Success as Betrayal

There are those in all walks and stages of life that seem to fall short of their potential. As one client described it, “I’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Chronic underachievement is often confusing to the victim and puzzling to those around them. While there can be many underlying reasons for this flat trajectory, there are many for whom success is bound in their mind with betrayal. Sometimes this betrayal is related to culture, where business success is experienced as an abandonment of subcultural or family values. A successful individual from a less successful family, or a family with communal cultural values, may experience their rise in professional success as turning their back on their family and culture, experiencing paradoxical feelings of both pride and loss. Sometimes success is a betrayal of some semiconscious pact that someone makes with themselves early in life that continues to undermine their progress. 

Success has its obvious surface meaning, but there is usually a deeper narrative. One that revolves around the semiconscious adaptation to past emotional challenges. When the deep narrative is supportive of success, there are few internally generated roadblocks. It is when the deep narrative conflicts with an overt track to success, that the symptoms of procrastination, avoidance, and self-sabotage appear. For others, it can be more family specific – a child achieving academic success is experienced as a betrayal by his father who struggled in school, or a successful career-oriented daughter is perceived by her mother as abandoning the family’s traditional values. A darker but altogether common scenario is the parent who is threatened by their child’s success, leading them to criticize and thwart their child’s progress by undermining their self-esteem.

When coaching someone with an underlying psychological conflict surrounding success, efforts focused on building second-executive abilities - time management, note taking, work structures, etc. - will be met with avoidance and excuses. In order to make progress, unearthing the social-emotional conflict and discovering the feelings driving the self-sabotage are necessary first steps. This step first requires the downregulation of the first executive through relaxation techniques and perhaps exploring uncovering the deep narrative which pairs success with pain, fear, or loss. This will allow for an increased participation of the third executive via introspection, reflection, and metacognition when the avoidance behaviors are activated. The next step is to have the second and third systems (in conjunction with the coach) collaborate in creating solutions to break up the blockage and create experiments in living that allow insights and strategies to be tested, modified, and permanently implemented. Throughout the process, the first executive will attempt to block progress, so it is also necessary for self-awareness to include the inner voices, habit patterns, and addictions that support the avoidance of confronting the necessary issues.