How to Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Joy

Do you know if you’re unconsciously self-sabotaging your own joy? Today, we’re exploring the difference between feeling our pain and thinking about our pain. Can you tell if you do both?

You cannot selectively numb your emotions, and that is part of the reason why you might be sabotaging your joy. We’ll chat through when you may have used the tool of dissociation, as well as the healthiest way to validate emotions when you are self-sabotaging your joy.

What is Codependency?

Let’s start with codependency: what it is and what it has to do with sabotaging joy.

Codependency is the habit of relying on someone or something outside yourself to regulate your internal emotional state.

In my first marriage, I unconsciously used the relationship to try to fix my scarcity mindset, attachment wounds, and fear of feeling.

I believed I didn’t matter—and that I couldn’t succeed without my ex facilitating parts of my life.

Codependency develops early, often rooted in attachment theory, and shapes how we as women form emotional habits that affect our mental, spiritual, and physical health.

Whatever those early habits are, they tend to shape how we live later on.

What is Self-Sabotage?

Self-sabotage is when you unconsciously block your own progress or success through negative thoughts, behaviors, or patterns.

For women, especially during or after divorce, self-sabotage can show up as guilt, fear, or avoidance—keeping you stuck instead of moving forward. Recognizing when you are self-sabotaging your joy is the first step toward healing.

Remember: You’re the Co-Creator of Joy

If we women have negative beliefs about “I can’t” or “I am not”, we’ll start to compensate somewhere. And very often, rather than rooting out those negative beliefs that we’re carrying about ourselves and the world around us, we compensate by trying to get other people to pour into us rather than manifesting it for ourselves.

We forget we can co-create joy with God—or whatever source you believe in—and that we have access to more internal resources than we think.

Why Numbing Pain Also Blocks Joy

Women have been conditioned to believe that healing means feeling less pain. But I believe healing is actually increasing our capacity to feel everything.

That means staying with the hard stuff long enough to process it—without numbing, avoiding, intellectualizing, or dismissing it.

The process of suppressing pain or suppressing symptoms is not actually healing. Gabor Maté, MD, has done a lot of research and writing in the world of addiction, trauma, and somatic healing.

He talks about how most of Western medicine aims at suppressing and numbing, but that’s not healing.

Brene Brown’s work has transformed entire generations of people’s understanding about what it is to live, learn, love, and parent from a place of vulnerability.

Brené Brown has said to us, “You cannot selectively numb emotion.”

If you are not feeling a lot of joy in your life after divorce, it’s probably because you’re avoiding feeling a lot of other feelings as well. And again, per Brené Brown’s research, she has shown us that you cannot engineer the discomfort out of vulnerability.

Feeling vs. Thinking: The Healing Gap

You can’t selectively numb emotion. So what then ends up happening?

We start to codependently rely upon things like dissociation, numbing, bypassing, and suppressing to avoid feeling the grief of divorce.

We women end up thinking a lot about our divorce grief and our loss, but not feeling it. What is the difference between feeling and thinking?

Do a body scan and notice where you’re feeling insecurity, grief, loss, anxiety, scarcity, anger, pain, rejection, joy, optimism, hope, or faith.

From there, you can tap into those emotions in the body, not just think about them. 

You Can’t Heal What You Avoid

We think about our problems a lot, we think about our pain a lot, but we don’t realize that we’re not actually in our body, feeling and processing them a lot.

This is where we women have somatic techniques to help us discern the difference between feeling and thinking. Breathwork is key for this process.

Can you sense how much you might be using self-sabotage and numbness, like scrolling, drinking, or overthinking, to avoid feeling dissociation? Can you sense how often you rely on those things instead of truly feeling, processing, and releasing?

To feel joy, abundance, and peace will also mean you have to feel your grief.

A lot of us have used anger, bitterness, and resentment to avoid feeling the grief of loss. So I want you to notice where you’re selectively numbing. I do not want you to force yourself to feel all the time. The tools of dissociation and compartmentalization can be valuable. It can be useful. It is a tool in the toolkit.

But the goal is to stop self-sabotaging and to increase your capacity to feel, feel a little bit every day or every week, and to carve out enough space to feel.

And the important thing here is to connect the dots that if you are feeling like you do not have enough joy or abundance in your life, it is probably directly related to how much you are using the tools of dissociation, numbing or bypassing, and to just start to slowly, gently tip the scales.

Feeling Is Validating—No Permission Needed

As I was preparing to talk about this topic, I got into the idea of validating emotion. When I’m feeling feelings, I want to look up at whomever I’m with and say, “Is that okay? Is what I’m feeling okay?”

It’s a negative belief that it’s not safe to feel what I’m feeling. I have to be perfect, I don’t matter.

These negative beliefs that we women have running behind the scenes in our mental programs.

For me, it’s a new, uncomfortable habit to feel feelings. By feeling them, I have validated them. Feelings don’t need to be labeled as good or bad.

How to Stop Self-Sabotage: Let Feelings Guide You Toward Joy

Creating the space to feel feelings is the validation they require.

Then, it’s a process of moving through them enough to say, “Okay, based on these feelings, what do I need? And am I willing to step into the uncomfortable unknown to ask for what I need?”

There is always a solution to your problem. You are worthy of all that you feel. Don’t let all of those feelings lead you down the path of reinforcing your negative beliefs.

Let the feelings be what they are, and then reach for those positive beliefs that you are enough.

You matter, you do not have to be perfect, and you can get your needs met—those feelings are not evidence of anything to the contrary. They are simply the color and the texture of our lives, and they are the path to joy.

I do understand, however, that it sounds a little sadistic to say, “To feel joy, you must also be willing to feel your pain.”

Stop Numbing: Joy Awaits Inside

If it’s hard for you to stop self-sabotaging, you’re in good company.

If you want to feel more joy and more abundance, it means creating more space for you to feel all of the feelings and trusting that, if you allow yourself to drop into your body and feel your grief, it will go.

It’s important to circle back when you have days or weeks where you dissociate more than usual, and carve out intentional time to feel those things that are asking for your attention, to give them a voice, and validate them simply by feeling them.

I’m so proud of you for being here and for believing in yourself more today than you did yesterday.

I love you so much. Peace.