{"id":704,"date":"2013-12-02T10:45:14","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T17:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/?p=704"},"modified":"2016-03-08T08:30:36","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T15:30:36","slug":"self-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/?p=704","title":{"rendered":"Self Awareness"},"content":{"rendered":"

The town doctor in\u00a0The Plague<\/span>\u00a0by Albert Camus defines the good man as he \u2018who has the fewest lapses of attention\u2019. Maurice Nicoll, PhD states in his six-volume series on\u00a0The Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky<\/span>\u00a0that \u2018it all begins with self-awareness.\u2019<\/p>\n

If you are considering meeting with a psychological professional (psychotherapist, counselor, etc.) it will benefit you to understand that you are not \u2018going to the dentist.\u2019<\/p>\n

At the dentist, you relax, sit back, PASSIVELY engage the treatment, and pay for your visit. The pain, we hope, is soon gone.<\/p>\n

At these psychological types of meetings however, you will be asked to ACTIVELY engage in the treatment (and pay for your visit). The pain will continue and you will wonder when the \u2018dentist\u2019 will make it go away. But your active engagement is the crucial first-step to your gaining the strength that you are seeking.<\/p>\n

Your active practice of self-observation is crucial to your research on your painful experiences and increasing your psychological skills. You must learn to begin working with the pain-creating activities that you bring with you. And your first tool in working with that is \u201cself-observation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, I know: \u201cI am self-aware at all times and have free will\u201d you would tell me. But there are a series of experiments that you will be asked to carry out, and in these experiments you will be able to test that self-assessment, under real-world conditions, to see just how persistent your awareness is and what you can do with it.<\/p>\n

Just today I challenged a client with me to notice how he was drinking from his water bottle (which hand, etc.) here in the office. I urged him to be repeatedly aware of that small act here in the next hour and to change the pattern of drinking in just any small way every time he did it. He agreed.<\/p>\n

Predictably (in my experience) he forgot the challenge about five minutes later and drank in his characteristic way for some time. Later I brought this to his attention and he laughed, recognizing that he\u2019d \u2018forgotten himself,\u2019 was unaware of that which he was to be watching for, did the behavior in a fully conditioned and unaware way, as he always has.<\/p>\n

Whether you and your therapist are studying thoughts, emotions, behavior, core beliefs, deep personal history, organizational behavior or the larger world, it is crucial that you understand the role you must actively play in this project. Without your commitment to repeatedly practicing self-observation, you\u2019ll miss out on a thousand moments that can aid your progress and help build the strength that you are seeking. This isn\u2019t something that the therapeutic person can do for you: you can\u2019t purchase this from a weekend seminar or from a self-help book, or from all the prayers that you repeat. And it isn\u2019t \u2018navel gazing\u2019 or \u2018narcissism\u2019 or \u2018egotistical\u2019 \u2013 in fact it is a corrective for all those.<\/p>\n

You begin by making this commitment to repeatedly observe yourself without judgment or criticism or guidance or changing anything.\u00a0\u00a0You start with just body posture and sensations, and then gradually expand to thoughts, emotions, reactions to others. You\u2019ll be astonished at how much of you is conditioned, mechanical, un-free, predictable, habituated, manifested without choice or awareness. Some of that mechanical nature is wonderful: you remember how to drive the car without having to relearn it.<\/p>\n

Some of that conditioned behavior is horrific.\u00a0\u00a0It ruins marriages and children and organizations and sleep and friendships and nation-states.<\/p>\n

And you can begin to do something about all that — if you are willing to practice \u2018being the person with the fewest lapses of attention.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The town doctor in\u00a0The Plague\u00a0by Albert Camus defines the good man as he \u2018who has the fewest lapses of attention\u2019. Maurice Nicoll, PhD states in his six-volume series on\u00a0The Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky\u00a0that \u2018it all begins with self-awareness.\u2019 If you are considering meeting with a psychological professional (psychotherapist, counselor, etc.) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88890,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/88890"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":859,"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions\/859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}