Do you not need an enemy because you are your own worst enemy? Do you do more to undermine yourself than anyone could ever consider doing to you? Do you shoot yourself in your foot by what you say/do or don’t say/do? Do you know what it is that you are doing to yourself and more specifically… do you know why?
If you are your own worst enemy, the only positive thing I can think to tell you is that you are not alone. Many people do more to harm themselves than anyone else could conceive of doing to them. To a degree we all fall into the behavior of setting ourselves up for disaster, but it’s not a prevailing method of behavior as it is with some people.
The answer to the question of do you know what it is you are doing to yourself can be answered with a ‘yes’. On some level, acknowledged or not, we all know when we are setting ourselves up and the only outcome is some form of disaster. This rarely diverts us. Sometimes we go in ‘where angels fear to trod’ but we do it for some reason other than self. That is not the situation that I mean. What I’m talking about are those situations where we know with a certainty that this should not be done for any reason. Yet we go. Then we pay the price. And it is always painful. Typically we always say we’ll not do that again. And then we do.
Why is the critical question. Why do we do this to ourselves? And why do we repeat behaviors that we know will only end badly? Those are a more difficult series of questions. While they are always individually defined, my suspicion is that the repetition is based in the comfort of the known holding sway over new and unknown results. Even negative results can provide us our identity but choosing a different approach requires a courage that not everyone will make.
