There are two kinds of creative saboteurs one internal and one external.

The external ones are easiest to deal with. Julia Cameron writes about ‘crazymakers’. ‘Crazymakers’ are people who make you crazy, the kind that get you talking to other people ‘Then she did THIS, and then they… can you believe it?’ They can suck up lots and lots of energy and time. They are fabulous for blocked people because you can just blame the stalled novel on your mother or your crazy friend Jane instead of actually working on novel and dealing with the internal saboteurs.

The other saboteur is someone who is normally very supportive and helpful but suddenly turns. I would warn my Artist Way students to keep very quiet about their creative recovery but they would often ignore my advice with interesting results. One former student reported that she had had a very unpleasant meal with a friend who laid into her big time when she started to talk about the potential creative projects and fun she was having. Sadly some of our relationships are based around unspoken assumptions – in this case ‘I’m the together person who will be kind (and pitying) to you the hopeless CFS/ME sufferer’. With the student recovering her creative side and instead becoming a person of agency rather than of pity the dynamics of the relationship became wildly apparent.

Similarly then blocked people band together and bond over their blockedness when one person breaks away and actually starts doing something it sets up a terror in the blocked that they will be left alone. It also is a powerful message to the blocked person that they are often clutching their blocks unnecessarily to their chests and they don’t want to be reminded of this.

What to do? Set boundaries, ask yourself why you are involved with this person? Creative saboteurs beautifully use up time and energy so you can't create. Why do you want to enable this block? If setting boundaries is very difficult try reading around issues of co-dependency.

Internal saboteurs are subtler. A belief that you shouldn’t be better than your siblings, shouldn’t think of being successful, can’t draw a straight line, not a creative bone in my body. They pop up often on the edge of success so we move away from what we really want into the more familiar territory of failure. Thinking about where these messages and patterns come from is important work. Take the knowledge and use it. When you see yourself doing the pattern again acknowledge it and change course. Our past does not have to equal our future. The important thing is that they will always be there to some extent even if very faintly. But that does not mean you have to allow them to limit you.

Do do start getting rid of all the crazymakers out of your life though. All that energy and time can be used to create space for genuinely supportive and inspiring people in your life and everybody deserves that.

Week 5 of 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women