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On the Illusion of Self-Knowledge

I’ve written about Morita Therapy and its methods for allowing our emotions to live inside us without conditions.

Imagine our feelings are our body’s ecosystem—just like we can’t control nature and let the rain take its course, we also can’t control our emotions.

Morita Therapy is based on the idea of acceptance. Instead of indulging, avoiding, or numbing our feelings, we should practice co-existing alongside them.

Yes, by all means, we can and should feel our suffering and continue living our lives, but we should not succumb to the pull of our sorrow or despair. This, I think, is a great practice.

At the same time, it’s vital to ask about our feelings, what they are trying to tell us, and whether we can learn from them.

Many people claim to be self-aware, inclined toward self-improvement and self-exploration, all in a quest to grow. But what does that mean to be self-aware? These are questions I’ve been considering these past few months.

Someone I love recently asked me what I meant by “growth” and “self-awareness.” I sputtered to respond, not because I don’t know what these things mean for myself, but because I’ve never had to define them for anyone but me.

I pondered at length about what those ideas mean. Long ago, I learned that every destructive pattern that shows up in my life, every sucky circumstance or occurrence that repeats itself and makes my life harder, has one thing in common: me.

At some point in our lives (the earlier, the better), we (hopefully) learn to stop blaming others for our problems and hold ourselves accountable for where we are and how we got there.

We can’t always change our circumstances and cannot control where we are from or how we were raised, but we can control, change, and choose our responses. We can either grow ourselves up or continue to blame others for failing to do that on our behalf and grow ourselves down.

We can either face the neglect or abuse, or sadness that was imprinted upon us in early life, and learn how to integrate and process our trauma, or we can continue to remain unconscious and live life repeating the very behaviors we blame others for visiting upon us.

When we don’t grow, we stay as our childhood selves. We don’t mature or allow our beliefs, behaviors, or awareness to evolve. We don’t realize that we are trapped inside a paradigm, a template of existence, that was designed and implemented by our caregivers.

We are the result of the world in which we were raised. And we were raised by people who lacked professional training in raising people. The only way to move away from childhood is to grow out of it; we must do that willingly. We cannot be forced.

Many people are innately curious about various topics and want to learn as much as possible. Yet, when it comes to their behaviors and defenses, these same people can be mind-bogglingly incurious about the one subject they should know the most about—the realm of self, specifically, their selves.

It’s safer to figure out the motives and machinations behind other people's choices, and somewhat terrifying to see your reflection in the mirror of bad decisions others have made.

But if you don’t understand yourself, and aren’t driven to understand, then the depth you can know other people will be pretty shallow. We cannot identify in others what we haven’t yet identified in ourselves. We may be able to spot the red flags in potential partners, despite not having identified our red flags, but we cannot know what those red flags foretell when we have fallen short of investigating our own.

The tricky part about growth is that you can’t attempt it until you’re ready. You may find you have no desire to do so. But what happens if you keep losing what you want and are still not ready to understand yourself enough to know why this happens?

You remain stuck.

Fear of knowing can keep people stuck for years—and sometimes entire lifetimes.

The great news about being stuck is that it’s the best moment to force yourself to grow. The tricky part about getting unstuck is that you must ask for help. You cannot go it alone.

I mean, you CAN, but you will never get unstuck if you only rely on the same mindset that got you stuck in the first place. It’s like trying to pull yourself out of the ocean while drowning.

There is no one way to ask for help. You don’t have to use your vocal cords. You can get on the internet and Google “Books to help me get unstuck,” “Affordable therapy near me,”; “Online support groups for [fill in issue here].”

You can go on Facebook and join a group of people struggling with the same issues. You can read novels. Literary fiction authors are the finest observers of the human condition; they are Citizen Psychologists with boundless insights, and there is much to be gained from reading.

You don’t have to get on the phone and verbally state: “I need help.”

You need only to say that to yourself. When we are willing to ask for feedback, willing to listen genuinely, and—most importantly—willing to make the effort to integrate what we’re learning, only then are we actively making the effort to grow.

Years ago, I realized that the things that bothered me about other people were qualities that I didn’t like about myself. That discovery, while mortifying, has allowed me to work toward course correcting.

Part of that involves paying particular attention to the inverse—how people react to and treat me. When I sense tension or irritation, I make a note and dissect it later to examine my behavior and assess what could have elicited such a response.

One of the most important things I’ve done to increase my self-awareness is to understand what my emotional pain points are.

What “triggers” me?

Why does it trigger me, what can I trace it back to, and what can I do to break the spell?

In other words, as much as possible, I go toward my emotions and try to feel what it wants me to know.

Which alerts me to the next difficult challenge: paying heed to the answer.

Self-awareness, according to me—a non-expert—is paying attention to the pattern and shape of our thoughts, actions, feelings, and beliefs.

It’s the ability to identify and address dysfunctional behaviors that keep us stuck or hold us back. Every behavior has a pattern, but if we don’t know ours, we are condemned to repeat our mistakes and will never propel ourselves out of the cycle.

Self-awareness is knowing what we value and believe in and living congruently with those values and beliefs.

Self-awareness is growing ourselves more informed, customized, and skilled than the people who raised us the first time.

When we don’t know why we do what we do, we keep doing it.

This is fine if you’ve chosen the Sisyphean life path, but if you want to arrive somewhere and find love, have a family, build a career, and/or be an essential part of a thriving community. You might want to start assessing the reality of your situation and asking yourself some basic yet vital questions about how and why you are where you are, and what you can do to move toward what you say you want for yourself.

Sometimes we say we want something, but we make no effort to get it. When this happens, the question becomes: Are we sure we want what we say, and if so, why aren’t we doing anything to get it? When we ask ourselves these questions, we can pinpoint the real issues.

We say we want to be in a committed relationship, but we withhold the part of ourselves that would deliver on the commitment part we claim to want.

Growing requires the motivation to develop new skills, gain a more fluid mindset, and improve communication skills. If we find ourselves struggling with the same difficulties we’ve struggled with our entire lives, and do nothing to address them, we will never make any changes.

When we become more conscious, we will be better able to spot our mistakes and negative habits with an unbiased mind. If we don’t identify where we are weakest, we can never build the muscle to become stronger.

Personal growth is simply another way of saying self-knowledge. We read many books about historical figures, politics, climate change, getting organized, and streamlining our productivity. Still, so few of us pick up books that will help us understand our behaviors, the bad habits we unconsciously repeat that keep us stuck in place, or provide us with the tools to get what we desire.

We are where we are, even if we want to be elsewhere, or don’t want to be where we are, because being stuck is serving us somehow. We’re secretly committed to our dysfunction.

Our stuckness reinforces some deeply held beliefs we have about ourselves, and moving away from those beliefs means moving away from all we know, all that’s familiar, and so we’re afraid. Perhaps people treat us in a certain way based on our entrenched behavior, and even if we dislike the treatment, we fear losing something we know so well.

But at some point, if we truly realize the life we want for ourselves, we must revise the outdated model we’ve been following.

In my definition, everything I’ve outlined above equals growth.

One thing leads to the next.

Self-reflection and introspection lead to growth and self-awareness.

Many psychologists would agree with much of what I’ve said above, but introspection doesn’t lead to self-awareness, and nearly 80% of those who claim to possess an awareness of self don’t.

In 2014, organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, an expert on building self-awareness, and a team of researchers embarked on a large-scale scientific study. They wanted to know whether there was a way to increase self-awareness.

While the team’s interest was in leadership in the workplace, Eurich’s findings are helpful for anyone interested in increasing their self-awareness.

Along the way, Eurich’s team came across some interesting figures. “Our data reveals that 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, but the real number is 12 to 15 percent,” Eurich says. “That means, on a good day, about 80 percent of people are lying about themselves—to themselves.”

What’s that now?

Eurich discovered that there are two types of self-awareness.

My most profound insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These deeper dives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

Unlock full access to read the entire piece, and discover the two types of self-awareness and how to harness them to strengthen your self-awareness

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