5 Self-Sabotaging Habits That Keep Us From Moving On and Healing

And how to create new, healthier habits to heal.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

I’ve never been very good at moving on or letting go. There are reasons, of course. There are always reasons. But the truth is that the reasons don’t matter nearly as much as we think they do. We can intellectualize why it is we hold on so tight while ignoring the self-sabotaging behaviors that prevent us from healing and moving forward with our lives.

Don’t get me wrong. Understanding why we tend to hold on when we’re better served letting go can help us have more self-compassion. It can also help us identify patterns and create new, more productive ways of coping. It can even help us explain to friends and family why moving on seems harder for us than it is for them.

But I got stuck in the understanding and couldn’t see a way to stop the cycle. Instead of creating new behavioral patterns, I was looking in the rearview mirror at the trauma that created the patterns in the first place. I became very good at accepting this tendency and very bad at changing it.

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