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: 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; self-victimization is about feeding into the story of what happened. This isn’t always easy to do. Sometimes the mere act of remembering something painful can bring up all kinds of old feelings. It helps if we learn to immediately redirect our thoughts to a positive, empowering affirmation. This means that next time I find myself questioning whether the other person really has best interests at heart, when I have no reason to believe they don’t, I can tell myself something like this: