The inner saboteur is a part of the human psyche that undermines a person's feet on his path to happiness. You know...everything is running, things are falling into place, and suddenly there is a compelling need to create a conflict, for example. It gets confusing. Logically, it is clear to everyone that we wish for the nice things for ourselves and for our loved ones, and suddenly the day comes when you clearly notice a part of you that wishes to harm, destroy and harm. It whispers solutions to you that create chaos and pain and even feels satisfaction when something doesn't work out or when it can hurt another. In my life, it appeared most actively in close relationships with women as a regularly appearing compulsive need to fight and hurt.

But who really is this inner saboteur?

Let's look at it this way. Life force flows through each of us and manifests itself somehow. Manifesting is natural. It is the dance of the life force. However, as children we were heavily restricted in our expression, and this restriction was often exacerbated by various traumatic experiences - we were beaten when we showed liveliness, humiliated for expressing our sexuality, etc. We were simply led to be "good", which sometimes unfortunately it meant being quiet and not moving too much. We were forced to believe things that we could not understand with our childish knowledge or even contradicted our ability to perceive intuitively. We were also forced to accept them and so one day it happened that the world of adults simply broke some of us.

At that moment something very interesting happened. In order not to put ourselves in further danger of being traumatized, we had to start being "good". However, in order for this to be possible, we had to push certain aspects of our life force away. We had to hide some parts of ourselves! The moment of internal splitting has come. We became two. The good and the bad. And where do you think the bad guys have gone? They became shadows, the very shadows that bother you in adulthood and undermine your feet.

A miracle, right? We often tend to see inner saboteurs as something bad that we need to get rid of, when they are repressed child parts waiting to be accepted! What's more, we are waiting for them too! They get angry to draw attention to themselves. It angers us to notice that we carry with us something worth rediscovering. Because they carry various important qualities that we naturally lack in our usual repressed ("adult") state - we have no contact with them.

This is an important point. The saboteur carries a certain lost quality, and this can be discovered in the moments when he is active. These displaced qualities are called "lost parts of the soul" in shamanic terms. In times of storms, it is possible to learn from the saboteur. It has something that you miss at other times and you don't even need to know about it. How to regain this lost quality? Such an integration process often requires more attention. These forgotten parts are in direct contact with the memories of the trauma that forced them to hide. In the process of integration, there is no other way than to release this trauma.

Trauma tends to repeat itself over time. Hence the frequent experience of the saboteur as a hungry entity trying to create situations similar to those that led to his creation. It is a bit of a mystery until one becomes more familiar with the workings of the mind. The human mind is a grandiose recording and evaluation device that only repeats learned patterns. It just repeats! It is up to us to stop these destructive schemes. The procedure is still the same. First, you need to realize what is happening and stop the compulsive tendency. At that moment, the emotional aspect that drives the whole mechanism - trauma - often appears. Trauma must be felt with understanding. This is where the healing lies.

In order for such healing to be successful, an adult needs a certain degree of inner stability. It is necessary to have at least some distance from emotions - anchoring in the consciousness of the observer. (This is where a good therapist can be a valuable support.) Otherwise, the person will believe that the more emergent emotions are the reality taking place in the present and everything will just repeat itself without rewriting the destructive schema. You bite someone again, you get drunk on the pier again, you lie to someone again...

That is why strengthening contact with consciousness as such is so important. It creates distance from emotions, which are only one layer of reality. Then it is possible to experience them purely and they no longer have the power to drag a person into a carousel of confusion. The key is focusing attention on "what one is aware of." What is aware of your feelings? Stay with it. That is meditation.

The ability of the human mind to project reality outwards and firmly believe that what it sees and perceives is the truth is enormous. That's why healing trauma is sometimes so challenging. In order for the rewrite to occur, the "treated" needs to realize that what he perceives when the saboteur is active is an image (memory). At such a moment, distance is created and more awareness enters the situation. Then even deeper emotional layers can be released and the saboteur gradually dissolves. Integration is taking place and the splitting of the life force is disappearing. The end of schizophrenia…

The surprise may then be to find out that the saboteur was actually you all along and what was trying to get rid of him and rejecting him was only a mental strategy to be "good". A survival strategy that you've come to regard as your own over time. A liberating twist isn't it? Suddenly there is no dark shadow because that which was blackening him and fighting him is no more. What really needed to die was the mental tendency to be "good." Such shifts are demanding in proportion to the depth of trauma one has once suffered and require patience, sensitivity, understanding and often considerable determination. However, the moments of inner union that follow are a tremendous gift, and people who manifest such paths are often walking role models for society. May love and wisdom guide us - our ability to embrace reality is much greater than we think. We are diamonds in the rough that we polish with our own determination to shine for this world…