CHAPTER 5
Emotional Self-Awareness
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
—RICHARD FEYNMAN, AMERICAN PHYSICIST AND NOBEL LAUREATE
“A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.”
—AUTHOR PETER MCARTHUR
Research has shown that greater emotional intelligence leads to increased fulfillment and success in life, and the journey begins within us. Unless we have first done this work on ourselves, we will be limited in our attempts to apply this work in the rest of our lives. Knowledge of our inner landscape helps us to realistically look at how we deal with others and the environment around us. A certain degree of understanding and the ability to manage our emotions is essential before we are able to effectively change other areas of our lives.
The amount of work we will have to do, and the effort necessary for us to change our inner landscape, depends on where we are starting from. Of course, the environment that we are raised in determines to a large part how we view ourselves and the world around us. People who have grown up in dysfunctional families will have developed coping mechanisms that do not serve them well in the larger world. They will require a longer period to come to terms with their emotions and learn to deal with them than someone who was raised in a relatively healthy environment.
Awareness of Our Emotions
Before we can do anything with our emotions, we need to be aware of them. Some—like anger or fear—are more obvious, especially if we are experiencing them strongly. Others are more subtle, and we may not be consciously aware of them. Shame and guilt, for example, sometimes feel similar enough that it can be difficult for us to distinguish one from the other. Our ability to be aware of our emotions also depends on what we have been taught to do with them. If we were raised to believe that our emotions were bad and we needed to keep them under wraps at all times, we may have buried them so deeply that we have trouble accessing them. But access them we must. In this case, it is not a matter of what we don't know won't hurt us. Repressed emotions have and will continue to hurt us unless we bring them into our awareness and deal with them.
Anthony Robbins, in Awaken the Giant Within, talks about how our emotions serve us:
The only way to effectively use your emotions is to understand that they all serve you. You must learn from your emotions and use them to create the results you want for a greater quality of life. The emotions you once thought of as negative are merely a call to action. Once you're familiar with each signal and its message, your emotions become not your enemy but your ally. They become your friend, your mentor, your coach; they guide you through life's most soaring highs and its most demoralizing lows.1
There are a number of techniques we can use that will help us to get in touch with our feelings. I will include some of these at the end of this chapter. Sometimes, however, if our feelings are repressed enough or resulted from a traumatic experience, we may need professional help to work with them. In this case, we may need the help of a professional therapist or a support group. For example, two international groups, The Mankind Project and Women Within, have been very effective at helping their members work through their emotions. Psychologists who are aware of these organizations often have referred their clients to these groups, believing in the work that they do and their ability to create a safe environment for accessing, exploring, and releasing emotions.
Getting to the Source of Our Emotions
Once we come to recognize and become aware of our emotions, we can work on getting to their source. When we react emotionally to a situation, often it is not the situation itself to which we are responding. The event is acting as a trigger, bringing up emotions we have experienced in the past. For example, if you were in a room with ten people and a speaker called the entire group stupid, you would all have different emotional reactions. Someone whose abusive father constantly berated him for being stupid when he was growing up might become totally enraged. Another person might feel some anger, but not nearly as much as the person with the abusive father. Yet another, who never experienced being called stupid, might not have any strong emotional reaction and wonder what caused the speaker to say such a thing.
Most of us spend far too much time living in our heads and too little in our hearts. We need to regularly monitor our feelings to see if we are living the life that we want for ourselves or that others have prescribed for us. In Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person, Hugh Prather states, “The more I consult my feelings during the day, tune in to myself to see if what I am doing is what I want to be doing, the less I feel at the end of the day that I have been wasting time.”2
Our feelings do not lie. As humans we have an unlimited capacity to delude ourselves. Our minds, however, are unable to override our feelings. Our feelings always give us away and point out the inconsistencies in our life. Instead of tuning out our feelings, we need to get more in touch with them. To live an authentic, rewarding, and self-fulfilling life requires that we make use of both our intellect and feelings.
“Become the change that you want to see in the world.”
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
—RUSSIAN AUTHOR LEO TOLSTOY
Brad's Story
In his early forties, Brad's life had reached a crisis point. Dissatisfied with his job, he was convinced that what he needed was a change in careers. He suffered from constant fatigue and felt as if he were trapped in a rut from which he would never escape. Convinced that the job was his problem, Brad complained about his work to anyone who would listen. He was convinced that if he could only find more meaningful and fulfilling work, his life would get better. Tired of hearing his complaints, however, many of his coworkers found themselves avoiding him.
On the surface, Brad appeared to his coworkers and supervisor to be mild mannered and easygoing. He never showed signs of anger and seemed to handle stress on the job with ease. But beneath his calm and unflappable surface was a lot of pent-up frustration and anger. On occasions it would boil up. For example, a coworker sent an e-mail requesting that Brad do his job in a certain manner. Angry that he was being told how to do his job by someone with no authority over him, Brad wrote expletives on the message and sent it back to the coworker. Brad's supervisor called him in and questioned his behavior. Brad's boss told him that he could not understand why someone who was highly intelligent would act that way. This only made things worse as Brad started to notice that he was distancing himself more and more from those around him at work. Many of his coworkers avoided him and tried to avoid putting themselves in a situation where they would have to spend some time with him. Brad especially had problems with his direct supervisor, strongly resenting it anytime he was asked to do something. The supervisor was at the end of a long list of authority figures with whom he had problems.
Eventually, Brad realized that he was depressed, and had been so all of his life. When Brad became aware of his depression, he sought out professional help. Through counseling, he gradually began to delve into feelings that he had been avoiding for many years. The cause of his depression, he realized, had been the relationship he had with his father. He never felt good enough for his father, who frequently referred to him as an idiot. Even when Brad was well into his thirties, the father continued to belittle Brad in front of other people. Brad felt his father was a highly intelligent man who was bitter because he had never fully used his capabilities, but had worked in a menial job all of his life. As his self-awareness increased, Brad realized that he had picked up his father's life pattern.
During his counseling, Brad began to see all of the areas of his life that were impacted by his lack of awareness of his feelings. He realized that by not learning how to manage his feelings, he had been sabotaging his life. Besides seeing a counselor on a regular basis, he took in a lengthy session of group therapy. When Brad discovered ways he could release anger, he told those close to him that he felt real hope for the first time in his life.
Photography, which was always a serious interest in Brad's life, developed into a passion. Fear of rejection had kept him from entering his photographs in contests, even though several professional photographers had advised him to do so. Since entering, he has won a couple of awards for his photographs of nature. On Saturdays, he sells his photographs at a local market and finds it very satisfying having others appreciate his talents. At times, it is still difficult for him to accept that others are willing to pay money to have his work showcased in their homes.
Brad continues working in his same job, but claims things don't get to him as much as they used to. As his complaining about the job decreased, he found that coworkers no longer avoided him and for the first time he has been invited to parties by a number of colleagues. He has become friendlier and seems to have found a new interest in the people he is working with.
Although it is not the job of his dreams, Brad has come to the realization that it is not the worst job either and is noticing for the first time that there are some parts of his work that he really enjoys. Aware that his problems with authority figures stem from anger at his father, Brad has made an effort to build/develop respectful working relationships with his supervisors and managers at work.
Brad had an aha moment when he first came to the realization that his supervisor acted as a trigger for Brad's hostility, reminding Brad of his father. This awareness was the first step in repairing his relationships with his bosses. He made a conscious effort toward building a better relationship with them. While in the past he looked for differences that kept them apart, he now make a deliberate attempt to look for things that they had in common.
By taking an honest look at his feelings, and by committing himself to working with them, Brad turned his outlook around. He is now able to enjoy his life.
“You will have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.”
—ACTOR ALAN ALDA
Techniques for Increasing Emotional Self-Awareness
- Take ten minutes every day. Find a private place in which you are comfortable. Close your eyes and concentrate on your feelings. Be aware of tenseness in your body. Re-create events of the day that created some strong emotions. Try to re-create those emotions by remembering the events. At the end of the time, write down the different emotions you have identified in a book that you keep for this purpose. After a couple of weeks, notice if you are getting better at identifying emotions by the number you are able to re-create.
- If you have difficulty getting in touch with your emotions or have trouble telling them apart, see a therapist or join a group that specifically encourages you to express these emotions. Sometimes seeing others get up the courage to share their feelings will trigger a desire in us to do the same.
- At the end of the day, if a strong negative emotion—such as fear, anger, or sadness—has come up, try to find the original source. For example, if someone made you angry, ask yourself if that person reminded you of someone who made you angry in your past. Think back to the first time you were aware of experiencing that kind of anger.
- When you find yourself getting ready to react angrily, force yourself to not respond for at least ten seconds. Have a thought ready—a pleasant memory or something that has puzzled you—that you force into those ten seconds. Do whatever works, whatever you have to do to force your mind to think about something else, but don't react.
- If you find yourself reacting from anger, fear, shame, or guilt, ask yourself afterward how you could have reacted differently. After you have come up with a better way to handle the situation, concentrate on it for thirty seconds. Tell yourself that next time you will deal with it in this way.
- Every day look for an opportunity to share at least one positive emotion. Tell someone if something they did made you feel good.
Notes
1. Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 249.
2. Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 17.