Things start going well, and then you find a way to burn it down. And you have got the diagnosis loaded and ready. Self-sabotage. My trauma response. That is just how I am wired.
I want to take that apart carefully, because half of it is true and the other half is the exact thing keeping you stuck.
The behavior is real. I am not going to tell you people do not undercut themselves near success. They do, predictably, and you have watched yourself do it. That is not the argument.
The argument is what you do with it after, because the story you tell about it will either change it or guarantee it repeats. And watch the move you make. You take a thing you did, a specific bad call, and you promote it into a thing you are. I self-sabotage. I am a self-saboteur. It is an identity now.
Ellis called that overgeneralization. You take one behavior and rate your entire self by it. And once it is a fixed trait, notice what it quietly buys you. You cannot be held responsible for who you fundamentally are. The label stopped describing the problem. It became the permission slip.
So separate the two things the label fused. There is the act, and there is the self. You made a bad call. That is a behavior, and behaviors are yours to change. You are not a self-saboteur. That is a global rating, and it is false and useless, because it gives you nothing to do but brace for the next time.
Here is the whole move, and it is faster and harder than any excavation. Name the act clean. I made a bad call, not I am broken. Refuse the identity. This is something I did, not the definition of me. Then do not do it again, and go do the right thing in front of you. No ceremony.
Real trauma is real and it deserves real work, and I do that work every week. This is not that. This is reaching for the word trauma as a hall pass to keep doing the thing.
You are not a self-saboteur. You are a man who made a bad call and gets to make a better one right now.
Check your intel before you move.