How psycharts.com Proposes to Solve Voluntary Self-Sabotage

Updated

psycharts.com proposes a single, specific method: study the same sequence of cause and effect twice—once from the outside as an observer and once from the inside as the person who acted—then combine what each view reveals. The site's core claim is that neither perspective holds all the information needed, but their collaboration does. This approach applies to recurring patterns of unwanted outcomes, such as addictive relapse or repeated failures to sustain an intimate relationship, where a person sincerely intends to avoid a result they have already experienced yet follows the same path again.

What the site means by "voluntary self-sabotage"

The site frames the problem as a "mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma." Its working definition: a well-intentioned individual voluntarily follows a path they have already discovered leads to unwanted outcomes. Making a mistake is normal and is how people learn. The damaging pattern is the recurring loop—relapse despite the best of intentions—which the site describes as destroying lives.

Two examples are given:

  • Recurring failure to control excessive appetite for a substance (food, drugs) or an activity (gambling, pornography), where sincere intention or even public commitment does not prevent relapse.
  • Recurring failure to control excessive emotional reactions that undermine intimate relationships.

The site's key observation is an asymmetry: the solution to someone else's pattern looks simple, while the solution to your own looks impossibly complex. That gap is the starting point for the method.

The mechanism: why one viewpoint is never enough

The site's explanation rests on a mismatch between how cause and effect looks and how it feels.

  • Observer's view (third person): friends, family, and your own hindsight judge your actions differently than you did in the moment. From outside, the sequence of external events is visible, but the internal reactions that drove them are not.
  • First-person view: you have direct access to your internal reactions, but not to how the sequence appears from outside.

Neither point of view "has access to all the information necessary to solve the mystery," per the site. The proposed key is to observe the sequence of external events and internal reactions from both the outside and the inside, which the site says produces "a new and extraordinary perspective of cause and effect."

The site also invokes Nietzsche's perspective and optical illusions as illustrations of how the same thing can appear different depending on where you stand—and closes on "the power to choose," positioning the combined view as what makes a different choice possible.

How the method is practiced

The site does not present this as a clinical protocol. It is an invitation to build the skill through fictional tales, so you can become familiar with studying cause and effect from both the observer's third-person perspective and the first-person perspective of the saboteur.

A practical reading of the method:

  1. Pick one recurring pattern you have already noticed—ideally someone else's first, since the site says solving their simple problems is a helpful first step toward your own more complex one.
  2. Trace the external sequence as an observer would: what happened, in what order, before the unwanted outcome.
  3. Trace the internal sequence as the person would: what you felt and told yourself at each point in that same order.
  4. Lay the two sequences side by side and look for where they diverge—where the outside view and the inside experience describe the same moment differently.
  5. Use the combined picture to identify what the site calls the cause the person "voluntarily" followed, then move from understanding others' patterns to your own.

The expected result is not a one-time insight but a better understanding of why the person voluntarily follows a path already known to lead somewhere unwanted—which the site presents as the precondition for a solution.

What to keep in mind before relying on it

  • It is a self-study framework, not a treatment program. The site presents fictional tales and a perspective-taking method. The page evidence contains no clinical credentials, outcome data, or pricing information; nothing indicates whether access is free or requires login.
  • The site itself flags the difficulty gap. Others' patterns look simple to solve; your own look impossibly complex. Expect the transfer from practicing on fictional or others' cases to your own to be the hard part.
  • The method depends on honest dual recording. If you only reconstruct the outside story or only the inside feelings, you are back to one incomplete viewpoint—the exact condition the site says cannot solve the puzzle.

If you want to test the approach, start with one low-stakes recurring pattern and write both sequences for the same episode before drawing any conclusion.