You may have said, or heard, that ‘you are your own worst enemy.‘ Although you’ve heard it, have you taken action to keep from becoming your own worst enemy?
You have enough on your plate with the affair. Doing things to sabotage yourself is not going to help you.
Becoming Your Own Worst Enemy <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. The topic we’re going to be dealing with today is becoming your worst enemy. This is one that I find that many of you have struggled with, because when an affair happens it shakes you up so bad.
A lot of times you find the struggles going on with inside yourself more insurmountable than some of the struggles with the cheater, even. You may have heard it said in the past “You are your own worst enemy.”
Although you’ve heard it, you may have not taken action to stop this from happening. It’s important for you to take action to keep from becoming your own enemy.
You’ve got enough on your plate right now with the affair, without having to fight with yourself. When you do things that would sabotage yourself, that’s not going to help you deal with the affair situation.
Fighting the Wrong Enemy
In these cases you’re fighting the wrong enemy. Rather than fighting yourself you need to be fighting the affair. The affair needs to have your focus. It needs to have your emotional resources.
During these times you have a limited amount of focus, a limited amount of attention, a limited amount of emotional energy. Are you going to spend that fighting with yourself, or fighting the real enemy?
That’s why I want you to deal with this topic, to take the steps to avoid becoming your own enemy.
Because when you fight the wrong enemy, you may be fixing the wrong problem. In the counseling circles, many times we use the term ‘Self-Defeating Behavior’, or SDB’s for a shortcut. The self-defeating behaviors is debilitating. They can turn into a long-term habit or behavior pattern.
If you’re a person that tends to have a lot of these self-defeating behaviors, or what we would commonly call becoming your own worst enemy, it’s almost like it becomes a way of life because you become so self-defeating. It makes it hard for anyone to get close to you. We’re going to talk about what you can do to break this self-defeating, or self-blame, cycle.
Breaking the Self Blame Cycle
Of course the solution is going to be to break the self-blame cycle. And how do you do that? Well, we’re going to be talking about that.
1.Reject negative self-talk. If you’ve got one of these “poor me” dialogs it often leads to self-loathing and self-pity. That negative self-talk, what that does, it’s not just a matter of you expressing emotions.
You’re literally programming your mind and your emotions to follow a given pattern. If it’s a negative pattern where’s it going to take you?
That’s right. To a negative place. For that reason you’re going to need to reject the self-talk. When that pops up in your head, that negative thought, reject it.
Choose not to accept it. Say I choose not to accept that. It’s going to be important to break that part of the cycle.
2.Avoid negative and fearful people. They may be your very best friends, but if they’re not building you up, supporting you, or encouraging you, then they are tearing you down.
During this time you need people that believe in you and that encourage you in what you’re doing about the affair. Not people that say oh, they’re a waste of time, they’re not worth it, don’t spend your money on it, or you’re never going to get anywhere there, the lover’s too good looking, too rich, too smart.
That type of talk, that’s negative and fearful people. Those are the type of folks that you want to avoid. Because it will rub off on you and change your way of thinking.
If you already have a tendency to be down on yourself, surrounding yourself with other people that are down on you, you may feel comfortable with it mainly because they mirror that negativity that you have inside of yourself, but this is not going to get you out of this pattern. We want to break that pattern, that’s part of what we’re after here.
3.Remove the guilt. I mention this because blame, including self-blame, is often used as a way to balance out guilt.
When I find people that do a lot of self-blaming it’s typically because they feel guilty about something, and kind of like those scales of justice they have a lot of blame in one, then they fill the other one up with guilt to balance it out.
In breaking the cycle it’s not just a matter of rejecting the negative self-talk. You’re going to have to get to the root of the issue and remove whatever it is that you still have guilt baggage over. You need to get that off your plate. Rather than add more blame you want to take steps to remove the guilt.
Does that mean that the affair is your problem? No, it does not mean that the affair is your problem. There may be things that you feel guilty about. You had unkind words, or something that you did was unkind and you feel guilty about it. You may need to get that cleared up.
But once you remove the guilt, then it creates a situation where the self-blame does not have anything that it’s balancing out and it will be much easier to reject at that point. But as long as you feel guilty about things on the inside, the more guilt that you feel the more self-blame that you’re going to be vulnerable to. This is why you want to take these steps to break that self-blame cycle.
This topic, in terms of you becoming your own worst enemy and self-blame, you don’t need to have your spouse around to work on that. You can work on that with yourself right now. You don’t have to wait till tomorrow for a better day, or you to get to feeling better. You can start it now. And I encourage you to do so.
For more help in dealing with affair recovery, try the downloadable ‘Affair Recovery Workshop’. In it, you’ll find tools that change your way of doing things. Those old habits that keep the Self-Defeating Behavior going can be altered, when you know how.
Best Regards,
Jeff
