Original content by Ashley Berges
Often sabotaging successes and borderline personality disorder is overlooked. It is a very important part of BPD. There is a tendency to sabotage one’s happiness and well-being. The reason for this self-sabotage is the overreaching feeling of not being deserving, not capable of doing something, having an unstable self-image, unstable emotions, and how self-sabotage is apparent in the many actions of someone with signs and symptoms of BPD.
Sabotaging success is very important to understand because it can get in the way of a multitude of things. It can get in the way of a career, relationships, and opportunities. This sabotage can get in the way of a job. Perhaps a conflict or an argument at work can lead to losing a job, something that may have been averted but was not.
We need to look at emotional dysregulation to understand why someone sabotages their success. People sabotage their success daily; you do not have to have borderline personality disorder to do this.
When someone is dealing with emotional dysregulation they have severe anxiety, severe depression, shame, anger, and self-harm. Self-harm can be both physical and emotional. Overdrinking and eating can be considered self-harm. Excessive substance abuse is another example of self-harm. Risky behaviors are a form of self-harm. Focusing on that behavior to avoid focusing on what is going on, to escape instead of focusing on the here and now. Perfectionism, trying to be perfect with everything. Finally high conflict with interpersonal relationships. This can get in the way of many things, especially when having to deal with groups of people.
There are many examples of sabotaging success. Let’s look at a few of them. We must remember that this can be a very large factor in someone’s life, something they repeat repeatedly. It can be a pattern in a person’s life where they just cannot get out of their way.
Another aspect of sabotaging success is getting very angry in situations that don’t require this type of elevation. This impacts careers and opportunities because most often people do not want to deal with this type of behavior. This causes other people to not be comfortable with what they have seen.
Not showing up is another type of sabotaging success. Someone just does not show up to a job or sleeps through a commitment. This is more of a passive way of sabotaging success.
Another aspect is that alcohol and drugs get in the way of success. Depression is another aspect of sabotaging success. Not able to make an appointment or participate in an activity.
It is difficult, situations pop up in life, and it is important to be able to realize and understand what matters. In the moment anger can take over and sabotage what we have been working for. Often we do not need someone else to be involved with the sabotage, we can just sabotage ourselves. We can set ourselves up for failure, by not setting an alarm, or drinking the night before a big event.
It is very important to understand that this type of sabotaging success directly relates to low self-esteem. It directly relates to feeling bad about one’s self. Keep in mind that we enjoy our triumphs and that occasionally we judge both our internal and external successes. Keep in mind that we enjoy our triumphs and that occasionally we judge both our internal and external successes. We base our value on outside successes. If we are torpedoing these successes, we feel as though we have failed as well as realizing that we are sabotaging ourselves. This creates more depression and sadness. We are then wondering how we get out of this pattern, and how do we stop it.
Although this is one of the more undercover impulsive risky behaviors of someone with signs and symptoms of BPD. It can get in the way of someone having success in their career or something they love to do. It all goes back to the person not feeling that they have a high enough value. When someone believes this way, it will continue to impact impulsive and risky behavior. This also impacts emotional dysregulation.
Ultimately this is one of the big aspects that someone with BPD signs and symptoms needs to realize is that when they have opportunities, how do they begin to safeguard them, how do they not repeat the pattern of torpedoing things? This sabotaging of success gets in the way of finding value. We must find value internal value but unfortunately, many of us need to see external value before we can see the internal value. When we don’t see the external value, such as a good job or success, we tend to beat ourselves up creating more problems and frustrations in our lives.
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