The Secure Love Club Podcast

Ep #24: The Self-Sabotage That Shows Up Right Before You Up-level & How To Overcome It

• Mimi Watt

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If you’ve ever hit a point in your healing where you thought, “Why is this happening again?” or “I thought I already worked through this!” this episode is your reminder that healing isn’t a straight line… but every challenge is an invitation to EVOLVE.

We’re talking:

- How to catch yourself before spiraling into victim mindset
- What self-sabotage is really trying to protect you from
- A deeply personal story about my most recent PA launch and the shadow it brought up
- Why your challenges are a portal to becoming the next version of yourself
- How to work with your inner child and nervous system to shift from fear to empowerment

PLUS - I take you behind the scenes into a real reprogramming meditation I did with my inner 13-year-old self. I share the fears she brought forward, the words I said to her, and how that single moment of healing created a ripple effect in my external reality.

🎧 Tune in now! And if this episode resonates, send me a DM on Instagram - I’d love to hear your thoughts!

MIMI SOCIAL MEDIA
Come say hi 👋 (or DM me your biggest takeaway) over on Instagram here!

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You are listening to the Secure Love Club podcast. I'm your host, Mimi Watt. Hey friends. Welcome back to the club. Oh my God, I have been. Obsessed in the last two weeks with this song called No Broke Boys by Disco Lines, Tanashi. You have to look it up and have a dance party in your room because I literally just did a dance party before hitting record to get myself in the vibes and in the mood to bring you the juice and the tea and the gossip and all the things on. On this podcast. You can tell it's got me hyped up. Oh, how are you doing today? I hope you're having a good day, and if you're not, that's totally okay, but I hope you put a smile on your face now, now that you and I are together connecting, what do I wanna update you on? First of all. We just wrapped up the launch for the latest intake of peacefully attached, and it was a very interesting launch. Something that I'm gonna talk to you about today is a pretty personal and vulnerable experience I had. In that launch and how it relates to the topic of today's podcast, which I haven't decided on the title right now as I'm recording, but it's going to be something around how healing isn't linear and looking at what your challenges are trying to teach you, because they're always there for a reason. But before we dive into that, we kicked off with the welcome call for peacefully attached yesterday and. Oh my God, it was so amazing and such a vibe and just so special to welcome in this group of women who have said yes to investing in themselves and taking charge of their healing journey and their relationship journey by getting the support they need, giving themselves the tools required to really uplevel and fully ditch those anxiety riddle dating patterns. Or at best, like really learn how to manage them. One thing that I said to my women on the call yesterday is that when you finish this program, you are still going to be human. And it's important to say that because sometimes we go into a program thinking that it's going to be. The answer to our problems. I mean, and whilst it is in many, many ways, we can think that, oh, after I do this work or after I do this program, I'll never have any struggles again. I won't have any issues. Everything will just be easy, breezy cover girl, and that's not necessarily true. Because at the end of the day, you are still human and you're still going to have challenges that arise, and you're still going to need to draw on your inner strength and resilience to face those challenges if you want to be able to keep moving forward in your life and progressing to the next version of yourself. So what I did say to them though is that. If you follow through and you do the work and you keep getting the support, keep implementing the tools and showing up for yourself, you can anticipate success. You can anticipate achieving the results you desire and becoming the kind of person that you want to become. With every new challenge that you overcome, you are stepping into a more confident, more empowered, more secure version of yourself who is capable of handling these challenge. Who has a deeper sense of resilience so that you don't revert back to old patterns so that you don't let self-sabotage get in the way of your progress so that you don't let old self-limiting beliefs drag you back down to a place where you don't wanna be anymore, to a place where you don't belong. And so this ties in really nicely with the theme of today's call. And you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut the intro there because I feel like this is, otherwise I'm just gonna get a little bit too preachy. So without further ado, let's dive into the meat of this episode. So I'm gonna share a personal experience I set, uh, that I had recently as mentioned in the introduction of this podcast in my recent launch of peacefully attached, and I'm sharing this experience. So that you can see yourself in it and use it to draw on to find strength for a challenge that you might be going through right now. So whether that is a challenge with a relationship, maybe your inner situationship that you know isn't good for you, but you're struggling to leave it. Maybe you are in a relationship that has sort of run its course and you know you need to leave, but you are struggling to find the courage to do that. Maybe it's a job that you are in and you're having an issue with your boss, or you want to change careers or maybe you're starting your own business, whatever it is for you, life inevitably is going to have challenges. And so I'm gonna share a challenge that I recently had and. Let you take from it what you will, the message need that you need to be able to take steps towards the higher version of yourself, right? Not defaulting. Back down to a past version of you. I recently wrapped up a coaching container, a smaller coaching container with some clients, and on the last call, one of my clients said to me. It's been really beautiful to grow with you throughout this container. She said, I feel like we've been growing together. I've been sensing your growth as I've been growing, and it was such a beautiful reflection because there's so much truth to that. You know, even though I have been on such a big journey of healing and self-exploration and reflection, there's always more growth to be had and. She said it at such a point. PO point po. Poignant. Is that the word? Poignant time. Uh, because the week prior, or about two weeks prior, I went through a bit of a death and rebirth in my launch. And for those of you who don't run an online business. Um, this may, you may not fully understand, but I'm sure you can relate it to yourself in some way. So when we say launching, it's when doors are open. And I'm welcoming all of you to join peacefully attached if it's aligned. And even though I've been at this online business thing for five years now, the launch process always brings something up. It. Always brings up a shadow that needs to be integrated, a challenge that you need to overcome, and it can be really sticky and really uncomfortable. Now, for me, over the last few years, there's been a serious self-sabotaging pattern that has reared its ugly head. Every time I'm going into a launch, and it's not that I. I don't think that I'm a great coach and I don't have the tools that I know will help people, but there clearly has been some part of me that was afraid, that was wanting to hide and not give these launches. Everything I've got. And this feeling started to come up for me in sort of the first half of the launch when maybe I wasn't seeing as much momentum as I wanted to, or not as many people as I was hoping had joined yet, and I could feel myself getting emotional and. Starting to want to step into a victim mentality and you know that if you allow yourself to drop into victim mentality, it can be very hard to get out of it. Now, because I've experienced this same, uh, process over the last few years, several times I was able to catch it. Okay, so it's, the first thing is, can you be aware when you are wanting to go into a victim mindset? And by victim mindset, I mean basically not taking accountability or responsibility for the results you're getting in your life and blaming. F anything you can externally for the reason why you haven't got those results. So whether it's you blame, um, a, a coach or a mentor you're working with and you're like, oh, they haven't given me enough of the right tools, they haven't given me enough support, or you're blaming. Your boss or you're blaming your partner or your friend or your family member for why you are the way you are and Right. This is the thing we can get stuck in with relationships and without anxious attachment, we can get into a place of blaming our parents and using that as a reason to not. Face yourself and do the work to heal your anxious attachment and take responsibility for the types of relationships you want to create as an adult going forward. People will say, well, it's all, it's all my parents' fault. Like, my dad did this, my mom did this, and it really fucked me up. And so, you know, I'm just damaged and that's why my relationships are so bad and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a really off-putting energy and it doesn't feel very good either, does it? It feels extremely disempowering and it doesn't give you any sort of drive or motivation to want to better yourself. It makes you want to just stay in your comfort zone and hide from the world and say, poor me, poor me, and get attention and love in that way or from that suffering. And whilst it might feel like temporary relief because. If you are the victim, it means that you know you should be taken care of and you don't have to do anything. You just get to, yeah, sit and wallow basically. And so there is temporary relief, and I have definitely done that in many situations in my life, not just with business, but for this particular episode, we're talking about this experience in business. I have done this where I've just let myself fall into the victim mindset because it's so much easier in a way than. Taking a really good, hard look at myself in the mirror and trying to understand where is this desire to sabotage myself coming from? What do I need to learn here so that I can overcome this hurdle and evolve and every time I have allowed myself in the past to go into a victim mindset. It is, like I said, it might feel good short term, but it really damages the way you see yourself as a person. It damages your self-esteem because self-esteem and self-confidence comes from overcoming challenges. It comes from seeing something difficult and outside your comfort zone, backing yourself to take a chance to try and do that thing, and then doing it and realizing that you didn't die and coming out the other side. That is what builds true confidence, true self-trust and self-esteem. So every time I didn't jump, I didn't pull myself out of the victim mindset. My self-esteem lowered, my confidence lowered, and it actually just made the whole process of launching feel even more terrifying. So maybe for you it's. In dating and relationships, if you are constantly putting yourself into a victim mindset saying, oh, you know, it's just so hard because of my, my issues from my parents, or, well, it's too hard to meet anyone because the apps just suck. Or I can't meet anyone because my job is too demanding. Like, whatever excuse you are using, I know it probably feels so valid. It, but I promise you there's a way to work around it if you truly want to get outta that victim mindset. So this had happened to me enough times that I was able to be really hyper aware of this self-sabotaging pattern, wanting to repeat. I was, it was on a Sunday afternoon. I was in the car with my sister thinking about the launch and thinking about certain results and X, Y, Z, and I started to get really emotional. I started to feel sad. I started to feel not good enough, not worthy enough, all the things right. And I got home. I let, I let myself cry. It is not about bypassing our emotions, of course. You know, I always say that it is so healthy and important to process your emotions. So let yourself feel the fear or the frustration or the sadness, but don't let yourself get stuck in it. So this is what I did. I came home, we on the Sunday afternoon, and I came into my room. I sat with myself on my bed, and I took a moment to reflect. I took a moment to get introspective. I took a few breaths. I placed my hand on my heart, and I spoke to myself and I said, Mimi, okay, you have a choice here. We can repeat the pattern. And continue to feel bad about ourselves and make the whole launch process more and more terrifying. Right? Because the more you put something off, the more you sabotage the scarier and harder that thing gets. I think that's the point I was gonna make before, but I got sidetracked. So if you are putting off dating. Or relationships for whatever reason, whatever excuse that feels valid to you, what you're actually doing is just building more and more fear in the anticipation of doing that thing. So of getting back out there and dating, of meeting people, of getting into a relationship. Or if you are wanting to start your own business or side hustle and you are stuck in this spiral of excuses of like, it's too hard. It's not gonna work for me, I don't know what I'm doing. The longer you entertain those thoughts, the harder it's going to be to start, because the anticipation builds so much that it just feels too overwhelming and too terrifying. So I said to myself, you have a choice here. We can repeat it and make it worse for ourself or. We can face this fucker head on and we could really try to understand why this is happening. Because any type of self-sabotage in its purest form is really just a self-protection mechanism. It's always there to protect you in some way, so it actually serves. A very well-intended purpose in your life, but we wanna understand what that self-sabotaging mechanism thinks it's trying to protect you from so that we can validate it and then reframe it. So what I did was I said, okay, I'm not doing this again. I'm gonna dig deeper than I ever have before, and I'm gonna face this feeling just like I have faced feelings of anxiety and unworthiness in relationships. So I took myself into a deep reprogramming meditation, and this is something that I do with my clients inside peacefully attached, is I take them through this process so that they know how to work with the feelings that are coming up in their body. On a really somatic level, so from in the body and in the nervous system because that's really where our feelings and fight or flight sensations live. We can talk about this stuff and we can analyze it till we're blue in the face, but it's not until we go deeper and we work with the actual feeling that you're going to be able to get to the root of what is keeping you stuck or the root of what is wanting to sabotage your growth and success. So I took myself into this deep reprogramming meditation. And in these meditations often you start, we'll start with addressing the feeling, and then what happens is you inquire about when you first remember ever feeling this way. And when I did that, to my surprise, my 13-year-old self came up. Now, this was a surprise to me because a lot of the time when I'm doing inner child work or re-parenting, it's often a much younger version of me that comes to the forefront. So a version of me who is maybe five, three, uh, four, six, any anywhere around that age. So when the 13-year-old version of me came through, I was really surprised and. When I got curious and I gave her the opportunity to tell me what she was so afraid of, she said, I'm so afraid of letting people down. I'm so afraid of looking stupid and not being important. Woo. And it really hit the heartstrings. It really, um, it opened my eyes. Because I had no idea that this 13-year-old version of me was still there, present in my body, and still experiencing this sort of fear. These fears that come up are basically, I. Fight or flight patterns in the body that never got resolved, that never got processed. So you might have had a traumatic experience when you were younger. And by traumatic I can mean it's either big T trauma or little T trauma. So something big T trauma is a major event. So it could be, um, your parents' divorce, abuse, anything like that, like very traumatic. Or it could be small T trauma where. You just aren't really properly heard from your parents on a consistent basis. Maybe sometimes they listen to you, but majority of the time they tell you that they're really busy or they're really stressed. Like, can we just talk about it later? And that might not seem like a big deal, but when that is your experience time and time and time again, it does have a compounding effect on the way you internalize that and the way you. View yourself and feel about yourself. So, and when those, sorry, when those experiences don't get properly resolved, meaning you are not supported in being heard, being seen and having someone really validate your emotional experience and give you the reassurance that you need, especially when you're younger, uh, to feel secure when that doesn't happen, that experience. Remains stuck in the body. It's actually wild how this happens. So I obviously had this stuck experience in my body from around 13 years old. My subconscious brought that to me and she was so afraid of, yeah, not being important and not being taken seriously. And once we located, once I located that I. Realized that that 13-year-old part of me was wanting me to sabotage launches because putting myself out there to talk about the value of my program to welcome people in was cause, or that was a potential cause for rejection. It was a potential cause for not being taken seriously, because maybe if I, if no one signed up, maybe I would interpret that as well. No one takes me seriously as a coach, or if people did sign up, there was a chance that I might let them down because it wouldn't be, I don't know, quote unquote, good enough or up to their expectations. Now, of course, on a. More rational conscious level. I fully back the content in my program. I fully back my skills as a coach, but that's not the way our emotions work. They are not rational, they are irrational, and that's why you can be. A fully fledged adult in a situation, whether it's at your job, in your relationship, whatever, and you can be saying to yourself, why the fuck is this still happening? I'm an adult. Like I should be able to handle this. I should be able to make friends. I should be able to put myself out there. I should be able to date. So why isn't it happening? And there's a very good reason for that. It's because the body doesn't operate from. What you are thinking consciously now it most of the time, is running on autopilot and defaulting to the stuck fears and emotions and blocks in your body as a way to protect you. Because if those experiences were never processed and resolved when you were younger, then of course the body's gonna be terrified of experiencing that pain again. Therefore it's going to try to sabotage any situation in the present day where it interprets that that pain could be repeated. So when you are able to locate what it is that that part of you is terrified of the first crucial step to being able to move through this is acknowledgement. Just like when you are having a really bad day or you've had a bad experience, you're going through something tough. All you want is someone to just be with you in that experience. You don't need solutions thrown at you or reassurance thrown at you right away, or someone trying to tell you that everything's gonna be okay or that No, no, no. It's not that bad. It's not that bad, or That shit doesn't help. What we really want is someone to just, as they say, sit in the mud with us to just validate what we're feeling. I so understand how you're feeling. I get that. That really must be tough. I'm with you. How good does that feel to have someone just acknowledge it? Because that means we can start to feel acceptance. And we go, oh, okay. I am not crazy for feeling this way. This is real. This is valid. Okay, now I feel a little bit better. Now I feel a little bit more at ease, knowing I'm not totally alone in this feeling. So that's the first step. And once you've done that and you feel your body relax a little bit and come back to a place of neutrality, then we can start to reframe and reassure. So what we do in this space is reparent. You may have heard that term, reparenting. This is where you as the wiser adult, get to come in and start to give that younger part of yourself the reassurance and validation that she needed when she was young, but that she maybe didn't get. And when it comes to knowing what that part of you needs to hear, you are the wisest person in the room. Only you truly know what words are going to be the ultimate comfort to that part of yourself, or what is going to give her or them the boost of confidence and encouragement that they need to start to put their shoulders back. Chest proud and be ready to take on the challenges of the world. You know? So when you are reassuring that part of yourself, just go with your intuition, go with your gut. What does she need to hear? And so in this moment, as I started to reassure her, what came through and what I realized is that what I said to her is, you will always be important. Because you were born worthy. You've never had to earn your importance or your worthiness. You just are. And as long as you have the best and purest of intentions, as long as you show up with passion and an intention to want to try to help and serve your clients as best as you can, you will never let anybody down. As long as you stay true to your word and you follow through on what you say you're going to do, and you do your very fucking best, you will not let people down. But most importantly, you will never let me down. That is crucial because the child within you, their greatest fear is letting you down. Their primary attachment figure, their caregiver. And when you were young, that was your parents or parents, but now as an adult, you get to be that primary attachment figure, that parent for that inner child, and so letting them know, you will never let me down. I love you unconditionally. I back you and support you a hundred percent. No matter what happens. I will never leave you. I will always be here with you. You are so important. You have a message to share. You have a reason to be here now. Get out there and serve. Serve your people. Remember what they need. Remember what you know and the ways that you can help and lead with your heart. And when I came out of this meditation, I am not kidding you. Something had shifted on such a visceral level that in the next week, five new clients came into the program. That is a true story and you know, as much as I already know that this kind of work works, hence why I teach it in my program. It never ceases to amaze me. How connected our external reality and results are with our internal programming and processing. It is absolutely incredible. What I want you to take away from this episode is number one, healing isn't linear. You can have done, you can have done so much work on yourself. Being on a personal development journey for five plus years, invested in coaches, in therapists, counselors, done online programs, listened to all the podcasts, and still have moments of struggle, still slipped back into an old pattern momentarily. Still have anxiety come up in dating, and that is okay. It is normal for this to happen, so please don't ever think that you're a failure or you're not doing it right or anything like that. If you are having a little slip up or you're falling back into an old pattern, the importance and what is the truest indicator of your growth is when you're able to catch it. You are able to be aware of the slipup, the self-sabotage, the wanting to go back into your patterns and get curious. What is this challenge trying to teach me? What part of me needs to be integrated and healed so that I don't arrive at this point? Again, what does my inner child need to hear to soothe their anxiety? To know that they don't need to chase anyone, that they don't need to beg for someone's attention. They don't need to be more perfect to be worthy of love. What do they need from me? What do they need from you? The secure parent who is there to reparent them today? Whatever challenge you're going through, I want you to take this wisdom. Learn from my experience. And implement it into your own life so that you can step up and evolve into the next version of yourself. Be it in your relationships, in your career, in your friendship circles, in your family, in your relationship with yourself. Have a beautiful week, my friends, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed today's episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this episode with your friends and come find me on social so we can hang out between episodes. All the links are below in the show notes.