Is it a fact that people mess up their lives or is this just their impression?It really is a fact. I’ve worked with people who got the book contract they always wanted, and suddenly developed writers’ block. I’ve seen people get into the relationship that they’ve been looking for, and then either do something to push their partner away, or decide that there’s something wrong with relationship and end it. I’ve had several patients who were within a few credits of graduating from college when they suddenly dropped out. So it’s a very real phenomenon that, just when some people get what they want in their lives, they do something to undermine it.Why do they do that? At the deepest, unconscious level they really don’t believe it’s okay for them to have what they want. As much as they really want it on a conscious level – and they really do want it –something is telling them that’s it’s not okay for them to have it.How do you help them with this? When a person is in this self-destructive frame of mind, she usually feels like she’s a failure, and that there must be something wrong with her that’s causing her to fail. So the person who drops out of school will convince herself that she isn’t smart enough to graduate, even when she’s been getting A’s in all her classes. The person who pushes his partner away will decide that he’s not attractive or successful enough for her, even though this has never been an issue in the relationship.So my first task is to help people recognize that the reasons they’re giving themselves for their behavior don’t really match their experience. They’re most tempted to drop out or to leave a relationship when things are going well, not when they’re going badly. This suggests that what they’re most afraid of isn’t failure but success.How does that self-destructive thinking get so deeply imbedded?It usually has its roots in our early experiences in our families. For example, I’ve worked with people whose families seemed to do everything to encourage them to be successful. The parents worked hard to send their kids to good colleges. They told them that they could be successful at anything they wanted to do. But alongside the explicit messages were more indirect messages that conveyed the opposite point of view. Every time their child was successful, the parents would disparage their success. It was great that their son was a successful engineer but he should have been a doctor. It was wonderful that their daughter was a physician, but why wasn’t she married yet?I think we’re much more responsive to the implicit messages we get from our families than we are to the explicit ones. The implicit messages tend to give us more information about what our parents seem to need from us emotionally. They tell us more about our parents’ vulnerabilities. On an unconscious level, we recognize that they don’t want us to have the life we want because they’re afraid that we’ll abandon them, or that we’ll be more successful than they are. There are as many fears as there are families. But if we feel that they need us to fail, we’ll find a way to fail in order not to disappoint them, and continue to feel close to them.How hard is it to talk people out of this? It’s very difficult and it takes a long time. It’s not really a matter of talking people out of it. It’s more a matter of helping people to see how much of their suffering is being caused by this dynamic. What we’re up against is a really fundamental conviction people have that something bad will happen if they allow themselves to become the people they want to be. If their identity has been formed around the feeling that disappointing their families will be catastrophic for them, they’ll be inclined to undermine themselves rather than disappoint their families’ expectations. Disappointing those expectations can feel like being annihilated, like losing the identity they have built up and maintained over many years.How do you help them through it? It involves tracking their feelings very, very closely. People who are struggling with self-destructive behavior usually swing back and forth between two opposite moods. When they first experience a success, they’ll often be ecstatic and very optimistic about the future. However, almost invariably, at some point their mood changes dramatically, and they feel depressed and hopeless. My job is to track these changes in mood, and help them understand why they find it so hard to hold onto the good feelings.At the beginning of this process, people often can’t access their good feelings at all, once they’ve disappeared. They may not even remember that they had them.For example (and, again, I would never talk about an actual patient; this is a disguised composite of a number of people I’ve seen over the years), I worked with a man who, after many years of very hard work, was experiencing a lot of success as a musician. He would come to see me after a successful weekend performance and be jubilant. However, by our next session, he was very depressed and convinced that he would never be successful. He had no memory of how good he had felt in the previous session. He was convinced that he had always been depressed, and always would be depressed.Our process had several stages. First, we had to get to the point where he could remember how good he had felt right after his performances. Then we had to figure out when his mood had changed. Finally, he realized exactly when his mood took a nosedive. After a therapy session when he was feeling really good, he would go home and immediately call his alcoholic mother. On one level, it looked like he was trying to get the kind of positive response from her that he had always longed for and never experienced. On another level, it was clear to both of us that he was setting himself up to feel bad, since his mother just complained to him about her life and never gave him the kind of positive response he wanted. Over time, it became clear to both of us that he was calling her because he felt that he wasn’t entitled to have a happier life than his mother had. We had to observe this pattern many times before it changed, but eventually it did change. He was able to enjoy his success, he didn’t get depressed anymore, and he was able to feel genuine compassion for his mother without feeling that he had to sacrifice himself for her.Once they’re figured out the dynamic, can your clients maintain it?It’s really interesting. This seems like such an intractable problem, and it takes a lot of time and effort to resolve it. But, once someone has resolved it, I’ve never seen them backslide. Once people feel entitled to having a life that feels meaningful and satisfying to them, they don’t want to give that up. That’s the good news.Click to learn more about finding your life path with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.