An Archaeology of Self Sabotage

Imagine that 50,000 years ago, you are you but much younger — perhaps 7, 8, 9 years old — and you look up at your parent’s face with the sun gleaming behind them over the African savannah. In their eye you see a sudden but brief look of disdain and with it a sudden tightness in your gut. You had seen the look before though the brevity of this occasion was only an inkling suggestion of the uncompromising extent to which it had disturbed your composure the last time you had seen it or remembered seeing it anyways. For on this occasion, much like the previous, it was followed by a kind of lesson that to the mind of such an adolescent suggested an import of the severest nature and a suggestion of what would ultimately prove to be the normalcy of your relationship.

Before you in your small hands a length of wildebeest tendon is pulled taunt against the notched length of a two year old sapling held firmly against the ground between your first and second toes. Leaning heavily onto the sapling you pull the length of animal sinew ever tighter as the sapling bends.

For a moment it seems possible as you watch the sapling bend under your strength as you reach the thong for the opposite end of the bow staff. Although as your strength is depleted, it becomes apparent that you do not possess enough strength to complete the task for quite suddenly your progress bottoms out. But you have more ingenuity than that and you stand and reposition the far end of the staff in a nook at the base of a nearby tree and thereby allowing a greater portion of your weight to aid in a fuller bend to the staff to more completely serve the objective.

The staff bends deeply and the thong loop is so close. And then you glance and there is the look of disdain. Your parent’s eye turns hard as he looks squarely at you. At the critical moment of the procedure the look disturbs your concentration and the bow staff slips from your hand and recoils upon your breast and back off the tree and falls to the ground. Though with failure the look in his eye does not go sourer still but rather it softens.

Your father picks up the bow staff and the length of treated sinew, and this time standing over you he holds the bow staff with your hands beside his and his strength coupled with yours you easily loop both ends of the thong to the staff, and there you have a bow.

As you look over the bow, your bow, your first bow he takes your small shoulder in his hand and holds it firmly for a moment. It is a kindly grip. But what registers to your mind just below the surface is that you have not superseded his instruction and for this he has rewarded you with praise and affection. However many interpretations may be available of your attempt at doing what certainly would have accomplished the task at hand entirely on your own, you have instead done it with his full recognition and with all but perfect precision to what he has told you to do.

But, nonetheless, that look of disdain stays with you because it jogs a memory that is rather near. Only the day before, in fact, you had again transcended his instruction due to your lack of strength and chose to gain better leverage when chipping stone for an arrow point and as you completed the task, your father instead walked away, the look unchanged and a feeling of despair set with you.

Later in bed, the image of your father wordlessly turning his back to you and walking away flashed before your mind and kept you up that night. But then again, there was somewhere in you a much deeper conjecture concerning your father’s behavior that wasn’t based on mere frustration at having completed a task with your own amendment to his instruction. There was in fact a conjecture derived from ancestors that preceded you again by another 50,000 years when the community was again more precariously situated upon the edge of survival than the last and violence over the merest jealousy or perceived threat to an insecure intelligence was the difference between a meal or starvation.

Embedded in the very fabric of your mind are millennia upon millennia of a storied past. The tragedy and success of presumably innumerable generations of adolescents who preceded you. Each of their stories informing your emotional and intuitive reaction to nearly everything in your world.

In one story, a neglected child is snake bitten who wandered to a nearby creek unattended and through him no further generations were espoused. Another under similar circumstances is dragged screaming into the jungle by a leopard. But then again, there is another who gained a nod and smile as the child superseded the instruction of their parent in stringing their first bow who accomplished the task and was congratulated for it. Another still, self possessed enough to gain the ancient equivalent of chiefdom and learned through adequate instruction to question themselves more often than not under circumstances of worthy consequence for their parent also taught that despite that parent’s greater wisdom the parent did not desire you to believe that they possessed a perfect wisdom, for believing that you are smart enough is useful, but believing that you are unerringly smart is just neurotic arrogance.

But when we turn back to your story as you string your first bow, what has gone largely unacknowledged in the occasion of your father teaching you to string a bow was not ultimately how near you were to accomplishing the goal regardless of how it was gained. What has gone unacknowledged was the implied instruction in addition to the most essential purpose of the occasion, that being: “Do not supersede my instruction.” And here your father’s actions speak multitudes more than his words. Gone unchecked, his words will reverberate across your lifetime, for certainly as you inevitably gain more wisdom his instructions will be ever more amended, superseded, and — if you are adamantly rebellious despite the implied consequences— disregarded.

And so over this slow conditioning you realize — though to such youth that realization might well be better considered as laying much closer to the unconscious as opposed to the conscious mind — you have learned in ever so discrete a fashion to set aside the expression of your intelligence for the sacrosanctity of love, affection, attention, any guidance at all, and reassurance. Because somewhere deep deep in the psyche there is not only the threat of a lost meal at a time when such ancestors could not afford to lose a meal but also the predatory threats that preside over any jungle or savannah for a hunter gatherer.

The thing is is that the child in our more secure, edge of survival resistant present relies on a mind that has evolved by and large to exist in a very different time and circumstance, a mind that does not know that their parent will not or could not at least lawfully walk away and leave them to a night alone presumably to their doom. For if they did, they might say “Hey! Fuck you buddy! Let me figure this shit out!”

For in our evolutionary past, a parent who is insecure about their intelligence and “rewards’’ you for your failures with affection and attention as often as they ignore you for your successes and improvements upon his guidance and teaching is conditioning you to sabotage yourself and the expression of your creativity and intelligence for the sake of their emotional instability.

These early memories transform what would have otherwise been as you reach adulthood. They no longer maintain the form of literal imagistic emotion in your mind’s eye that keep you up at night as a child, but rather as an adult these memories and others like it inform your behavior and how and what exactly you will sacrifice for love, affection, reassurance and guidance and, furthermore, what you won’t. For love at its minimum is a demonstration of another’s willingness to see that you survive but at its maximum it is a willingness to guide you to an understanding of how to thrive.

Such demonstrations in the early portion of our lives become in fact not merely memories but a veritable roadmap for life. Indeed, one need only look at their life to see what they have sacrificed for love in the past to know what they might sacrifice for love in the future. Though that is easier said than done. Many of these sacrifices anyone would consider noble but for others they may be precisely the difference between one who is self sabotaging and one who is not.

The self sabotager has learned to equate thriving with undermining their very capacity for the expression of their own intelligence. Because of course under other more “cogent” circumstances the intelligence required to understand that you were very much in need of adjusting your behavior according to your parent’s insecurities and emotional instability is in fact rather preceptive and might feasibly have been used just as easily to better learn to string a bow, hunt antelope, or — perhaps what is more relevant to modernity — not showing up absurdly late for a date, or not say things during a job interview that later cause you to wonder: “Why did I say that?”

Indeed, how often do we ask ourselves that very question? “Why did I say that?” “Why did I do that?” But the answer does not seem to be there at the surface, and yet even in the moment of having done or said the thing you feel your face getting hot with frustration and embarrassment. Perhaps you’ve even seen it in the faces of the people you’re working with or speaking to.

Here it is clear that some part of you is working at cross purposes with your self. Whatever that is, it is working at a level of the psyche that is not readily available to your consciousness and yet it is there disrupting you nonetheless because you see it in the actions you’ve made and that you find strange and curious and misguided, at least in retrospect.

These memories and very likely many many more memories like it quite literally become embedded in your psyche and inform your intuitions as an adult. If unchecked they will for all intents and purposes be recognized by others as being synonymous with who you are as a person, as an individual. And an individual so-constructed will seem to make mistakes and be entrapped in failure as simply a matter of their personality and, therefore, further solidifying the self fulfilling prophecy set out for them in childhood: compromise yourself, your needs, your dignity for others because if you don’t they won’t love you.

Because let’s be clear, people do always love other people at least in the minimum sense who make them feel good about themselves, and a person who is willing to sacrifice their dignity to prop up another’s is always a good friend to have around. The self-sabotager may have the benefit of having many friends who love them but very few — perhaps none — are genuinely interested in see them thrive in self-actualization.

Of course few people are acquainted with modern theories of the developing personality so why would they know that such traits are not a static, unchanging aspect of another person’s existence? For the average person they see a person’s behavior and make inferences about what they are likely to do in the future. And isn’t that a useful way of assessment? Of course. But for the person who has sacrificed their dignity for another, would they not choose otherwise if they could better see what motivates their behavior and why it came to be as it is?

To be clear, the habits of the self-sabotager are not merely personality traits in the conventional sense. They are characteristics of how some individuals navigate their relationships, their careers, their friendships and not because they can’t do something else but because they didn’t know they could. The issue of course is that outside of the idiosyncratic circumstances in which the self-sabotager grew up such behavior might well get them fired, cheated on, ignored, sidelined, and secretly considered loveable but incompetent. Which is almost what the self-sabotager wanted but… not quite.

This most importantly is not a condemnation of parents in general however misguided they can be, for certainly had they known better they would have done bette. In part isn’t that why you have read this far, to do better for yourself and, thereby, do better for your own children present or future? If they had had better access to and knowledge of the repercussions of their own behavior as a guide and teacher and the near impossible importance of every minute behavior that a child will inevitably pay attention to they would essentially be a very different person, at least in the conventional sense.

As Carl Jung said, the psyche develops from infancy through adulthood and across the lifespan on a spectrum starting from unconsciousness toward increasing consciousness. It is not simply a switch to be turned on when we say it is. And if that path toward consciousness is stunted in any way, then that particular corridor will be closed off until necessity reveals to us the need to walk it. Though unfortunately for essentially all children, due to the vulnerable nature of childhood it is often not the child that will entreat the parent to look in those places they least want to look, which is to say that it is your insecurities as a parent that you are least likely to look at and most likely to defend at the merest antagonization from anyone and perhaps particularly one as ill-equipped for conflict as a child. And there the path is laid.

Furthermore, Dr. Jung also said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And there we have both the answer to our question “Why did I say that?” — implying that we are fated as such — and a clear articulation of the loss for words at our asking of it in the first place. For how else might we describe something that is more complex than we can as yet understand?

It is easy to call it fate or God but perhaps that is a misdirection even a sacrilege depending on your beliefs. All too often it is rather something we just do not want to see about ourselves and blaming or explaining it away by conjuring God or fate is just a cop out on it.

To condemn the parent is to assume a supreme subjective importance to your own story which is a rather grandiose and egotistical take on the circumstances. It’s as if to put your story in monument above theirs, though of course this was not meant to be read by any one person. And in that sense it is meant for no one person directly but every one directly.

Rather, a more relevant and less self centered approach might be to use the same archeology to understand the parent which in turn will also help you better understand yourself so as to end your habitual self sabotaging and, perhaps, even to lay the groundwork and the empathetical framework for you to desire and, thusly, guide them away from further sabotaging themselves and their relationships as your parent had with you.

It would be quite ignorant and self centered to assume that the forces at work in you are only at work in you, as if you were somehow less subject to the pitfalls and follies of human nature than other humans. But truly that which your parent is subject to is often equal in part or in whole in you.

To make such a discovery is to know that had you not made such a discovery of yourself you too would be condemned to a similar fate with your children. Which is also to say that the forces at work in your life by and large are far grander than you yourself, and that the forces at work in you are at work in almost everyone.

The variations are rather minute but important since even the smallest variation can be greatly magnified across years, decades, a lifetime or generations. But with the caveat that one ought to understand what differences there might actually be, though we too often claim/mistake the largest of them as our most subjective when it is in fact the opposite. And in this sense it is important to be aware of what we can to both ease our own burdens and those of our loved ones.

An endnote:

I should point out that my intention isn’t to pick on fathers specifically. As I stand to be a father at some point, it is my inclination to see that cycles such as these are broken. I don’t believe one side of parenthood is anymore likely to be subject to such courses of action as those outlined here than any other. But as I would like to invest my time writing other things than reiterating ideas already expressed in similar context, the reader might take matters into their own hands to see how these ideas might express themselves in people other than fathers.

I’m not sure how to attribute this. I referenced nothing in its writing. In this sense, I am the only authority I can think to refer to directly, but I can give a handful of authors who are likely to have given me useful ways of understanding in order to have written it.

Notes on likely inspiration:

David Buss — an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin
Lindsay Gibson — a clinical psychologist who has written extensively about child/parent relationships.
Abraham Maslow — a psychologist known for his work in his hierarchy of needs and positive psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung — founder of analytical psychology