On Developing Self-Awareness

Socrates famously told his students that the unexamined life is not worth living. For most of us, vast areas of our lives are rarely examined. We dwell within the necessities of daily life and but seldom find the inner leisure and motivation to look more deeply at ourselves. People come into therapy because they are unhappy. The cause of their unhappiness may be focused specifically on one or two areas: a troubled relationship, an illness, or difficulties at work. Rather than having a specific content, their unhappiness might be experienced more as an unexplained over-all sense of malaise. Going to a medical doctor because we are ill or in pain, we seek an explanation and hopefully, a cure. Seeing a therapist, we look for a similar outcome. Like the doctor, the therapist must bring all of her knowledge and experience to play in assessing the client’s situation and formulating a direction for their work together. A general sense can emerge from the first session but the process of assessment is on-going, as the partners in the therapeutic endeavor reach deeper and deeper into the ways in which the client’s troubles are enacted and perpetuated in her daily life.

Talking about her troubles and receiving feedback can move a person closer to an awareness of dynamics in her present life which she experiences but may not be fully in touch with. This awareness can be expanded when, for example, her therapist enquires about her physical and feeling state in the session itself. For many of us reflection of that nature is quite foreign. Our consciousness is focused on the interaction itself. At another level, however, we are reacting mentally, emotionally, and physically to the person with whom we are talking. For example, though I might be speaking of a conflict with someone at work, internally whole other things can be going on. I might feel intimidated by the therapist whom, without realizing it, I have elevated to the role of an authority, someone who could judge me pejoratively. Alongside this reaction can be one of resentment for what I experience as being actually or potentially criticized and dismissed. At the same time I likely have other feelings, for example, longings to be understood and cared for at levels that have never been fully met. In my body are chronic tensions exacerbated by the intensity of this encounter with a person who so clearly is focused upon my words and feelings in a way rarely experienced. 

Exploring some of these reactions in the session can help me to be more aware of the quality of my interactions with others and thus to more deeply understand them. Especially when my inner responses to people and situations are viewed within the context of the dynamics of my formative years, I can develop an appreciation of the ways in which these dynamics have shaped my approaches to the world and to others. In itself this broadening perspective allows me a space to explore the possibilities of other ways of viewing and responding to the exigencies of life.

In my next post I will write about efforts that I can make between sessions that can further expand this “terra incognita,” the inner life which proceeds with or without my conscious awareness.