tendencies in itself exerts pressure on us to hold onto our current belief systems. But they also reinforce one another. Our belief that things are more likely to get worse increases our fear of uncertainty which in turn increases our need for safety.
While these fears may be well-founded in our humanity, and we can logically see why they manifest, they do, for the most part, rest on a limited and flawed understanding of ourselves and life. Yet, this doesn’t even matter, because by virtue that we identify with them, we find stability in them and hence we cling onto them.
They are the rules of the game we’ve been playing, and even if they’ve been harming our chance of winning, we feel safer to play if we have rules than if we don’t.
But on the other side of our self-defeating convictions is the more liberated life we want to live. To step into a new life, we need to leave our old life behind, and that’s often a scary thought. But thought is what is limiting us on the first place and it’s helpful to remind ourselves of some of the truths.
Transcending our convictions
We are not our mind. Our mind is a tool that we use to interact with and navigate the world, in the same way in which our body is a tool. But who we are is neither our body nor our mind. Our mind consists of thoughts, ideas, values, belief systems. They come and they go. They change and evolve. Who we are is the ever-present witness of this. We are consciousness itself.
We shape our experience. Objectively we cannot know if the alternative is worse. But we do have a lot of evidence for life’s abundance and generosity that we may be choosing to ignore. “You will never get any more out of life than you expect”, as Bruce Lee wrote. Our expectations of reality is what creates our reality.
Uncertainty is the nature of life. One thing we can be certain of is that we can’t be certain. Ever. And while we may be able to rationalise why this is frightening and why the fear is real, we can also recognise that our minds are biased towards loss and that our fear of the unknown is not only pointless but also counterproductive.
Self-sabotage, ironically, is a search for safety. But our need for safety is proportional to our lack of safety, which rests on our misconceptions and ill- founded assumptions that we won’t be safe. As cognitive beings, capable of metacognition, we have the option to not take our thinking patterns for granted. On the other side of belief systems that don’t serve us are belief systems that serve us and can help us build the life we want to build.