This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Hi, and welcome back to Tiny Sparks. This week we have a little mini podcast episode. I like to change up the way I present the information to you, because some of us like to listen, some of us like to read, and the good thing is, with the podcast episode, if you don't want to listen, you can read the full transcript below. So this week, I wanted to talk about something that comes up so frequently in therapy and healing work, which is the idea of self-sabotage. I see people all the time on social media talking about this, and very, very often the people I work with will come in and say, oh, I was making so much progress. And then I did this, this and this this weekend. And I'm just too self-sabotaging. And oftentimes the way that term self-sabotaging is used is it's very critical, it's very collapsing. It's this idea that I was doing good and now I'm bad. I'm sabotaging myself. And very often, what I want to support people in knowing is that it's not that you are “bad” or purposefully getting in your own way, but rather that a part of your brain is trying to protect you and keep you safe. That automatically shifts the lens from this collapsing blaming lens to this understanding of there's something deeper happening when we talk about self-sabotage. People mean all kinds of things when they talk about self-sabotage. A lot of times people will talk about things like procrastination, oh, I landed this project that I'm really, really excited about, but instead of working on it this weekend, I scrolled on my phone and watched TV all weekend. I am self-sabotaging and always delaying things- I'm never following through. Self-sabotage can show up in other ways, too. Perfectionism can be a form of self-sabotage, where we set impossibly high standards for ourselves that we can never reach. But oftentimes, self-sabotage people mean that they're not on the path that they want to be on. So they'll say, well, I was really wanting to go to the gym every day to take care of my health, and I did it for three weeks. But then this weekend, I didn't go to the gym at all. I laid on the couch all day and I just ate snacks, and I didn't move, and I didn't even go on a walk. I'm just really self-sabotaging. So first, there's this really problematic idea, which is that when we're wanting to make a change in our lives or to do something differently, or to move toward something different, that we have to be doing it exactly right every single day, or else we're not successful in that change. That, in its core, is a misunderstanding of how our brain works. When we're trying to make changes or move towards something we want that is new, that is different, that is something we haven't done before, we have to think about our brain and to understand that the things we have done repeatedly in our lives are like beautiful, paved highways in our brain. Our brain creates these patterns on based on what has happened to us in the past, so that it can predict what is going to happen in the future. So you can kind of think of the roadways in a city. They're not going to make beautiful big paved highways out in the rural country where not a lot of people go. They might have one, two lane rural state highway. They're not going to have a big, beautiful, gorgeous 12 lane interstate. They make the interstates around the major cities where there are a lot of people going, and our brain works the same way. It builds these pathways to say, this is something that's happened in the past. It's likely something that will happen in the future. It's something that I need to be able to access regularly. So I will build a roadway around it. It doesn't matter whether it's something that we like, something we don't like. It's all about what is going to keep us safe, keep us going and what we do repeatedly. When you want to make a change in your brain, you are saying, I want to go off of