Are you one of those women who accomplish so much, but when it comes to your love life, you wind up confused? Is self-sabotaging in relationships a part of your ways of managing anxiousness?

Imagine meeting a man who makes the process of dating and relationship easier for you and doesn’t leave you guessing and wondering where you stand. All you need to do is yield to the experience of feeling cherished, appreciated, or desired. He is eager to get to know you, your family, your background, what makes you tick, and what makes you frustrated. Your idiosyncrasies, those things you may be afraid to show to the world, are the exact things he adores about you.  

Oh that’s possible. I take this back. It’s not only possible, but completely probable if you know what you want and how to get it. But there is one caveat. 

Most anxious love seekers self-sabotage their chances of having a happy relationship.

Why do we self-sabotage in our relationships?

We can talk about why they do that and write a book, but simply put, we use various strategies to keep ourselves from being hurt. We develop these strategies as a consequence of emotional trauma. These strategies help us survive the tough environments. So what happens when we start a romantic relationship? Our old emotional trauma becomes triggered and we often wind up sabotaging this relationship.

Potential of intimacy in a relationship is one of the most triggering. Depending on your attachment style, but if you have an anxious attachment style, fear of pain and abandonment will most likely cause you to consciously or unconsciously start sabotaging your relationship.

You see, these can be various, and they affect our love life in different ways. Now, let’s see how you identify these so you don’t let them keep sabotaging your love life. When something triggering happens, you will feel a rush of various emotions, such as anger, fear, a sense of worthlessness, and so on. You need to pause and ask yourself if this triggering event is so strong that it is causing you all these emotions, or is there some old pain being triggered here?

When you do more exploration most likely you will realize that your reaction to the current event is much larger than it warrants. Then identify your emotions and explore the past events when you felt like this. You will usually find that these emotions come from old emotional trauma. To identify the trauma beliefs, you can ask yourself: “What does this tell me about myself, men, love, relationships, world, and so on. When you identify these beliefs, it will be easier to avoid self-sabotaging in relationships because awareness will help you pause and make informed instead of automated choices on how to react to certain situations. 

There is a moment in life when you realize that nobody can care as much as you do. When you get to this point in life, you can actually start the healing process. One of the very effective methods is to address your young wounded parts that are harboring these limiting beliefs because those beliefs helped them survive at some point. Now, those young parts need to get a memo that you are a grown successful woman who can protect her heart and all those young parts that need to feel loved, protected, seen.

In other words, you will learn how to manage the triggers and replace your trauma beliefs and automations with positive accurate beliefs that are more aligned with your goals of finding love and creating a healthy, secure relationship. Doing this will also help you pause trauma mental automations and become more mindful. A big part of this you’ve already done by identifying your trauma beliefs.

The next step is showing yourself compassion and curiosity. Remember these two words, compassion and curiosity. Imagine you are talking to a young child, your daughter or niece. 

What would you say? Something like, “You stupid thing. Why do you care if he calls you?” Well, no. This is usually how we talk to ourselves. If we talked to a child, we would say something like, “I know it’s upsetting that he didn’t call you, but him not calling you doesn’t mean you are not attractive. 

You can expand this to your current relationship and remember that both you and your partner have younger wounded parts. With this awareness, your communication can be much more effective.

This is just a small example of re-parenting our younger parts, but you can understand how this step can help you stop self-sabotaging in relationships. I will teach more about it in my upcoming coaching program.

We all have some difficult moments in life even if you come from a nice family. All good and hard times help us create a love story. It's usually based on how family and society treats us and then what kinds of beliefs we create based on that treatment. We can choose to willow in feeling victimized or we can decide to learn from the past experiences and decisions we made. Most importantly, you have the power. This takes a lot of exploration and it's built upon the above two steps, identifying self-sabotaging beliefs, and learning how to re-parent your younger wounded parts.

Now we can reframe our story. Instead of yielding to those limiting beliefs and deciding that you will never be happy in love because you haven't been so far, you can learn from it. For instance, you realize now that your ex isn’t the right man for you. But, you also see the reason why you fell for him. Many anxious love seekers fall for someone who’s similar to their emotionally unavailable parent. In this instance, you can decide to be aware of your tendencies to be attracted to these kinds of people.

In other words, you will learn how to manage the triggers and replace your trauma beliefs and automations with positive accurate beliefs that are more aligned with your goals of finding love and creating a healthy, secure relationship. Doing this will also help you pause trauma mental automations and become more mindful. A big part of this you’ve already done by identifying your trauma beliefs.

The next step is showing yourself compassion and curiosity. Remember these two words, compassion and curiosity. Imagine you are talking to a young child, your daughter or niece. 

What would you say? Something like, “You stupid thing. Why do you care if he calls you?” Well, no. This is usually how we talk to ourselves. If we talked to a child, we would say something like, “I know it’s upsetting that he didn’t call you, but him not calling you doesn’t mean you are not attractive. 

You can expand this to your current relationship and remember that both you and your partner have younger wounded parts. With this awareness, your communication can be much more effective.

This is just a small example of re-parenting our younger parts, but you can understand how this step can help you stop self-sabotaging in relationships. I will teach more about it in my upcoming coaching program.

When you meet someone, you may also decide to take your time and see if they are truly emotionally unavailable like your parents, or it is only your fear because of the past experiences. It doesn't mean you will end up miserable if you are dating an emotionally unavailable person. Most importantly you know now that you don’t want to give your heart just because there is strong chemistry between you two. So you reframed your love story. Instead of feeling like a victim or the one who is unlucky in love, to someone who knows that she can learn from these past experiences. With this new sense of power, you don't have to unconsciously keep self-sabotaging in relationships.

These are just a few tips that I teach in my Self-Sabotage Liberation guide. You can use these to start applying small changes that can yield great results. 

If you want to build powerful attraction with quality men or improve the relationship with your partner join my Secure Love Creator Club.