Inner Saboteur

A popular name for the part that supposedly wrecks your plans on purpose. We think it’s wrong.

Description

The concept is everywhere: assess your saboteurs, overcome your saboteurs, silence your inner saboteur. The usual definition runs something like “the part of us that routinely sabotages our desires, good intentions, and the plans we make for success”, and the usual advice is to defeat it.

Two problems. First, it doesn’t work. Fighting a part of yourself, silencing it, banishing it, getting it out of the system — in our experience this reliably fails, and often gets the part working harder. Second, the label is doing something we recognise from elsewhere: “saboteur” is what a plan calls the people who disagree with it. It explains why the Great Brilliant Way Forward isn’t going forward, without anyone having to look at the plan.

We do act against our own interests, frequently. That part is true. But when we have actually gone and asked, we have never once found a part whose goal was to wreck things. We have found parts protecting something, parts running the only strategy they know, parts that were never told the situation changed, and parts nobody has consulted in twenty years. There is a longer version of this rant.

What Inner Saboteur is NOT:

Not a part, in the IFS sense. It is a description of an effect, mistaken for an intention. For what is usually going on instead, try Protectors, Polarization, or a burden nobody has updated.

Examples:

“I sabotaged the interview” — or a protector decided the job was dangerous and didn’t tell you.
“My saboteur ate the diet” — or a firefighter noticed you’d been miserable for six weeks.
“Part of me wants me to fail” — worth checking. It is usually a part that wants you not to try.

see also:

Protectors; Polarization; Burdens; Self-like Parts; Parts Work