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Issue 7 > Sabotage and persistence.

Sabotage and persistence.

Christine Kane shows how to live your tale.

I got an email recently from someone asking about self-sabotage. The person wrote that she has a pattern of getting to a certain point in her vision for herself, when things are going well, and she'll find a way to mess it up.

There are so many levels to the idea of sabotage that it can be a challenge to see it clearly. On the one level, I totally get the idea of messing things up, right when they're going well.

I get that this happens because of how scared you can feel when things are looking like they might just be working. And I get that being scared can make some people go unconscious just to escape the uncomfortable feeling of fear. (Going unconscious meaning anything from eating five pieces of cheesecake, to watching re-run after re-run of Friends, to impulsively heading to the beach with an ex-lover—name your vice.)

Then, once you're deep into the unconscious state—bam!—you do something dumb. Or you do something mean. Or you continue to do dumb and mean things for an entire year until you've succeeded in beating the living crap out of all that was good in the first place. And then, you find yourself back where you're comfortable—in the land of things-are-awful-and-i'm-to-blame.

You're never done.

Okay, but here's the thing: The minute you realize that you've gone unconscious, or when you catch yourself in the midst of it, what stops you from picking yourself up, looking around at what's gone on, dusting off, cleaning up, and starting again? (Step away from the cheesecake!)

That is the issue here. Not the sabotage thing. Because nothing is ever done until you decide it's done. As one of the retreat participants said to another last weekend, 'Of course you're not done! You're not a roast, you know.'

The question becomes this: How do you know it's messed up? When exactly is the point your vision is really wrecked?

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