We live in a toxic society where at one time or another we encounter hurtful behavior. As rational beings, we naturally seek to protect ourselves from further pain, and in doing so we choose behaviors and adopt attitudes that we believe will help us cope with the emotional pain and the dissonance wrought from these experiences. Some of us become workaholics, alcoholics, rage-a-holics, perpetual victims, hermits, and catty critics. We live in self-imposed glass houses for fear of the ever-oppressive, future possibility of further threat. We live life through the lens of our judgments and quickly retreat from the world we so deeply mistrust, separating ourselves in defeat.

What Are Self-Defeating Behaviors?
Self-defeating behaviors are a series of habitual choices that separates a person from life supporting feelings, values, attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Initially, self-defeating behaviors "seem" to work by enabling a person to "cope" with the pain of an experience. These behaviors, however, are deceptive and isolating because initially they "seem" to make us feel better by temporarily restoring our equilibrium, but in the long term, they don't solve the problem or heal the pain at all; they compound problems and mask pain. Behaviors and attitudes become self-defeating when they bring to bear the effects and consequences we have been trying to avoid all along!

Self-defeating behaviors include:

Criticalness Victimhood Procrastination Defensiveness Substance abuse/ over eating/ under eating Alienation and isolation Perfectionism Projection Worrying Exaggeration

Hostility Suspiciousness Comparing self to others Unrealistic expectations Distorting feedback and selective memory Blaming others Imposing guilt Hanging on to past hurts Intellectualizing Hiding feelings.

How Self-Defeating Behaviors Get Started
Let's say for example you want to go on a date with a woman at work. While standing in the coffee room, you ask her on a date. She not only rejects your offer, but she threatens to report you to Human Resources for sexual harassment! You are frightened, bewildered and humiliated. From that moment on, you swear off all women, as a matter of fact, you swear off all interpersonal and intimate relationships. Life is going to be all about work! You vow to work, eat, and sleep and that's it. Self-defeating behaviors begin to develop because the conscious mind convinces itself that it doesn't need affection and attention from others, and cutting off this perceived need (threat) will prevent further potential pain. The downside of this behavior is that the initial desire of not wanting to be alone and isolated is now fully realized.

Overcoming Self-Defeating Behaviors
One of the most insidious effects of self-defeating behaviors and attitudes is they keep us stuck in the past by preventing us from responding to our most precious moments in life--the here and now. These behaviors eventually create anesthetizing habit patterns that keep us from living life on an integrated conscious level. To begin the process of overcoming self-defeating behaviors, we must stop abdicating control of our lives to other people and outside influences and learn how to see life as a series of new moments and not a stagnate reflection of our past.

Listed below are a few suggestions that can help put you on the road toward life affirming behaviors and attitudes.

1. Reflect back on events in your life that helped create self-defeating behaviors and attitudes. Identify your self-defeating techniques.
2. Rigorously question your perceptions and beliefs. Do you set expectations based on naive beliefs?
3. Suspend judgment. Judgments are not reality; they are your projected illusion of reality based on erroneous thoughts.
4. Be willing to let go of what you don't understand so you can make room for what you can understand and love.
5. Accept the fact that you are never upset for the reasons you think.
6. Stop trying to justify your negative thoughts by making them true. Stop defending a thought system that has hurt you.
7. Identify the "payoff" you get from self-defeating behaviors and attitudes. (Payoff such as self-righteousness, negative attention, substance abuse.)
8. Decide how long are you willing to pay the price of your self-defeating behaviors. (Price such as loneliness, hopelessness, isolation, boredom, and health consequences.)

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