Ep.73 Fuck Self Sabotage! The Key to the Shift.

If you've ever wondered whether you're somehow the common denominator in every situation that doesn't go your way, keep reading. This one's for you.

Do you ever feel like certain situations just keep happening to you over and over and you can't figure out why? Do you catch yourself scanning for proof that people don't include you, don't see you, don't show up for you?

This week I'm answering the question I know a lot of you are quietly asking yourselves. Why is nothing working out for me? Not because I have a tidy answer, but because I caught myself asking it too, and what I found underneath it changed how I see the whole pattern.

I've done years of this work, on myself and with clients, unwiring the exact identities that keep women stuck in patterns that feel like personality but are actually protection. And recently, after a cross country move, I caught an old one sneaking back in.

Let's get into it.

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Top Takeaways on Self Sabatoge and Why Nothing Seems to Be Working Out

1. Feeling something once is different from becoming it

After I moved to Austin, I had to build an entire community from scratch. New friends, new social groups, new everything. And somewhere in there, I noticed my husband and kids were thriving while I was struggling to find my footing.

At first I was excited for them. Then a small identity shift happened. They're really doing well, but I'm not.

There's a difference between feeling excluded and deciding you're someone who is always excluded. One is a feeling that moves through your body and passes. The other becomes a full time job for your mind, scanning for every piece of evidence that proves it true.

I even caught myself doing this at my 40th birthday last year, at a retreat in Mexico, spiraling into poor me because my friends supposedly didn't make time for me that day. Which was a lie. They threw me a dinner. I just wanted to be the victim of something.

2. The victim role feels safe because it means you're not responsible

Here's why this is so fucking hard to release. Being the victim means the problem is out there, outside of you. It's not in here.

And if the problem is outside of you, you don't have to be responsible for changing anything. That's the payoff. The sympathy. The poor you. The feeling that life is happening to you instead of with you.

I want to be clear, this isn't judgment. It's just honesty. But staying in it costs you everything, because the more you look for evidence that you're excluded, the less room there is to ever notice you're included. You end up building more proof for the very thing you don't want.

3. Misery loves company, and bandwagon friends keep you stuck

When you're deep in a victim identity, you go looking for validation in your relationships. You call the friend you already know will agree with you, the one who'll get on your bandwagon the second you need to feel sorry for yourself.

We call it venting or processing. Honestly, a lot of the time it's just two people agreeing to one story, and that's gossip at the root. Not because either of you is a bad person. Because misery genuinely does love company.

I was miserable. I just didn't fully realize how miserable until I was already sucked all the way into the story.

4. A pattern you already healed can come back in costume

This is the part that stopped me. I've done this exact work on myself before. I unwired this pattern years ago. And it came back anyway, in a new city, with new people, wearing a costume good enough that I almost didn't recognize it.

Sometimes the thing you need to heal comes back incognito, just to check if you really learned the lesson or only memorized the answer. That's not failure. That's a normal part of doing real work.

Recognition is the whole first move. You cannot change what you cannot see, and most people are never quite willing to get that honest with themselves. If you want to go deeper on how the nervous system gets stuck in a protective loop like this, I did a full episode on the four survival responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, which lays the groundwork for exactly what's happening here.

How to Break the Pattern When Nothing Seems to Be Working Out

Here's the exact journaling practice I went back to. Grab a notebook and be honest, don't filter it.

Step 1: Name the story. What is the story you keep telling about yourself or your life right now? Write it down exactly as it sounds in your head, no editing.

Step 2: Find the one core emotion underneath it. One word if you can. Rejected, unseen, unworthy, excluded, alone. That's the raw feeling driving the whole story.

Step 3: Notice what personality shows up to protect that identity. When you're in this emotion, do you withdraw? Get suspicious, resentful, needy, closed off? Maybe you overperform instead. Write down what shows up.

Step 4: Decide what you actually want to feel instead, and who you'd have to become to feel it. So many of us are fluent in what we don't want. Fewer of us have ever sat down and named what we do want, and what version of us gets to have it.

Step 5: Locate the feeling in your body. How do you feel physically when you're in this identity? For me it's contraction, getting smaller, my shoulders and stomach pulling in. The body speaks first, and it's the subconscious mind talking.

This journaling can genuinely shift things on its own. But the subconscious belief wired in when you were small doesn't always move with journaling alone, and that's real, not a knock on you for trying.

Common Subconscious Patterns and Survival Modes to Watch For

• Scanning for proof instead of sitting with what is. Once you decide you're excluded, your mind treats confirming it like a full time job. It's not lying to you, it's being loyal to protecting you, even when that protection is costing you what you actually want.
• Calling the friend who'll always take your side. It feels like support. Sometimes it's actually two people agreeing to keep one story alive.
• Mistaking a familiar pain for your personality. "I'm just someone this always happens to" is a story, not a fact, even when it feels airtight.
• Assuming healed means gone forever. A pattern can absolutely return in a new costume. That doesn't erase the work you already did, it just means there's another layer.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• The episode on the four survival responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, which this one builds directly on
• The journaling practice walked through step by step above
• If you're ready to see what's actually running the show, let's map it out together. Book a Freedom Roadmap Session. No pitch. No pressure. Just clarity.
• If you need something for tonight, start with the Free 5 Minute Nervous System Reset. It takes about 120 seconds to move the stress chemicals of that spiral out of your body.

Work With Me

If you've done the healing work before and an old pattern still found its way back in, you're not failing. You just can't read the label on the jar from inside the jar.

In my 1:1 sessions, we don't just talk about the pattern, we go into the subconscious together on purpose and actually rewire it. Not memorizing the answer, but genuinely relearning it at the level where it was first written.

If that's what you've been needing, let's map it out on a Freedom Roadmap Session.

And if this episode met you exactly where you are, do me a favor. Follow the show, download it, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts so another woman who feels exactly like you do can find it.

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