If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Under healthy circumstances, our natural instincts would be to want to protect ourselves, to preserve our health and keep ourselves safe. We would want to take good care of ourselves and keep ourselves out of harm’s way. For many of us, though, our instincts can be the total opposite. We intentionally endanger ourselves. We sabotage our happiness, health and wellbeing. We allow ourselves to stay in abusive relationships and abuse ourselves. We put ourselves in dangerous situations and act recklessly. We self-harm and contemplate taking our own lives. What causes our self-destructiveness? Where does it come from?

Many of us are subconsciously, rather than consciously, self-destructive. We might not be fully aware of these instincts within us, but they are there, beneath the surface. We might not yet be ready to admit them to ourselves or to others. We want to be perceived as normal, not sick or weird or wrong. We don’t want to acknowledge we have a problem. We don’t want people looking down on us. The sooner we bring our self-destructiveness to the forefront of our awareness, the sooner we can tackle it and create healthier, happier patterns for ourselves.

For many of us, our self-destructiveness comes from the subconscious programming that we were instilled with when we were young and that we’ve been developing ever since. We may have been verbally, emotionally or physically abused, causing us to feel as though we weren’t good enough or lovable enough. We may have internalized having been abused or neglected to mean we were unworthy, undeserving and inadequate. We might have misinterpreted our traumatic experiences as having been our fault, making us bad, shameful people.

When we believe at our core that we are inadequate, for whatever reason, it can develop within us a self-rejection where we don’t accept who we are. We feel insecure. We develop limiting beliefs about ourselves, such as the belief that we’ll never amount to anything, or that we don’t measure up to other people. We start to hate ourselves. This can cause us to feel like we don’t matter, like our lives aren’t worth fighting for, like we have nothing to lose and nothing to hope for. We give up on ourselves. Self-destructing comes naturally to us, whether in the form of criticizing ourselves relentlessly, sabotaging our chances of happiness, or physically harming ourselves by driving drunk, having unsafe sex, or cutting ourselves.

Knowing where our self-destructiveness comes from is an important part of growing our awareness about the issue so that we can take steps to heal it.

We fully believe you can recover, and we have a total commitment to helping you get there. Call 888-570-7154 for information on our addiction recovery treatment programs.