eli westfall, lmft

A quick Google search reveals the following about this phrase: “Know thyself” is an Ancient Greek philosophical maxim inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, urging deep self-understanding by recognizing your limits, passions, emotions, and true nature, leading to wisdom, better decisions, and a more fulfilling life, a concept explored by thinkers from Socrates to modern psychologists. 

What the heck does that actually mean? Good question. It has been a little time since I delved into the realm of philosophy and had any real heavy philosophical discussions, but let’s see if we can parse this out a little bit to make it make some kind of sense to us today. I am a therapist and as such I find it very useful for us to have a decent understanding of ourselves. In therapy we refer to this knowledge of one’s self as self-awareness. Being aware of what we experience, how what we experience makes us feel, how we act towards others based on how we are feelings, and how do we express those feelings in general. Having a good sense of our inherent value and worth. I talk quite a bit about self-awareness with many of my clients. Like any cross-section of people, they is a wide diversity of where people fall on the self-awareness spectrum. I have some clients who are very self-aware and others who are not.

Having some self-awareness is a pretty important part of personal growth. Since it is important, it is helpful to find ways to improve our own self-awareness. How do we do that? I can think of several ways we can become more self-aware.

1. Stop comparing ourselves to others.
2. Keep a journal.
3. Inventory what we felt and thought in various situations.
4. Inventory how we responded when we felt different emotions.
5. Explore better ways to express ourselves.

Let me explain these a little further and discuss how they differ from each other. First off, we need to stop comparing ourselves to others. There are many pitfalls we get trapped in when we compare ourselves to others. One of them is that we don’t get an accurate sense of who we are and what we have accomplished in life. When we compare ourselves to others, we don’t take into account each of us have very different experiences and circumstances… some that likely helped us to progress faster and others which likely held us back. Either way, none of us are walking the same path and it is essential we understand that. Our journey is our journey alone. Others can walk the journey with us, support us, be there for us, and help along the way. But no one else is walking the same journey we are.

Keep a journal. For some people, especially men, it seems kind of silly. But it isn’t. Humans are notoriously bad about have accurate recollections of the past. So write it down. I have a problem remembering things, mostly important things or things I have to do. So, I write them down. I have to. Otherwise, they may not get done. Journaling our experiences, feelings, emotions, and reactions can be very helpful. A very helpful step in becoming more self-aware is to track what we experience and how we feel/think about what we experienced. Sounds simple. Because it is simple.

Once we write these things down, we can begin to track exactly what we felt and thought in any given situation. I am running late to work, how did I feel? Anxious, angry, hurried, rushed, inconsiderate. Yes. I forget to do something my wife asked me to do, how did I feel? I wasn’t able to follow through with a commitment I made to my boys, how did I feel? And so on. After journaling experiences, try to group them into situations and the response to the situations. At this stage we are connecting feelings, thoughts, and reactions to different situations. When I get cut off in traffic, I get mad. When I disappoint my wife, I get sad.

Next step, is to work through how we responded when we felt the emotions in various situations. When I get cut off in traffic, I get mad, then I run the person off the road… in my mind, lol, not in real life. But I do yell, cuss at them, and drive too closely to them for a short time. Make the connections between the situations we find ourselves in, the emotions we felt in those situations, and how did we act as a response to the situation and emotion. This was one of the ways I was able to work through my anger management issues. I got a good handle on what made me mad and how I responded when I was mad, and from there find better ways to express my anger that didn’t make me look like a lunatic. If we can become aware of how we feel and then respond to various situations, we can then become able to manage those behaviors and act differently when we experience that situation in the future.

Closely related to the last step is finding new and different ways to act. A part of this is working through why we felt the things we did in each situation. Why do I get mad when I run late to commitments? Why do I feel sad when I disappoint my wife? Why do I get anxious when I feel like I don’t have control of things around me? This takes time and work to find the feeling and the feeling behind the feeling. I shared in another post how anger is typically a secondary emotion and we aren’t able to really conquer it until we find the primary emotion driving the anger. This step is where that exploration takes place and from that exploration, we find new ways to act or express our emotions. Healthier, more appropriate ways.

Obviously, we have just scratched the surface here and there is much more to be said about self-awareness. And yes, it is a journey… a long journey for some of us. But it is a journey well worth the effort to make it. I would love to talk to you more individually if want some help becoming more self-aware, reach out and we can find a way to make that happen.