Title: Develop Self-Awareness and Improve Your Relationships
Headings: Develop Self-Awareness and Improve Your Relationships
Develop Self-Awareness and Improve Your Relationships
About Lori Deschene
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Content: or selfish, hurtful, or irresponsible actions
Feeding off other people’s sympathy and maybe even depending on it
Telling sad stories from the past as a means of avoiding judgment or trying to win approval
Believing that everything would be better if the world or other people would change
As someone who’s done all of these things in the past, I can attest that this is often the result of immense pain. Sometimes we play the victim because we were victims. We learned that we didn’t have control and then adapted to that. Because we once felt powerless, we learned to give our power away. On the other side of the spectrum, self-empowerment includes: Consciously choosing to let go of victimizing thoughts
Considering that we may have played a part in some of the most painful events from our pasts
Learning from these events how we can respond proactively to similar events in the future
Feeding our own emotional needs instead of coming to other people with a void that won’t ever be filled
Accepting responsibility for our actions, and the consequences of them
Realizing things will only improve if we make a change, internally or externally
This requires self-awareness, which brings me back to my initial question: What does self-awareness look like, when it involves acknowledging pain from the past—and how does it differ from self-victimization? Self-awareness includes: Understanding our emotions—what we’re feeling and what triggered it—so we can effectively work through and transform our emotional responses (instead of using them to justify unhealthy choices)
Recognizing our destructive thought patterns so we can redirect them
Tuning into what’s going on in our bodies so we can learn from it and access our intuition
Noticing our behavioral patterns and habits so that we can make adjustments to change negative ones
Understanding our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations, and how they influence what we choose to do
Accepting that we are responsible for our actions—even if we developed certain patterns in response to events from our past
The fundamental difference between self-awareness and self-victimization, when it pertains to acknowledging we’ve been hurt: Self-awareness is about observing our response to what happened;