You finally get the good thing: the relationship that’s steady, the promotion, the friendship that’s truly reciprocal, and right when it’s working, you pick a fight, or pull back, or suddenly find something wrong that wasn’t there last week. There are two very specific reasons you self-sabotage when things are finally going well, and today you’ll learn both, plus effective tools so you can stop self-sabotaging and start enjoying your life.
10-minute read
Introduction
I’ve covered self-sabotage before. Back in Season 3, I looked at how it’s usually rooted in your childhood, in the attachment patterns you built early on, and I gave you a four-step process for working through it. Then in Season 5, I talked about the psychological tug-of-war between wanting something and being afraid of it, and that one included tools for catching yourself in the act. If you struggle with self-sabotage, I’m going to highly recommend that you go check out both of those episodes.
Those episodes are fabulous, of course, but they were about self-sabotage everywhere it shows up. Today’s different, because we’re zeroing in on one specific trigger: the moment when things are going well. There are two main reasons you self-sabotage when things are going your way (and both are unconscious, as you might have guessed). The first is that you sabotage yourself before you even know how something’s going to turn out, so you’ve got a built-in excuse if it fails. The second reason is that you pick a fight or pull back once something good is happening, because somewhere deep down in your psyche, you don’t believe you deserve it.
Reason One: You’re Protecting Your Image Before the Outcome Even Happens
Psychologists Steven Berglas and Edward Jones named this first one self-handicapping, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: you create the obstacle yourself, on purpose, before you know whether you’ll succeed or fail, so you’ve got a built-in excuse either way.
And you might be doing this more often than you realize. I had a client, we’ll call her Claire. Claire was sharp, good at her job, the kind of person who could have breezed through most anything she was assigned. But she always found a way to screw herself over, especially at work.
We’d been working together for a short bit when she got tapped to run a presentation that could have moved her career forward in a real way, the kind of chance she’d waited years for. Instead of prepping like it mattered, she stayed out too late the night before, told the whole office how slammed she’d been all week, and opened the presentation itself with “I kind of threw this together.” She ended up doing OK with it (because she was sharp and good at her job, as I said) but was beating herself up in our next session because she couldn’t understand why she’d done this!
I told her why: If it flopped, she’d already told everyone why. If it landed anyway, look what she pulled off on no sleep and zero prep. That’s unconsciously why she’d self-sabotaged this opportunity.
I’ve worked with people who’ve self-sabotaged in this way for years. I had one guy who “forgot” to train before running a half-marathon he was doing for a local charity. Same thing here: if he finished, he’s proving that he’s a natural, and if he didn’t finish, he proved he was never really ready anyway (he ended up not finishing and feeling ashamed since he didn’t get the money he was hoping for his charity).
Another client was meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time and wanted to make a great impression (he was totally in love with this woman) but did zero planning for it. No gift for the parents, didn’t think about how he was dressed, and ended up showing up late to the restaurant where they were all meeting. Not a great first impression. Once again, if something like that goes badly, well, you never really tried. If it goes well anyway, look at you, charming everyone without even trying. Either way, you never find out what happens when you actually show up.
I’ve worked with so many folks who are dating for a while, then they finally meet someone decent, and instead of showing up as themselves, they hold back, stay a little guarded, and keep one foot by the door. It’s so much scarier to try and fail than to just not truly try.
And this isn’t just about people who expect to fail. I looked at some research published just this year that shows that people who are already doing well do this too! Think about it, if you succeed anyway, despite some excuse, you look even more impressive. This means that the better things are going for you, the more tempting this might get (not less). The relationship you care about most, the job you’re genuinely good at, the goal you badly want – those are exactly the spots where your brain is most likely to plant an excuse, because those are the spots where failing would cost you something.
Self-Handicapping Tool: The Alibi Check
So, what do you do if you’re self-handicapping? Before something that matters – a presentation, a first date, a hard conversation – notice if you’re doing something that could double as a built-in excuse if it goes badly. Not sleeping enough, skipping the prep, having one more drink than you should, downplaying out loud how much you care. Ask yourself one question, and be honest: if this goes badly, will I be able to say it wasn’t really me trying? If the answer’s yes, that’s the tell.
Say you’ve got a performance review coming up that could set up a promotion you want. The Alibi Check version of you notices you’ve started telling everyone in the office, “I probably won’t even get it,” and catches that for exactly what it is: an excuse under construction, not a realistic prediction. The fix isn’t fake confidence; it’s removing that escape hatch on purpose. Stop saying the thing that gives you an out. Prep like it matters, because it does. Decide in advance that whatever happens here counts, no built-in excuse standing by, no matter how badly some part of you wants one.
It works the same way in a relationship. If you catch yourself thinking “I won’t bring up how serious this is getting, I’ll just see what happens,” notice that vagueness is doing the exact same job as the sleepless night before Claire’s presentation. It’s not patience; it’s an exit already installed, just in case. Say the real thing you mean instead, on purpose. Be radically honest with yourself.
As always, to do this, you’re going to need to make mindfulness a habit
Reason Two: You’re Undoing the Good Thing Once It’s Already Started
The second reason you self-sabotage when things are going well comes from self-verification theory, which is something I talked about back in Season 8 when I discussed why you keep choosing the wrong partner.
Self-verification theory was first coined by psychologist William Swann. His research shows that people are wired to keep the world matching what they already believe about themselves, even when that belief is negative.
For example, in that episode I talked about his theory that people don’t just seek partners who make them feel good. They seek partners who confirm their existing beliefs about themselves. If somewhere in your psyche you believe you’re unworthy of real love, too needy, or destined to be let down, you’ll unconsciously filter for partners who confirm that belief. Swann’s studies found that people with negative self-views were more committed to, and stayed longer in, relationships with partners who treated them poorly, because those partners felt more true, more real, more like what they expected. A genuinely kind, available, consistent person can feel suspicious if it doesn’t match your internal model of what you deserve.
If you really want to get scared, I can tell you that Swann also found that married people with negative self-views actually felt closer to their spouses the more negatively those spouses evaluated them, not less! Yes, yikes! Dating couples showed the opposite, favoring partners who saw them well. The difference is time and commitment. Once a relationship settles into something permanent, the pull toward being known accurately, even unflatteringly, gets stronger than the pull toward being flattered, again, even though their self-view was likely skewed.
If part of you has spent years believing you’re too much, not enough, or hard to love, a partner or a boss or a friend who treats you like none of that is true can start to feel wrong. Again, you might even be suspicious of them. What happens then is that some part of you goes looking for a way to affirm your underlying beliefs and make them true because a world where you were wrong about yourself is, weirdly, scarier than a world where you’re just confirmed to be exactly the mess you always suspected.
I had a client, we’ll call her Maya, who spent years bouncing between relationships that left her exhausted, then finally met someone steady, someone who really showed up. Six months in, everything was good, better than she’d let herself imagine, and she became convinced he was pulling away (even though it was clear to me that he wasn’t). She just couldn’t stop checking his phone, picking fights about nothing, testing him in small ways to see if he’d finally prove her right. It took a minute, but I kept pointing out that the relationship wasn’t the problem. The problem was that her whole sense of herself had been built around being someone who gets left, and being loved consistently didn’t fit that, so part of her kept trying to force reality back into a relationship she could recognize. From the outside, that looks like self-sabotage. From the inside, it just feels like something’s off, even though nothing really is.
I see this showing up at people’s jobs too, probably more than anywhere else. You finally get a boss who values you, gives you real credit, doesn’t nitpick everything, and instead of just enjoying that like a normal person, you start waiting for the catch. You second-guess a compliment. You assume the good project is a setup for something worse later. You’ve spent so long believing you have to earn every ounce of approval that approval without a fight attached feels, again, almost suspicious, so some part of you manufactures problems, just to make the math feel right again.
Undoing the Good Tool: Fight the Evidence, Not the Person
So, what do you do if you catch yourself “undoing” the good? When something good happens that doesn’t match your old story about yourself, part of you goes looking for proof the old story’s still true. A fight out of nowhere, sudden doubt about the promotion, or testing a partner who’s been steady the whole time. Catch the urge and name it specifically: what old belief about yourself is this good thing contradicting? Then write down the real evidence for the new version, on paper, not just in your head.
Say the fight you’re about to pick is with a partner who forgot to text back for two hours. Before you say a word, ask what that silence is really threatening. If the honest answer is “I’ve always believed I’m too needy to be loved well,” the job isn’t talking to your partner for hours about why they didn’t text back immediately and asking what’s wrong over and over. It’s writing down three specific things this person has done that contradict that belief, so you can’t argue with it later. In other words, you’re not managing the fight in front of you. Instead, you’re managing the much older belief system underneath it, and you’re not going to solve that by winning an argument about a text.
Or let’s say your boss gives you a real compliment and your gut reaction is to explain why you don’t quite deserve it; stop and ask what old story that reflex is protecting. Then list, on paper, two or three real things you did that earned that praise.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
- Are You Self-Handicapping or Self-Verifying? A 2-Minute Check-In if You’re Self-Sabotaging When Things Are Good
- The Alibi Check Worksheet: Catch the Excuse Before You Make It
- Fight the Evidence Worksheet: Catch Yourself Undoing the Good Thing
- The RET Tool: Rewriting the Story Underneath the Sabotage
- Journaling Prompts: Uncover your self-sabotaging beliefs
- Bird’s-Eye Pattern Inventory: Where Each Pattern Shows Up in Your Life
References
- Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 405-417.
- Xiang, Y., Gershman, S. J., & Gerstenberg, T. (2025). A signaling theory of self-handicapping. Cognition, 266, Article 106288.
- Swann, W. B., Jr. (1983). Self-verification: Bringing social reality into harmony with the self. In J. Suls & A. G. Greenwald (Eds.), Social Psychological Perspectives on the Self (Vol. 2). Erlbaum.
- Swann, Hixon, & De La Ronde, “Embracing the Bitter Truth: Negative Self-Concepts and Marital Commitment
- Swann, W. B., Jr., De La Ronde, C., & Hixon, J. G. (1994). Authenticity and positivity strivings in marriage and courtship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(5), 857-869.
