How You Could Be in Self-Sabotage Due to Past Trauma and a Protective Nervous System

Self-sabotage happens when you are in your own way of your overall happiness and success. You are either doing or not doing something that blocks achieving your goals. For example, despite wanting to have a loving relationship with your partner, you undertake actions that block connection or intimacy. 

So here’s what I discovered about how we could be sabotaging our present due to the past…

Even though the past traumatic experience is now over, our nervous system continues to use the encoded information that is from the distressing memory to disrupt us today. 

Let me attempt to explain further. Say, you find yourself experiencing anxiety symptoms such as nervous tension, dizziness, an inability to keep still or even having meltdowns. If you are to trace back the earliest time when you first had these symptoms, you may realise that your problem originated from the past. Your body is responding or reacting today from what took place years ago. This being the case, it is drawing information from the past and activating your nervous system. Using the picture, you will see how the “zzz” energy disruption is affecting you. 

Your nervous system signals a lack of safety, triggering the instinct to protect yourself often through fight, flight or freeze response. You are also apt to undertake behavioural patterns that put you in self-sabotage. Thus, despite your desire to lead your best life or to move forward, you remain captive to your past.

Note that past trauma need not be big events such as a death, divorce, sexual assault and so on. So long as the event or incident causes you emotional distress, you could potentially be disrupted for years. For example, if your mother ignored your cries for help in the past, the lack of love and feeling unworthy could affect you. And if she had repeatedly ignored you during childhood, you might find yourself always needing to seek approval and ending up in unhealthy relationships. 

How You Can Reverse Self-Sabotage

Fortunately, while you can’t alter the past traumatic events since they happened the way they did, you can still change the energetic information bringing about the distress that is affecting you today.

Since the body keeps the score, a somatic release and the calming of your nervous system is required. You work on clearing the “zzz” energy disruption. Once it is cleared, your past memory may remain but you are not longer affected by what took place in the past. Thus, if you’d like a more effective way of stopping the automatic responses and to reprogram a different response such that you are no longer having nervous tension and so on, the body and the nervous system need to be involved. This is why talk therapy alone is not effective for cases of deep-rooted anxiety, anger or depression. 

By releasing the energetic information and releasing the embodied distress at the root memory when your trauma first began, it becomes possible to free yourself. No longer holding on bottled-up anger and anxiety, you start to feel lighter and better. It’s how you can become more present and gain the freedom to pursue the life that you want. 
Hope the above information is helpful to you. 

Wishing you well-being,
Evelyn Lim
Transformation Life
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