Lack of forgiveness causes almost all of our self-sabotaging behavior.
– Mark Victor Hansen
When I first read this it took me by surprise. I thought but self-sabotaging behavior is what I am doing to myself. Why would lack of forgiveness be behind it? So I went to my earliest memory that created the pattern of “it isn’t safe to be seen”. Okay, my logical mind threw into my face, how is this created from lack of forgiveness? I had walked into my mom’s room after I woke up from my nap at 4 yrs old and exposed her adultery. From that experience came the life self-sabotaging pattern “it wasn’t safe to be seen”. Bad things happened according to my 4 yr old little girl, since soon afterward my parents divorced. What did I have to forgive myself for?
A critical key to achieving success lies in your ability to activate your potential to create the results you seek. , start by being aware of your self-sabotaging patterns.
– Lauren Mackley
For years I had thought that I was responsible for the divorce. As an adult, I finally learned that what caused the divorce was that my mom got pregnant and my dad had gotten a vasectomy, partly because he thought my mom might be betraying him and partly because there were four little girls and he thought that was as big a family as they wanted. So when she got pregnant, it was pretty apparent that he was right. So even though I had wrongly assumed responsibility for the divorce, I knew I wasn’t. So why lack of forgiveness for the continuing pattern of being invisible?
Self-sabotage is the proverbial hammer over the head that finally wakes us up, demanding that we pay attention. For most of us, it takes something devastating to crack us open, to get us out of our minds and into our hearts.
– Debbie Ford
What I discovered as I dug into this thought, was that this had layers and layers of lack of forgiveness. Unfortunately, what you will discover when you unwind your own patterns of self-sabotage, it that it is never a “one and done” kind of journey. Every single time I think that I have unwound the tangled mess around fear of being seen, a new thread of yarn appears and I am again unwinding some small aspect of this pattern to discover another thought, such as this one. If the pattern is still showing up, then something is still attached waiting for me to find the end of the thread and being unraveling it.
As painful as it is, it’s easier to live in a world of unfulfilled potential than to open yourself up to the possibility you have no potential. It’s easier to tell yourself you “would” have done better if “if” you’d worked harder than to work your hardest and see what happens. It’s easier to tell yourself you “would” be happier with your body “if” you are healthy than to eat healthily and see what happens. It’s easier to tell yourself your life “would” be better “if” you woke up early than to wake up early and see what happens. The fear of failure is worse than failure itself. Be willing to fail so you can see that you probably won’t and if you do, that it’s really not that bad.
– Sam Brown
Entwined within the pattern of “it’s not safe to be seen” is fear of failure. I find fear of failure is like that weed that you can’t get rid of. It sneaks into everything. A lot of people think that fear of failure is simply what it says, the fear to fail. But hidden within that weed is another noxious substance that feeds into my “it’s not safe to be seen”. It is fear of success. The fear that if I am successful it will put me into the spotlight and that spotlight will follow me around like a hidden camera just waiting to expose some defect. It invites attention like the circus barker with the megaphone calling everyone to come under the big tent and watch as Sheryl tries to fly too high on the trapeze and falls to her sudden death. All of those people will sit on the edge of their seats just waiting to find a flaw with my performance. To tell me in detail about my inadequacies. So in short, put me back into the comfort zone never again to explore my hidden potential.
