Why We Self-Sabotage
(Even When We Want
to Get Better)

From the mastermind of emotional avoidance herself (I ghost my therapists when they get too close to the truth).

You’d think wanting to get better would be enough. You hit your rock bottom, reach some version of “I can’t live like this anymore”, and you say you’re ready. And dammit, you’re really ready this time. But, somewhere between intention and follow-through, something unravels.

You skip the meeting. You lie to your therapist. You pick up again even when you know it’ll cost you everything.

If this sounds familiar, you might be dealing with self-sabotage. And man, that sucks…but you’re not alone.

“Tell me about your childhood.”

To understand why we sabotage our own recovery, we have to start by asking a different question: What did we learn, early on, about what it means to feel “good”?

For many people struggling with addiction, feeling good didn’t feel safe growing up. Moments of joy were unpredictable. Care and connection were inconsistent. The people we relied on for love may have disappeared, exploded, disappointed us, or never showed up at all.

So we adapted. We learned to expect letdowns, to avoid vulnerability, to anticipate chaos. Over time, we stopped trusting anything that felt calm, reliable, or good because those things rarely lasted.

The brain takes notes, and if your early years were spend in chaos, it probably recorded relief as danger, hope as a scam, and the idea of self-betterment as a setup to failure.

It’s no wonder that when we get close to recovery, we flinch.

“How does that make you feel?”

Substance use often begins as a form of relief: a way to escape discomfort, silence the noise, or feel something other than guilt or shame. Over time, though, it becomes a reflex. A shield.

In recovery, we’re not just giving up a drug, we’re letting go of a coping strategy that helped us survive.

We say we want to heal, and we mean it. But deep down, healing also threatens the parts of us that have been managing pain for a very long time. So we take unconscious (and sometimes blatantly conscious) steps to pump the brakes on any inch of progress we make.

We miss appointments. We pick fights with people trying to help. We push away support. We tell ourselves that the timing isn’t right—that this job, this relationship, this city just isn’t the place to get sober.

We steer ourselves off course not because we don’t want to be okay, but because okay feels unfamiliar. And unfamiliar can feel a lot like unsafe.

“Is this behavior serving you?”

“Why do I keep messing this up?”

It’s a valid question, but self-sabotage in recovery rarely kicks the door down to announce itself. More often, it slips in quietly through a side window.

• Getting involved with someone who brings the same chaos you said you were done with

• Letting a helpful routine fall apart

• Letting yourself bend the rules “just this once”

• Deciding that trying again isn’t worth it because you’ve already messed up too much

These choices don’t always feel like sabotage in the moment, but they chip away at progress and leave you back in a place that’s painfully (and comfortably) familiar. Patterns are gonna pattern. They’ll do what they’ve always done in an effort to keep things predictable, even if predictable also mean painful.

“What are you really afraid of?”

Self-sabotage is a pattern, not a personality flaw. It’s a behavior that often starts as a logical response to emotional chaos—especially for people who’ve lived through instability, trauma, or inconsistent care. Over time, it becomes reflexive. You learn to expect loss, so you prepare for it. You assume things will fall apart, so you knock them over first.

That preparation can cause you to numb yourself to the world, distance yourself from people who care, or walk away from things that feel steady. In context, these decisions make sense. They’ve been rehearsed for years, usually for good reason. But eventually, the habit of preemptive damage starts interfering with the very things you say you want: trust, peace, and connection.

Addiction often grows from this same soil. Substances offer control, predictability, and relief on demand, three things that may have been hard to come by in life thus far. But recovery requires more than cessation of the behavior. You have to be open to understanding why the behavior once made sense, why it keeps coming back, and why it’s important to break the cycles that are hurting you.

And that’s hard to do. For better or worse, these patterns were at one time built to protect you and, in many ways, they did. But the version of you who needed them is not the version of you who’s trying to get better now.

“Can we sit with that for a minute?”

You’re going to feel uncomfortable because everything is going to feel unfamiliar. You have to sit with it. Get to know it. Embrace the suck, because the only way out truly is through. Recovery means learning to stay. Stay in the moment, stay with the feelings, stay with the people who care enough to show you support.

And if you’ve never had to do that before, buckle up. Because sitting in the same discomfort you’re used to saving yourself from while an eager audience cheers you on is, frankly, the emotional equivalent to walking through a brush fire in gasoline shoes.

But hey: If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.

“Let’s talk about what’s working.”

Recognizing self-sabotage in the moment can be hard, but with the right tools you can catch it before it takes over.

• Therapy that addresses underlying trauma. Surface-level change doesn’t last if the root wounds are still driving your reactions. Working with a therapist who understands trauma means you’re not just managing symptoms—you’re starting to understand the story underneath them.
• Peer support. Sometimes the fastest way to break shame is to hear your own thoughts come out of someone else’s mouth. Being around others who’ve been there makes it harder to lie to yourself and easier to tell the truth.
• Structure and accountability. In early recovery, routine isn’t boring—it’s lifesaving. Consistent structure, check-ins, and support keep you from drifting into old habits that thrive on isolation and avoidance.
• Self-compassion. This isn’t the same as letting yourself off the hook. It means staying engaged even when you fall short. Shame makes relapse worse. Compassion makes it something you can recover from.

“You don’t have to do this alone.”

You’re not the first person ever to ghost their therapist, relapse after a good week, or blow up something good just to avoid getting hurt. There’s help available.

At Recovery Unplugged, we see self-sabotage for what it is: pain in disguise. That’s why our programs focus not just on behavior change, but emotional healing. With individual therapy, group support, and music-driven tools for self-expression, we help you face what’s really going on, with tools that make it manageable and sustainable.

Whether you need virtual therapy, trauma support, or just want to talk to someone about getting help, we’re here. You don’t have to be ready for everything, you just have to be willing to start.