anxiety.co.zaThe Moment Things Start Going Right
It’s a familiar story for anyone in recovery, things finally start to improve. You’re sober, you’re stable, maybe you’ve rebuilt relationships, found work, started trusting yourself again. Then, out of nowhere, you do something reckless. You pick a fight, skip a meeting, ghost a friend, or flirt with relapse. And as you watch it all fall apart, a voice in your head whispers, Why did I do that?
That voice isn’t madness, it’s survival. Twisted, misguided survival. Because self-sabotage isn’t about wanting to fail, it’s about feeling unsafe with success. It’s what happens when your nervous system still believes chaos is safer than calm. When you’ve lived in disaster for so long that peace feels like a setup.
Addiction taught you to expect pain. Recovery asks you to expect peace. But the body doesn’t always know how to trust that peace yet, so it ruins it before it can be taken away.
The Biology of Breaking What Works
Self-sabotage is rooted in the same biology that fuels addiction. The brain’s reward system, after years of chemical highs and emotional rollercoasters, becomes wired to associate intensity with safety. You start to crave the familiar rush, the dopamine spike that comes with danger, drama, or risk. Calm doesn’t stimulate that system. It feels flat, lifeless, even threatening.
When things go well, your brain misinterprets the quiet as danger. It releases stress hormones, searching for the chaos it’s used to. You feel restless. Uneasy. Bored. So you unconsciously create conflict to restore balance, not emotional balance, but chemical balance. You’re chasing adrenaline without knowing it.
That’s why self-sabotage feels almost physical. You feel the tension before you act. The tightness in your chest, the itch under your skin. The brain is trying to return to its “normal” state, even if that normal has always been destructive. It’s not a moral flaw. It’s a nervous system still healing from addiction’s definition of safety.
The Psychology of Unworthiness
Underneath the biology, there’s belief. Many people in recovery carry a deep, unspoken conviction, I don’t deserve good things. It’s not conscious, but it’s powerful. Years of guilt, shame, and broken trust carve it into your identity. So when good things arrive, love, opportunity, stability, they feel counterfeit. You wait for the punchline.
That’s where sabotage steps in. You ruin the good thing before it can reveal itself as temporary. You pick partners who can’t love you back, quit jobs before they can fire you, stop therapy just when it starts working. It’s not about wanting pain, it’s about wanting control. Pain you create feels safer than pain that surprises you. Chaos you cause feels more bearable than chaos that comes uninvited. So you destroy what’s good to protect yourself from the possibility that it might leave on its own.
The Familiarity of Failure
For those who’ve lived through addiction, failure feels like home. It’s predictable, familiar, and strangely comfortable. Success, on the other hand, is terrifying. It’s unfamiliar territory where expectations rise and vulnerability deepens. When you succeed, people notice. They trust you again. They depend on you. And that pressure can feel unbearable. Because deep down, a part of you still believes you’re one mistake away from disappointing everyone again.
So you preempt it. You ruin the moment before it ruins you. You go back to what you know, because pain you understand is safer than happiness you don’t trust. That’s the logic of self-sabotage, safety through destruction. Addiction isn’t just a chemical pattern, it’s an emotional one. It teaches your brain to seek chaos, and it takes years to unlearn. The first step isn’t stopping the behaviour, it’s understanding that the impulse comes from fear, not failure.
The Fear of Calm
In recovery, calm can feel like danger. You’ve lived in high-alert mode for years, where every quiet moment was followed by a storm. The body remembers that pattern. When life starts to feel too peaceful, the mind panics, What am I missing? What’s about to go wrong? This is called anticipatory anxiety, the body’s learned response to trauma. It confuses peace with threat, and stillness with vulnerability. So you stir things up. You provoke arguments, overshare secrets, make impulsive choices, anything to prove that calm can’t be trusted.
But the more you repeat this pattern, the deeper it becomes. You start mistaking exhaustion for safety, because at least it feels familiar. You’ve replaced danger with discomfort, but the cycle is the same. Learning to stay in calm, to breathe through the discomfort of peace, is one of the hardest skills in recovery. It’s the work of retraining your body to believe that safety doesn’t always come with noise.
The Addiction to Control
Addiction thrives on control. You controlled your highs, your pain, your emotions, your escape routes. So when you lose control, even to something good, it feels unbearable. Self-sabotage becomes the way to reclaim power. If you end a relationship first, you can’t be left. If you quit a job, you can’t be fired. If you relapse on your own terms, you can’t be “caught.” The destruction gives you the illusion of choice, and choice feels safer than surrender.
But control isn’t peace, it’s fear in disguise. The more you cling to it, the more life becomes about survival instead of living. Recovery asks for something harder than control, it asks for trust. Not in perfection, but in your ability to face imperfection without self-destruction. The real strength lies not in controlling outcomes, but in learning to stay when things are uncertain, to believe that unpredictability doesn’t equal danger.
The Role of Shame
Shame is the quiet engine of self-sabotage. It whispers that you’re broken, that every good thing in your life is a fluke, that love or success are accidents waiting to correct themselves. Shame doesn’t believe in second chances, it believes in inevitability. When shame runs unchecked, every success triggers panic. You start waiting for exposure, for people to realise you’re still flawed. You call it imposter syndrome, but it’s really a fear of being loved for who you’ve become instead of who you used to be.
So you self-destruct before anyone can see through you. You retreat into behaviours that confirm the old story, I can’t change. It’s not comfort, it’s confirmation bias, your brain seeking evidence to match your low self-worth. Breaking that cycle starts with telling a new story, one where mistakes don’t mean failure, and success doesn’t mean betrayal of your past self.
How Trauma Trains the Brain
Most addicts don’t sabotage because they’re reckless, they sabotage because they’re traumatised. Trauma rewires the brain’s survival instincts, teaching it that unpredictability equals danger and that comfort is temporary. It keeps you scanning for loss, even in safety. That’s why so many people relapse not during hard times, but during good ones. The nervous system can’t handle the vulnerability of happiness. It expects the fall. It’s bracing for impact before anything’s even wrong.
Trauma doesn’t just teach you how to survive chaos, it teaches you how to depend on it. Recovery means unlearning that dependency. It’s slow, awkward work. It requires patience with your own fear and gentleness with your triggers. The goal isn’t to erase the instinct to protect yourself, but to teach it that you don’t need destruction to feel alive.
Building a New Relationship with Success
Success in recovery isn’t about never falling, it’s about learning not to panic when you rise. That means redefining what “good” feels like. For someone used to adrenaline, peace will feel foreign. For someone used to crisis, normal will feel flat. But over time, the body learns that flat isn’t failure, it’s safety.
Start small. Notice when things are going well and your instinct to ruin them appears. Pause before acting. Ask, What am I afraid of losing right now? What does peace make me feel unsafe about? That pause is where the healing happens. It interrupts the automatic pattern of destruction.
Therapy, support groups, and mindfulness can help you map your triggers, the situations that make you crave chaos. The goal isn’t to eliminate those triggers, but to meet them with awareness instead of impulse. Every time you don’t sabotage, you teach your brain that safety doesn’t have to end in pain.
The Strength in Staying
The opposite of self-sabotage isn’t perfection, it’s staying. Staying when things feel too good, too quiet, too vulnerable. Staying when the urge to flee or destroy rises in your chest. Staying long enough to learn that nothing terrible happens just because life is gentle. Recovery isn’t about avoiding pain or chasing joy, it’s about learning to tolerate both without turning them into proof of who you are. It’s about giving yourself permission to live without a disaster waiting around the corner.
You don’t need to keep testing your worth by seeing how much chaos you can survive. You’ve already survived enough. Now the real test is how much peace you can allow yourself to feel without running from it.
Letting Good Things Stay Good
Self-sabotage isn’t proof that you’re broken, it’s proof that you’re healing from a life where chaos felt safer than calm. You’re not ruining good things because you don’t want them, you’re ruining them because they feel too new, too undeserved, too fragile. But the truth is, peace isn’t fragile, it’s patient. It will wait for you to stop flinching.
Every time you choose not to self-destruct, even in small ways, you build a new definition of safety. You teach your nervous system that good things don’t have to end. You stop expecting loss and start practicing trust. Healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about finally believing that the person you already are deserves to keep the good things when they come.
