I doubt it's "self sabotage," Ryan Breen. I have a different hypothesis.
What if the all the progress that you say you were making wasn’t solving the real problem?
That is, you were losing weight and you were posting lots of articles on Medium, but these were always experiments for solving some deeper problem. You never sat down and said, “The problem is that I don’t have enough Medium articles,” because Medium articles (and weight loss) are both means to solve some more fundamental problem of esteem, or trauma.
What looks like “self sabotage” because you redirected your energy and behavior away from solutions that were not addressing your real, deeper problem could be your unconscious mind taking you away from what is not working in an attempt to find new experiments that will work better.
The real problem may be that your parents put you in no-win, double-bind dilemmas that undermined your developmental progress whenever it seemed to them like you might be putting your own needs ahead of theirs. (Or it might be something else. I’m speculating, as an example). If that’s the case, then you might be working hard in your unconscious mind to “push thru” the obstacles that your parents put in your way, as you did when you were a child, because that’s the only thing that worked for you then.
The problem could be that you are no longer a child, the obstacles your parents put before you are now imaginary, and pushing thru is no longer the way to continue your development — so your “solutions” are not match to the real problem of gaining self-authorship of your life without risking your parent’s rejection.
One thing I’ve discovered recently is that my own Inner Critic is somehow allied with the bullies and belittling and the stress and unfair criticism that I experienced as a child. I no longer think “self sabotage” is really a thing, and when those feelings come up for me, I go back to thinking “What problem am I trying to solve?”
My unconscious brain is always pulled back to working on problems that I’m not aware of. When I can pull those unconscious problems into my conscious mind, I find the solutions come easier.
