the Little Saboteur

I recently read through a book about something we all carry inside us that the author called our little saboteur. I feel in love with the concept straight away. You might call it a good angel and a devil. It is the thing inside us that tries to control our ability to change for the better. Getting rid of our self-destructive tendencies.

I used to imagine this as the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. But that denotes evil to me and that is a battle we have ongoing but on a different level than a saboteur.

So I decided I needed to keep my concept of ‘evil’ but add the concept of also having a little saboteur. This is the little being who stops me when I am working at change. Sometimes the being interrupts my creative flow as well. Mostly it hovers around the edges waiting for an opportunity to sabotage my taking care of myself and hubbie. Double whammy for hubbie as he doesn’t know about his little saboteur yet let alone mine.

That little being is individual to everyone. Only you can give it substance and form. I have mine pictured clearly. I call him Sabbie and I have decided he is male. He is small and almost weightless for which I am grateful. The only time he takes on weight is when he is trying to do me in. Then he feels like a boulder!

He is shaggy by nature being generally unkempt. He changes in color from pink to firey red with some serious blue tones thrown in for good measure. The colors deepen as he grows in strength. When I have him under control he remains very pale.

He pops up when I am deciding on vegetables or something gooey. He creeps around when we are out for the day and need to decide where we are going to eat. He screams at me when we are shopping for food.
And let me think about exercise and he is yelling bloody murder.

I’m slowly learning to drop him in his tracks. I send him away as quickly as I can when he makes himself known. In the past two weeks he has gotten easier to banish but I know him. He will be back at it just when I am feeling my strongest.

I think that the trick to making him vanish is to name him, welcome him, and learn to laugh in his face or give him a good swift kick so it takes him a long time to climb back up to my shoulder. Laughing is best though. He hates it when I laugh at him as he is so serious about what he does. It slays his ego.

You really need to be comfortable with him though. If you can’t name him, give him a place and keep him in it – you can’t defeat him.

I wish everyone would grab hold of this concept and run with it. Introduce yourself to your own little saboteur. Tell him you are a nice place to visit but he probably wouldn’t want to live here on a regular basis.

He is going to fight you kicking and screaming but if you laugh and really mean it – you can win.