It’s going well. The relationship, the job, your health, the plan you finally started.
And then you do the thing. You stop showing up. You say something you can’t take back. You spend the money. You skip the one appointment that mattered. You let it slide until it falls apart, and then you look at the pieces and think: of course.
After enough rounds of this, most people land on the same question. Am I the problem?
You’re not the problem. But something in you is running a program, and it’s worth finding out what it is.
It isn’t willpower
If willpower could fix this, you’d have fixed it. You’ve probably tried harder, made promises to yourself, set reminders, started over on Mondays.
Willpower lives in your conscious mind. This doesn’t.
Your subconscious is the part of your mind that runs without you thinking about it. It records everything, and it creates programs out of what you experience and feel the most. That’s what programming is: something repeated until it became automatic.
Your thinking will match your programming. If your programming says people are out to get you, it will keep making you think people are out to get you, even when they aren’t.
So when good things start happening and something in you pulls the brakes, that isn’t you failing. It’s a program running.
Why “good” can set it off
Things going well can bring up a feeling you’ve felt before.
What that feeling is depends entirely on you, and nobody can tell you from the outside. The questions below will help you find it, in your own words.
Whatever the feeling is, ruining the good thing first gets you out of it before it arrives. If you end it yourself, at least you saw it coming. That’s why it can feel like relief, right after the damage is done.
How to find your program
You can start this yourself. It comes down to four questions.
1. Pick one time you ruined something good. What was happening?
2. What did it feel like it was saying about you?
This is the step most people rush, so here’s what I mean. Not the name of an emotion. “Angry,” “anxious” or “hurt” are too broad. Everyone feels those, and they don’t point anywhere. I mean what the moment felt like it was saying about you.
Say someone you care about doesn’t call you back. “I was annoyed” is the emotion. “It felt like I wasn’t worth calling back” is the feeling. Or say you finally get the promotion. “I felt nervous” is the emotion. “It felt like it was only a matter of time before they found out I’m not good enough” is the feeling.
That second kind of sentence is the one you’re looking for. It’s usually short, and usually a little uncomfortable to say. Put yours in your own words, even if they’re messy.
3. Has anyone else ever made you feel exactly that way?
Not something similar. That exact feeling, with someone else. If someone comes to mind, you’re not looking at one bad moment with one person. You’re looking at a program: a feeling your subconscious has repeated so often that it brings it back on its own, with different people, even over small things.
4. When is the earliest time you remember feeling exactly like that?
Don’t force an answer. Let a memory come up. It’s often smaller and more ordinary than you’d expect. That earliest memory is usually where the program started, and that’s where the work is.
What changes it
Two things, and they work together.
Catch it earlier. Most people only notice after the damage is done. The goal is to notice it while it’s starting: the urge to cancel, the urge to say the thing, the sudden sense that none of this matters. Each time you catch it sooner, you get a little more room to choose.
Go back to where it was learned. That younger you didn’t know how things would turn out. You do. Going back with that understanding, and with the love they didn’t get then, is what changes it. I’ve written out how I do that, step by step, in What Do You Say to Your Inner Child?.
You’ll know it’s working when something good happens and the urge to wreck it is quieter, or comes later, or doesn’t come at all.
What I can’t tell you
I can’t tell you which feeling is behind yours. That’s yours to find, and you’re the only one who can.
I can’t promise one memory will change it. A program like this is usually built from many moments that felt the same way.
What I can tell you is that “Am I the problem?” is the wrong question. A better one is: what feeling keeps coming up in different relationships?
Find out with the free quiz. It takes about three minutes and shows you the feeling that keeps repeating, in your own words. No email needed.