Increase Your Self-Awareness | Being Well Podcast

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back one of the most important skills for a person to have is self-awareness it improves our relationships it helps us pursue the goals that truly matter to us and it supports us in growing and changing for the better but as i said on an episode of the podcast just a few months ago self-awareness might be the single biggest challenge in the world of personal growth because it is both so essential and so difficult to see ourselves clearly and i even questioned during that episode whether it's possible for us to become more self-aware well today it's time for me to eat my words a little bit because we're going to be focusing on self-awareness including how we can maybe just maybe become more self-aware over time so to help us do that i'm joined today as usual by dr rakansa and rick is a clinical psychologist he's a best-selling author and he's also my dad so dad how are you feeling about this topic i feel it's perhaps the foundation topic for truly being well yeah with it all problems are solvable without it no problems are solvable a slight exaggeration but pretty close to the truth yeah yeah and it's something that you can really develop over time yeah okay well great well you know that's a maybe a point of distinction between the two of us it's not that i don't think it's developable at all i just think it's really hard to do it and that gets me into the first thing i wanted to ask you about which was about working with people in therapy and you obviously have a long time clinical background as a as a clinical psychologist did people generally walk into the room when you worked with them being fairly self-aware of course nobody's perfect but fairly self-aware about what their underlying problems were or was that something that in general really needed to be cultivated over time yes what i mean is that sometimes people come in to different therapists for different reasons i had a general practice seeing adults couples families and also kids and sometimes people would come in because there was a practical problem that it was very clear to them for example how to navigate uh you know parenting co-parenting with an ex or what to do about the fact that they just felt a loss of purpose in their life after the kids left home or they retired that was pretty clear or they knew they had a drug issue or an alcohol issue that they just had to deal with other times yes often people come in with this sort of vague miasma of misery like and i'm not making fun of it this is poignant this is real it is uh and they didn't know why they felt the way they did or they didn't know why they tried to do some things and they hadn't worked so definitely that's where we start but it's certainly not where we end and i guess a little bit i'm in the cam i'm in the candle business so you're talking to a guy who has seen the evidence again and again and again of the benefit of bringing light to situations and bringing light out into what had previously been the shadows well that's a beautiful metaphor to start with and there's this common idea in therapeutic practice of what's known as a presenting problem there's this thing that a person knows that they have to deal with on some level they're having an issue in their life that's bubbling up to the surface but that presenting problem is often a manifestation of much deeper issues that that person is facing they've got something that's beneath the surface or in the darkness to extend your metaphor there that you need to bring a little bit of light to was that also something that you saw pretty regularly where somebody might have an awareness of a surface issue but there was some deeper thing that was revealed over time that you needed to draw their attention to sometimes what would happen for someone is that there would be a revelation of some sort in which they would become aware of what they had not yet been aware of in a way that was really freeing and a story in my case that you've heard me talk about is that roughly in my mid-20s i had the revelation the realization that growing up i had been a nerd but not a wimp i had cast my history in the framework of oh i was a wimpy mediocre kind of um unworthy sort of human being and uh i told the story that way and it was revelatory when i realized and i became aware of the facts that no i'd actually been a dork i'd been a nerd but i had not been a coward i had not been a wimp and that's one kind of example in other situations people realize that something is important that they've pushed to the side or they realized that it would be more effective if they did something or they realize what is actually at stake in an important relationship that they're you know having conflicts about so they definitely can realize certain things one of the interesting thing that comes up for people is realizing their own responsibility which is a kind of self-awareness where you start to recognize wow yeah good news bad news or rather bad news good news bad news it's your responsibility to a large extent good news it's your power to make it better and the two go together because if it's in some ways your responsibility for how things have turned out that means you have influence over things and if you have influence over things you can make them better so this might seem kind of abstract i'm sure we're going to get into a lot of details here but you can see immediately that um you know there are that this topic of self-awareness is indeed foundational i'll say one more thing here that's beneficial people grapple with issues right there's issues okay was i a nerd or a wimp right or was there what should i do better as a parent you know to to raise our kids okay there's also this process of self-knowledge for its own sake as we gradually expand the light that moves out into the shadows of our interior people feel more whole they feel more integrated they usually feel a lot better and more at ease and at peace with who they are yeah i think this is a good moment to talk about some distinctions around self-awareness different kinds of ways that it can show up for a person and there's a classic distinction between internal and external self-awareness and we've mostly talked about internal so far this is knowing your own values your tendencies uh your thoughts and feelings the big schema that govern the ways in which you view the world outside of yourself all of that stuff that is internal self-awareness and then external self-awareness is typically more relational or social in nature where you have an awareness of how you're perceived by other people so to give an example of how these can be different for somebody i might have an internal awareness of the fact that i'm an extroverted and sociable and often which will probably not come as a surprise to podcast listeners quite a chatty person and then so that's my conceptual or internal self-awareness then my external self-awareness is having a moment when i'm in a group of people and we're all talking about something and i'm able to do a moment-to-moment scanning of my behavior where i can look at it almost as a spectator and have a moment where i go hey forrest you're probably taking up a little bit too much of the air in the room right now and it's time for you to toss the ball to somebody else so that might be a helpful distinction for people in terms of the different ways where they can be self-aware right can you look at yourself from the inside out and from the outside in including through the eyes of others and including taking into account what's it like for them to be with you to be around you totally that's a really useful thing especially if you occupy any position of privilege or in society right maybe i'll talk here for us that would if it would be helpful about different kinds of self-awareness uh particularly internally that internal form so now that you've made that distinction yeah so one think of granularity of mindfulness in real time how acutely can a person discern in a time scale of quarter seconds or even tenths of a second what's going on in their own streaming of consciousness that's the time part and then if you think about space the full breadth of the stream the swollen river really of consciousness with all is flotsam and jetsam how granular can a person detect subtle subtle shifts of mood intention perception bias expectation presumption how rapidly can they detect the psychodynamics the bubbling cauldron of different impulses different subpersonalities different almost darwinian struggles this is actually talked about as neural darwinism darwin neural darwinism there we go different struggles in these different aspects of yourself that are claiming access to the global workspace of consciousness they're trying to get the microphone if you will yeah sitting around the big round table you know that's the field of uh the workings space of consciousness so first question is how acutely can a person really really be aware of themselves second how much awareness can they have for everything including things that they tend to not be very aware of maybe due to training or culture or because they're really leery of certain things they don't want to be aware of that part so for many people full self-awareness is not particularly about tracking your thoughts more effectively because people are in their thoughts and they're thinking about their thoughts you know they're in it but what about your body sensations what about these somatic markers to use the term from antonio demacio that you can discern activate for half a second a sec two two seconds maybe as the underpinnings of an emotional and cognitive reaction to somebody or something how much can you be aware of that how much can you be aware of the um you know just the kind of title ebbs and flows of mood or deep down inside yourself or the activity of these deeper younger parts of yourself that are calling out with unmet needs now i'm how aware of that can you remember okay that's the second thing and then a a big third one is people are often uh caught up in situations for a lot of early cycle analysis is essentially about this one thing in which they're actively repressing parts of themselves repressing so pressing totally they're trying to hold them down they're trying to keep them at bay and it's it's kind of like wrestling a whole bunch of twisty kids you know trying to keep them in position but you know they're they're active and they're coming forward and it takes a lot of energy to keep them at bay and then it can create conflicts with others because with certain other people they might tend to speak to that part of yourself you're trying to keep at bay or name it not you know which then pushes us into denial or with other people longings are stirred up in which parts of ourselves that we've kept at bay suddenly want to now rush forward because it seems like there's such a nice person finally who sees me and wants to talk with me meanwhile we're like oh no don't reveal that okay so there's this active dynamic process of repression suppression that's really quite real and then just last there's the question of not so much the stuff that's in the periphery of of of awareness you know or kept at bay in kind of active processes that a person might be dimly aware of but then there's the question of what is what is genuinely unconscious and a fair amount of therapy and a fair amount of growth in general is to become more open to truly unconscious material to allow it to come forward more whether it's through engaging our dreams which is a wonderful vehicle for getting in touch with what's genuinely unconscious or becoming more alert to what has just started to break the water line i think of let's say this unconscious chunk of you is like a big submerged log with one bit of one leaf barely breaking the surface of the stream of consciousness so you can kind of see it especially if you have good granularity of mindfulness and so then you kind of tug on that leaf gently gently and then you get a hold of the twig and then you start working the twig and you get more and more in touch with that piece of repressed material in yourself oh now i've got a real branch here and eventually aha the log comes into view this is a great way in to talk a little bit about some of the reasons that i think it's so hard for people to become truly self-aware and one of those big reasons is everything you're pointing to here dad about the nature of the mind itself and the nature of the way in which we interact with our own psyche right because i've got mixed feelings about freud in general but we'll we'll use his model of the mind for the moment because it's a convenient metaphor around this idea if there's the conscious and then there's the subconscious and then there's the unconscious but i basically just want to take the concept that our self-awareness or our psyche broadly has layers to it and we're aware of many of those layers unless you are just a total sociopath or you have no interoception whatsoever everyone has some degree of awareness of their interior pretty much even very young children you can ask them pretty sophisticated questions about the nature of their experience and certainly once they're passed 3 five seven eight years old they're able to answer those questions in pretty sophisticated ways uh so we might be aware of these surface layers but we're often far less aware of the deeper ones and sometimes people can even get a little trapped by their own self-awareness where they've gotten halfway down so they think they're really aware about a process but really there's all this stuff that continues to exist underneath it so we can kind of bait ourselves into the false belief that we've become really fully aware of something when really we're still inside of our defenses essentially and that defense structure and the pain that's associated with self-revelation for people sometimes is i think a major block to self-awareness because you you pointed to something their dad when you were talking where people often go through a typical process with this where let's imagine a kit you see a kid running around on a playground kids are self-aware but they're not really self-monitoring they're just being what they are right they're running around they're interacting with other kids they're expressing whatever true nature is for that individual in that moment in time okay and then we have a revelatory moment where as you were saying earlier something is brought to our attention and this realization is often pretty painful because the thing that's generally brought to our attention by people we're interacting with is not always pleasant it is not always something that we're super happy about uh it's often attached to a lot of shame and self-criticism and then that shame and self-criticism has some kind of defense that emerges around it people's defenses really vary some people repress whatever that material is and they say okay i'm going to push that outside of my awareness other people go into extreme over monitoring and anxiety and self-consciousness about the issue and then there are probably a hundred other coping mechanisms but those are two big categories of them and we typically have to get through that self-consciousness problem to get to a point of true self-awareness of an issue and the big battle for a lot of people is getting through the defense that's attached to the initial moment when they had the blink of the self-awareness light turn on and that light became tied to pain and shame and self-criticism and then they need to get past that to actually work on the issue does that more or less track for your dad oh completely and yeah you're quite a freudian uh you're right there talking i don't i don't know how i feel about this but inner conflict yeah inner conflict yeah you know so multiple parts conflict among them dynamic relationships among them and a major process of defending against experiencing certain things defense well i totally co-signed that yeah one of freud's most famous cases was a young woman and she had a kind of paralysis in her hand that was called a glove paralysis in which she couldn't move and didn't respond to painful stimuli like being poked with a needle in a portion of her hand that did not correspond to the neural architecture in other words the nerves sort of moved through the whole wrist area but for her it was like there was a line that was drawn it was like a she was wearing a glove it was clearly psychogenic in its origin so that he did analysis with with this uh young woman and it eventually became clear that while she was living with her abusive tyrannical father taking care of him in a very deferential way situated in the social structures of the time she wanted to slap him that was the repressed impulse in her but she couldn't do that she couldn't slap him that would have been a total violation of her role it would have brought down all kinds of bad things upon her she couldn't slap him so psychogenically she paralyzed her hand and desensitized it as a way to manage that inner conflict paralyzing her hand was a solution to a problem as she experienced it now that's a very dramatic example of a defense the paralysis being the defense the defense against an underlying impulse right even a very understandable one most of the time when we broaden in self-awareness it's much more incremental and bit by bit also a lot of the time what we become aware of is good news yes to some extent we get in touch with our pain and as a subset of that pain there could be feelings of shame or worthlessness or appropriate healthy remorse so sometimes we do get in touch with that but very often what we get in touch with is neutral informative information right that's actually useful pragmatically useful information about ourselves or we get in touch with aspects of ourselves that are really really sweet and good that's a that's a real important aspect of self-awareness like i'll ask you maybe we'll take turns here i don't know i have a i have a story queued up um is there anything that you got in touch with through self-awareness that for you was reassuring a relief good news i know i'm not totally sure how to answer that question to be honest uh this is the first in the podcast you've never been unable to answer a question and also that pause was really long so this immediately for me as a therapist and i'm not going to therapize you forest fear nod and it's definitely on the air i'm not going to verifies you but for me i i smell blood in the water like oh yeah i'm a therapist oh yeah uh yeah i'm leaning into this one big time yeah i i maybe god maybe this is maybe i'm just wrong about this which i'm hoping to be um i i don't feel like that's where the pain points are for people i think the pain points are around dealing with things that they need to change not embracing like positive aspects of their personality but that's maybe because that's where the pain points are for me because i think i need to embrace the positive yeah hey there you go i'll definitely say my clinical experience 80 of what there is for people to recognize about themselves is good news ish on average maybe 20 is how they could be more skillful oh really yeah really yeah now in my clinic that's my clinical population but that's definitely my experience well okay well then sure let's let's roll with it then um and if i could just go a step further and knowing that and framing it that way makes the the pro the journey the path a lot easier to take because you're usually expecting that what you'll be discovering is good news and so you're much like okay yeah hey going yeah that's a totally fair piece of advice because i think that if people are are deeply concerned that every time they appear inside the vine all they will find is demons then clearly that is a big disincentive to peering inside of the mind so there's probably some some real usefulness here and that's a comment absolutely your assumption is really common yeah yeah and and i mean obviously i'm coming to this as not a clinician so i'm i'm not having the experiences that you're having in terms of sitting in front of people i'm just engaging with my own content and and hey maybe we've just found like a story that i tell myself in that i'm becoming now more self-aware of here in real time which is this idea that like i'm on some level um i don't know what the right word is because i don't want to say like conceited because i don't think of myself as being conceited but i i think of myself as having positive qualities i find those pretty easy to access if anything i feel like i need to be very careful about not over attributing positive qualities to myself and so that's something probably because i got a lot of feedback when i was kid a younger person around people feeling like i was a little big for my britches in various ways and because i'm extremely socially valenced i developed a fair amount of sensitivity around that so so my self-monitoring processes are often very tuned to being very careful about tone and not over claiming my own knowledge and being very sensitive to how i'm being perceived as too much of a knower by other people and it even comes through on the podcast from time to time where uh as long time listeners will know i precede almost every comment with some version of i think or kind of or sort of or maybe um and that's sort of my way of softening that so you know maybe a little self-awareness is picking up in this moment about my own process uh but to honor your question i think that's something that i've become increasingly self-aware of is uh my own positive motivations in terms of almost a push back to that being where no i'm i'm really not trying to show somebody else up i'm really not trying to put somebody else down i'm just sharing for the sake of sharing when i'm being a big extroverted chatty person in a space and i'm doing it from a real place of positive motivation so that's something i'm aware of and in the heart aspect of it that is really great because it helps me not feel in quotations like a bad person a phrase you hear a lot during this sort of stuff um about those well i'm glad we're talking about this for all kinds of yeah it got super real there yeah a couple things so yeah and then i'll tell you my little story maybe as an example of this so first uh what you're describing is a very common that a person assumes that the revelations will be mainly upsetting and sad and painful and hard and occasionally that is the case usually it's not usually some are but most of those things we learn about ourselves are there they're all useful and i'd say the great majority of them often have this feeling of they're reassuring they're a relief they're self-accepting it's good news second it is true it's a reasonable concern that we don't become too big for our britches we can't get that i would also say that in terms of the distinction you made about two ways to know ourselves from the inside out as we experience ourselves and also from the outside in as others see us in my view there are certainly some people who would be really served by being more aware of and more focused on their impact on others and how others see them including in pragmatic ways in particular situations but in general i believe that most of us and that's definitely been true in my own history have been excessively regulated and muzzled and playing small based on the anticipated reactions of the audience out there and much of the time the truth is those folks out there they just don't care about you that's bad news good news no you're just a good player and they're a bad day and and so you know to your own self be true okay quick story for me i've written about it um i was rolfed that form a deep tissue bodywork when i was about 22 you probably know where i'm going with the story and the fifth session involves your guts you know your belly and i just thought oh my gosh i'm gonna have all this repressed pain and sadness and sorrow and horrible feelings of inadequacy oh my gosh and my rougher was a very mechanistic kind of person she just was there to move the meat around okay so i go into the session with a lot of fear and dread she starts working on my gut and then what gets released what gets overwhelmingly flooding me was love and with that was the revelation of oh yeah that was repressed love was repressed a lot because um i withheld it from my mother in my painful poignant you know struggles with her which to this day i feel even though i was just a kid when i was doing it i feel sad about it and somewhat uh definitely remorseful for the impact on her and so that would be an example often what people get in touch with is as you said their underlying good intentions their underlying sweetness and sort of positive blessing orientation toward the world their wish that others be happy their wish that others don't suffer they get in touch with that they become aware of abilities and talents and skills that they had just sort of taken for granted and habituated too because they're familiar and tuned them out increasingly they get in touch often with really neat aspects of themselves so you know kind of quirky spunky feisty funny different parts of themselves get in touch with abilities they may have pushed to the side or they didn't even realize that they actually had to get in touch with those kinds of things i want to highlight a key point that is implicit in everything that you've said so far which is that we don't want self-awareness to make us more inhibited the goal is for self-awareness to make us more free yeah and of course in some ways awareness of a tendency that's a little problematic out in the world requires a degree of the inhibition of that tendency but often what you're doing when you're inhibiting that problematic tendency is you're allowing other more useful more positive more helpful tendencies to become more free and that's the goal you know whatever that that true nature is that i was talking about toward the very beginning about the kid running around on the playground letting that part of you out in a more full and complete kind of way and so this was a for the record a entirely unplanned part of the conversation that i think ended up being in any way it's totally revelatory and uh but it led us to that i think really critical point um which is this idea of freedom where a lot of people think that self-awareness is about repressing our negative tendencies and i totally framed it that way for starters and i think that you you um made a really important point there dad when you're just highlighting now there's so much there's so much good stuff in there that it's important to become aware of too in in a way what we're getting at is a classic question of what is human nature and you know are we fundamentally saints or sinners are we you know which wolf is in charge insidis etc and the fundamental view that i have and i think is supported by just a ton of evidence is that within the underlying nature of ourselves is a movement toward toward integration and health and where i think freud did get it wrong as a creature of his time is this view that was very victorian in his era that what's underneath the surface the id so-called was savage animalistic yeah control really needed to be managed by the superego with the ego more or less trying to negotiate between the excessive demands of the super ego and the a lot of problematic metaphors here about the wild versus civilization and all this stuff that starts popping up [Music] yeah if you look even just a little bit below the surface and these are some of the the issues that i have with freud that i kind of alluded to earlier when you just see relics of that i think back in my grad school i went to grad school gosh when did i do it late eight you know eighties nineteen eighties and um i was reading a lot of material there about theories of child rearing and a lot of them just viewed the child as this nasty little savage that needed to be frustrated and punished and controlled so that controlled or in civilization yeah the child would gradually internalize the superego as it were of the parents or the culture and then regulate themselves that was the view that was the view and there's so much about it that's totally wrong if you just look direct experience when you take care of people's basic needs and you don't hassle them and you let them kind of flourish in their own way who do people naturally tend to become gentle interested caring friendly pretty decent pretty self-regulated kind of folks usually and it's the exceptions to that that really stand out but the rule is this natural movement in us toward health insanity and lovingness toward others and i think that that's an important thing to appreciate and in a way recognizing it for me gives us courage and strength to stand up against the forces of callousness atrocity brutality exploitation racism and all the rest as aberrations from our true nature well that's really interesting for starters and is a good framework for some of the stuff that i would like to take a little time to focus on now because i would love to return to that structure of you have an awareness of something you have some painful experience associated with it you cut it off in some way that cutting it off prevents you from becoming self-aware in a useful way maybe what you're becoming self-aware of is some positive trait that you've pushed down for a variety of reasons as you were saying dad the example of pushing down a sort of natural lovingness because you don't want to give it to a certain person at a point in time or if the thing that you're becoming aware of is some maybe slightly more problematic tendency that you need to apply a bit more top-down monitoring to or you need to pick up at the root uh for whatever reason and in that moment of the cutoff is where i think a lot of the interesting questions about how to become more more self-aware are because there's this critical moment immediately around the time that self-consciousness kicks into a person's system where they become self-critical overly punishing about the nature of the thing as opposed to being able to accept it fully and address it in whatever healthy way exists for a person to address something so what does the person do to limit the pain that's associated with the self-criticism or self-consciousness and that gets to a lot of the defenses and repression and so on that we were talking about a little bit earlier and that makes a lot of sense when somebody's dealing with a more painful or a big air quotes negative tendency that they might have but it's a little bit less obvious when to your point dad we're talking about positive tendencies that we're pushing down for whatever reason what do you think causes people to repress the positive aspects of their nature well it's so good a couple things here i want to restate a key thing you said just great i like it which is for all kinds of reasons often because of messages we got growing up where our what our culture says today we feel like there are parts of ourselves including feelings let's say or vulnerabilities in us that are best pushed down into the basement and locked away and then once they're locked away we have less and less awareness of them we forget that it was we who put them there and have the key right that's definitely one thing that's true and a lot of the healing journey is to come to terms with what we've pushed away and in a way that's tolerable um become more willing to experience it in other words we've pushed it out of the field of conscious experiencing and to heal we need to experience it out we need to let it flow through us while being experienced usually in a very accelerated kind of way on on the way out the door okay that's definitely a major source of lack of self-knowledge another major source though is just being busy being numb being preoccupied with other things you know if your focus is intensively on verbally saturated task doing you're just going to not be so aware of your nonverbal somatic imagistic aspects of yourself because you're just distracted you're over here with that and that is actually a major major [Music] source of lack of self-awareness and the other is just people who are not very mindful they don't have very good um you know just real-time granularity of self-awareness the other thing that happens i think that's very real for people is that they are identified with habitual ways of of seeing thinking and doing and totally yeah william james described us well he said most people are bundles of habits and when we're in the habit it's almost trance-like we're caught up in the trance we don't really notice it and it's only when we actually get a little distance from it that we begin to recognize what's actually happening there and that's another major reason why people lack self-awareness it's not so much a deliberate repression or disowning of some aspect of themselves they're just caught up in a habit a way of being and thinking so these are more maybe normalizing and less dramatic but significant ways of talking about the causes of lack of self-awareness and therefore what we can do about it yeah and just to add an additional one that i was thinking while you were talking painful experiences can cause people to cut off aspects of their nature that are positive just in the same way that they can cause aspects of their nature that are more problematic to emerge it goes both ways you could be a beautiful child being nothing but loving and joyous out in the world and still get punished for being that way because there's some aspect of that part of your nature coming forward that for whatever reason your parent responds poorly to or you get punished for at school or whatever so there are plenty of tendencies that people have that look like these really beautiful traits in adulthood that get essentially punished out of them in childhood and and i want to highlight that because i think that when we talk about self-awareness it's easy to make this sound like a developed skill and more software people are good and less self-aware people are bad and if you're if you lack self-awareness it means that you're just not very thoughtful or you're not very good at this thing um having more or less self-awareness it often has very little to do with how much effort a person has put into self-awareness i mean sometimes it does but a lot of the time it doesn't because some people have just gone through experiences that were more challenging that cut them off from their interior in more profound ways and it's really appropriate to give people a break for that frankly and to give yourself a break for that if you're somebody who went through those kinds of experiences included in that is dissociation absolutely yeah yeah people it's an adaptive response in the trauma the crisis of the moment to dissociate from it to go away from it and become unaware of it i want to go now to your question which is very poignant why do we lose touch with the best in ourselves what are some of the ways that happen and thinking out loud about it and i'm very interested in what you would say when you look back on your history or what you see about other people uh yeah one is it's other people other people convince us that certain aspects of ourselves don't exist yeah i'm not generally a behaviorist but around this kind of stuff i am a total behaviorist i think that we get positively reinforced by a lot of different things towards some problematic parts of our behavior yeah and i think that we get negatively reinforced away from some really lovely parts of ours beautiful that's a really that's a deep summary for us to kind of people can almost make a little list of themselves as a self-help thing like oh you know reinforcements of negative things inside myself what can i do about it and then punishments for good things inside myself oh what can i do about that classic example of this in the in the culture and so i am as i've shared about in the past on the podcast i come from a dance background it's a major hobby for me um [Music] or in the past pre priya pre-covet went to probably 15-20 events a year where you spend a weekend going to a hotel hanging out with a bunch of other dancers doing competitions all this different stuff major social activity is drinking um drinking gets very positively reinforced by that community they're not deliberately trying to cultivate alcoholism but there's social circumstances you're hanging out at the hotel bar and somebody says hey can i buy you a drink it's kind of tough to say no it becomes a social interaction thing um and so there are a lot of different ways in which negative habits get positively reinforced without anyone trying to be mean or without anyone trying to be cruel to you or hurt you or anything they're just these little things that tend to pop up i'm getting value live from this inquiry just feeling into one path one way other people punish suppress the good within us is because when they detect that in us especially when we're maybe a little younger than them or we have less power than they do when they detect that in us it makes them uncomfortable inside themselves because they've repressed that inside themselves and being aware of that in you gets um on the edge of becoming more aware of that in themselves so they and this is again a common dynamic people manage their internal conflicts externally by getting other people somehow to be different another aspect is based on social roles in other words let's suppose you're a boy and someone was beautiful in yourself as you're you're sensitive you're aware you're really kind toward other people you know you have a lot of feelings and you know that doesn't fit the social roles and it makes out other people uncomfortable let's say when you're that way or flip it the other way you're a girl and you're full of passion and power and you've got you know you do not suffer fools gladly you have you know you're not quickly compliant and that too can violate you know classic gender roles to use myself as a personal example i am absolutely the person you're describing their dad where i have a lot of uh tendencies that i think one would describe as in our social western culture as being traditionally feminine in terms of my relational style with other people a lot of the ways in which i interact and so on of course this is very much stereotypical gender norms all disclaimers aside but still this is just the way in which in western culture we often present these things um which is a very false way of thinking about it but you know it's what people internalize when they're kids and uh there was a lot of me not really wanting to accept that for a long time because of the stories that were attached to that about what that would say about me and the truth is that all it says about me is that i am a sensitive caring individual yeah as to your point are positive traits yeah wow oh no right uh yeah you're in touch with your emotions oh bad on you yeah can't have that so anyways um i i think that these are all great things to highlight i do want to move a little bit just out of a sensitivity for time and the people listening to this toward a certain amount of what can we do about this including the ways in which we can cultivate more self-awareness over time and i began the episode by saying that okay yes we can become more self-worth but it's really hard for all the reasons that i talked about so far and i would love to give you dad an opportunity to talk about how you've seen people cultivate more self-awareness it's huge subject uh well actually nah nah what i mean is uh it is our nature to be whole think of a young child fully expressed fully aware um maybe without a lot of verbally informed insight into themselves that they can talk about but they're whole and then as time passes one part of themselves after another gets disowned repressed exiled put the box cut off and they then end up being to me metaphorically if you imagine the vast domain of each of us as individuals full of all these provinces with a sort of kind of capital that's the you know roughly coherent and somewhat stable executive core executive call it ego process right they end up withdrawing from their vast estate to this tiny little gatekeeper's cottage on the very edge of their wall and peering out to the windows just waiting for the barbarians to invade freaked out about what might bubble up from their own interior i mean that's really normative that's really not normative that's really common right so it's it's of our nature to gradually reclaim the totality of who we are to gradually become more aware of what's happening in the provinces maintain appropriate executive function while operating much more like a genuine democracy you know rather than some kind of tyranny some kind of paranoid tyranny so it's our nature second being in touch with body sensations super foundational really easy to do what's it feel like to breathe tuning into your interior sensations it's a major foundation that's a really good way into it another way into it is to become more mindful do a little bit of mindfulness practice a little bit of mindfulness training and start being aware of impermanence start being aware of the dynamic changing processes inside you that are happening really quickly you're not judging it you're not trying to change it you're not trying to increase or decrease anything you're just trying to be aware of what's happening really quickly another thing you can do is to start having some guesses about what you may have pushed away and really listen to it really invite in those parts of yourself and a good metaphor here is given in a the title of a lovely book i read in grad school a long time ago about doing psychotherapy it was titled psychotherapy the art of wooing nature it has a lot of levels to the meaning and the visual there is that your your kind of core executive self-knowing process is sitting by the fire and out there in the shadows and the edge of the woods surrounding this clearing in which you are these various creatures are coming to the edges and watching you are you going to shame them are you going to attack them or are you going to welcome them can you rest in a welcoming spirit there sitting by the fire wooing wooing these sub personalities these younger parts these less verbal parts these more primal id centered parts more archaic parts that are in the psyche of all of us as the psyche evolved gradually over 600 million years of evolution of the nervous system your inner lizard your inner mouse your inner monkey among other parts can you welcome them to come forward so those would be three right off the top that i would emphasize yeah uh tuning into your body becoming more aware of rapidly changing events and your own stream of consciousness and having a hunch about parts of yourself that you want to welcome into the light great place to start and i'm trying to think about this through the lens of how i've become more self-aware of some of my own tendencies and what worked for me what was that process like understanding that i'm i feel like i've been at this for a while but i'm only 34 years old i'm sure that i am not all the way down to the bottom of the basement yet and i still got a lot to to make aware inside of my own consciousness um and what immediately comes to mind is this phrase from the buddhist tradition and please correct me if i say this incorrectly dad i believe that it's gradual cultivation sudden awakening which for me is a beautiful articulation of how this process works most of the time and i think that my reticence about asking huh can people actually cultivate deliberately greater senses of self-awareness is i'm not sure what the first stone is that gets us into the gradual cultivation part once the cultivation starts the awakening can happen but i don't know what it is that gets me to seeing this thing on the edges of my consciousness where i'm just beginning to become aware of it where i can then start wooing it forward to use your language and i'm trying to think about that like actively right now as we're recording this and i i don't have a great answer for that question but there's some questions that might be useful for people one of the things that's been helpful for me is to ask what am i worried that i am and then attached to that i think that a major resource for me has been increasing self-compassion and self-acceptance which has really opened the field for self-awareness and becoming increasingly skeptical of the more self-punishing voices inside of the mind because even though a lot of what we find inside of the mind is good news it's often good news that's covered in something it's covered in shame it's covered in self-criticism it's covered in some painful experience that we want to forget and we need to be well resourced we need to be confident we need to feel sturdy we need to nurture ourselves if we're going to engage with that that painful often difficult material and i think that one of the things that maybe has led to the the movement toward gradual cultivation for me has been greater kindness to myself and a greater movement into feeling internally resourced in a lot of different ways and as i've increasingly felt that way that process of self-awareness has become much more accessible for me with people out loud about them and for myself there's some major questions one is you know what do i really want or what do you really want or what would it look like if you got what you really wanted here right so wants deeper wants really really important that's a good question another one is what am i feeling a lot of people have it's technically a lexithymia they have a hard time talking about their feelings and for some people there's a genuine neurological issue but very often we're just not used to it but it's there's an inquiry what am i feeling emotionally not what i'm thinking what am i feeling emotionally underneath it all and and especially uh with a sense of sensing down into your own interior sensing down what's underneath it what's the what's the want underneath the surface wand what's the feeling underneath the surface feeling classically what's the hurt or frustration or anxiety that underlies the anger so that's it another one is what am i pushing away um what am i holding in bay and related to that what would really make me squirm what would be uncomfortable to reveal to this other person or to reveal to myself yeah those are yeah those are good questions we've mostly explored the very murky part of this whole conversation the murky underbelly of the psyche these these deep things we can become aware of sometimes what's really helpful to become more aware about is what we're actually doing out in the world because people are very self-deceptive i'm very self-deceptive and for me one of the things that's really supported me in increasing my awareness particularly around behavioral things is trying to do whatever i can to move towards something resembling objectivity understanding that you know objective to who is itself a very complicated question but asking yourself a real question about how much time are you actually spending on fill in the blank because people will say oh i'm spending a lot of time doing this or doing that or you other person that i'm in a relationship with are not spending enough time doing x or doing y well how much time are you actually spending and it's often remarkable how little sense people have of how regularly they are sticking to this habit that they want to cultivate or how much time they're spending working on this thing that they want to do um for me when i started tracking my workouts as a small example it was revelatory to me because i realized that i thought i had been working out x times a week when really i had been working on a very different number of lessons that was a much smaller number yes absolutely and so anything that you can do to move away from your often rose-colored glasses prediction of what's going on to what might actually be going on it can be super helpful and very revelatory for people and i think one thing that really helps people is to sustain present moment mindfulness sustained mindfulness because so often we start sleepwalking our way through our days we are that bundle of habits we're in a kind of a trance state we just sort of go along and that's not much self-awareness to be able to have this it's interesting the root of the word for mindfulness and the language of early buddhism sati has its etymological roots in memory there's something recollected can we be recollected as we move through our day and if we're recollected as it were through our day we're typically much more in touch with ourselves in real time so that's another thing i would really just try to bring a shout out to and to gradually bring ourselves back to the present when we notice that our minds are wandering we've lost we've gone on autopilot people go on autopilot a lot and just keep waking up keep waking up keep waking up sharon salzberg has this really nice metaphor about this she says there you are in the meadow full of self-awareness maybe meditating away maybe just doing your thing but you're your way and every so often a train goes by and some of the time you notice the train and it just goes on by other times you suddenly find yourself on the train 10 minutes or 100 miles down the track as soon as you realize you've been carried away on the train though right there bingo you're back in the meadow and it's that recollecting that returning again and again and again that gradually builds up the trait of being self-aware steadily in the present as you move through your days great point and i think that we're beginning to come to the end here so if there's anything else you'd like to share with people now's a good opportunity i'm going to share a very useful kind of corny 60s psychological method that people want and maybe love it maybe force you'll do it and you'll report it back i'm your guinea player no this is something elizabeth would be all over where basically you get a piece of paper fairly large you know [Music] 12 inches by 18 when it's kind of larger maybe even bigger than that and you just imagine that this piece of paper represents the whole of you your whole psyche and then just start kind of drawing on it a little bit maybe with colored pens it's okay to use words it's okay to make little pictures and maybe have this area in it that's loosely associated with this kind of core executive process and then you have these other parts and then over there you've got the tree of wisdom and here you have the cave full of deep jewels and inner treasures and then over here you have a bar a party everybody's whoop-dee-doo over there these are all just parts of yourself these are aspects of yourself and you use this as a kind of exercise to acknowledge and explore all of who you are not getting uptight it's not an art project it's okay however you do it and you might populate as well this vast domain of who you are with different characters you know and he just all this sort of stuff all of who you are that's kind of a sweet fun exercise i think it points to maybe a final thought to leave people with which is when you're engaging in this process becoming more self-aware opening up the basement of the mind however you want to talk about it a really useful question to ask yourself when you're pushing for a little bit more awareness of a certain issue of one kind or another is on behalf of who am i doing this and for what purpose am i doing this and what's run underneath this conversation i think is this really important point which is that people often put pressure on us to become more aware in their mind of what they think our problems are and it's really easy to get caught up in that and and bow to that social pressure so it can be helpful to return to again that question for who for what purpose and sometimes we do need to apply more of that external monitoring awareness in order to get along with other people in useful ways uh in the world in pro-social ways that are actually good fundamentally but sometimes people are just trying to inhibit us through increasing that self-awareness and again we've returned to that core idea is this making you more free or is this making you more inhibited and for me that's been a very useful question to return to over and over again what a fantastic summary at the end here great great well thank you excellent excellent yeah well today i had a fantastic time talking with you about how we can become more self-aware i think this was just a really wonderful conversation we covered a lot during today's episode it was one of my favorite episodes of the podcast that we've recorded recently and i began it by asking rick about his experience in therapy working with people over a number of years i asked him if people generally walked into the room with an awareness of their issues or if self-awareness was something that really needed to be cultivated over time and he answered yes for most people there was a level of awareness of some issue that brought them to therapy in the first place people generally go to therapy because something is not going well in their life but then alongside that there were often deeper layers of self-awareness that did need to be developed and this is consistent with something that's known as a presenting problem which shows up a lot in therapy people will often walk into the room because they're dealing with some kind of a specific issue but that issue is really a surface level problem that is concealing other deeper issues and this points to why self-awareness is so challenging to cultivate in general the metaphor of an iceberg is often used to talk about freud's model of the mind in particular where you have the conscious mind as the little bit above the surface and then you have the subconscious and then underneath that you have the unconscious aspects of the mind and we could be aware of many layers of the mind but sometimes our awareness up to a point deceives us into thinking that we're more self-aware than we are actually we feel like we've gotten all the way down to the basement when really we're just on the second or third level we then made an important distinction between different kinds of self-awareness particularly highlighting internal self-awareness which is an awareness of our own values tendencies thoughts feelings sensations all of that good stuff and this is distinct from external forms of self-awareness which i like to refer to as self-monitoring really more a moment-to-moment scanning of our behavior that to use myself as an example prevents me from talking way too much during a conversation which of course is still something i'm guilty of from time to time rick really highlighted something throughout the conversation and it came to a head about halfway through it where he asked me forrest what's something that you've become more aware of that was a positive quality and i really struggled to answer that question because my whole framework around self-awareness was that well isn't the stuff that people struggle with the more negative aspects of our personality or problematic tendencies i mean doesn't it make sense that that would be very painful to become aware of and therefore we're repressing those uh that awareness in a variety of different ways or we have all of these defense mechanisms around it that are preventing us from becoming more aware and this was one of those times during the podcast where my dad really blew my mind a little bit because in his experience most of the time when people walk into therapy i think that he said something like 80 90 of the time what people struggle to be aware of is the good news the positive aspects of their personality of their character of their self their wholeness however you want to talk about it that they've pushed away over time often as a response to external pressures and becoming aware of this and leaning into it leaning into the idea that when we delve into the mind we often find good news there it's just a great thing a great idea to have access to because so much of the time people are afraid about delving into their psyche because they're worried about all of the demons that they're going to find there so it can be a really helpful pushback against fear and self-criticism to become increasingly aware of the positive parts of yourself your personality that you've disowned over time i then presented a loose structure of awareness and the lack thereof where often we begin blissfully ignorant frequently as children of some tendency that we have then there's a moment of painful realization where somebody brings something to our attention and we go oh that doesn't feel great and then this leads to some kind of self-criticism that this doesn't feel great is because there's shame associated with it or intense negativity that we direct toward ourselves and i think that shame in particular is one of the biggest blocks that people have to self-awareness and then in response to that pain people cope and they cope in a lot of different ways some people cope by becoming extremely self-conscious and anxious about whatever the revelation was where they engage in a hyper monitoring of it some people really repress it they totally push it down to the basement of their awareness some people swing super hard the other direction and you see this for instance in people who have narcissistic forms of behavior where that's often rooted in a deep lack of self-worth so they compensate by presenting themselves as being overwhelmingly filled with self-worth and all of these defenses get in the way of true self-awareness because self-awareness almost always involves a layer of self-acceptance not to say that you're just going to let things go on as they have always been forever and ever but you need to accept the reality of the situation the way you feel the way you are the way your behavior is before you can do anything about it and this then took us to a key point that really influenced the rest of the conversation we don't want our self-awareness to make us more inhibited we want it to make us more free even if what we're doing is applying some top-down controls so we inhibit some problematic behaviors out in the world that often creates the space for positive to behaviors to become more free themselves we then close the episode by talking about some ways that people can deliberately develop more self-awareness and rick gave a lot of advice here i'm not going to cover it all but he pointed to a couple of key practices the first is developing the moment-to-moment capacity for mindfulness the second is various forms of interoception feeling into the body particularly somatically and then third leaning into inviting forward aspects of ourself that we've pushed away over time and he used this lovely metaphor of somebody sitting at a campfire and inviting forward all of the little animals that exist on the periphery of the shadows uh it's a very rick kind of metaphor very soft and fuzzy but i think that it's a useful way to think about it where we all have these different aspects of our personality the ifs model internal family systems does a really good job of person of talking about this and personifying it in ways that can be helpful for people and so a really fundamental question is which of those aspects are we leaning into and which are the ones that we have pushed the periphery of our awareness and becoming more self-aware often involves a process by which we become more aware of the parts that we've pushed to the side i had a great time recording this episode with rick if you enjoyed it we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to the podcast and maybe even leave a comment a positive review it really does help us out also you can tell a friend about it it's probably the best way that we have to reach new people if you'd like to support the show in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwellpodcast and for just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return this includes things like transcriptions of the episodes ad-free versions of our episodes and expanded show notes where i go into a lot of detail about the topics that we explore and the research and prep that goes into each episode so that's it for today's episode thanks again for listening and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 11,276

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, self-awareness, self, awareness, therapy, positive psychology, becoming more self-aware

Id: pbs5MLgjZKs

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022