Finding yourself may sound like an inherently self-centered goal, but it is actually an unselfish process that is at the root of everything we do in life. In order to be the most valuable person to the world around us, the best partner, parent etc, we have to first know who we are, what we value and, in effect, what we have to offer. This personal journey is one every individual will benefit from taking. It is a process that involves breaking down – shedding layers that do not serve us in our lives and don’t reflect who we really are. Yet, it also involves a tremendous act of building up – recognizing who we want to be and passionately going about fulfilling our unique destiny – whatever that may be. It’s a matter of recognizing our personal power, yet being open and vulnerable to our experiences. It isn’t something to fear or avoid, berating ourselves along the way, but rather something to seek out with the curiosity and compassion we would have toward a fascinating new friend. With these principles in mind, the following guide highlights seven of the most universally useful steps to this very individual adventure.
1. Make sense of your past
In order to uncover who we are and why we act the way we do, we have to know our own story. Being brave and willing to explore our past is an important stepping stone on the road to understanding ourselves and becoming who we want to be. Research has shown that it isn’t just the things that happened to us that define who we become, but how much we’ve made sense of what’s happened to us. Unresolved traumas from our history inform the ways we act today. Studies have even shown that life story coherence has a “statistically significant relationship to psychological well-being.” The more we form what Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about as a “coherent narrative” of our lives, the better able we are to make mindful, conscious decisions in our present that represent our true selves.
The attitudes and atmosphere we grew up in have a heavy hand on how we act as adults. As Dr. Robert Firestone, author of The Self Under Siege, wrote, “As children, people not only identify with the defenses of their parents but also tend to incorporate into themselves the critical or hostile attitudes that were directed toward them. These destructive personal attacks become part of the child’s developing personality, forming an alien system, the anti-self, distinguishable from the self-system, which interferes with and opposes the ongoing manifestation of the true personality of the individual.”
Painful early life experiences often determine how we define and defend ourselves. In short, they bend us out of shape, influencing our behavior in ways in which we are hardly aware. For example, having a harsh parent may have caused us to feel more guarded. We may grow up always feeling on the defense or resistant to trying new challenges for fear of being ridiculed. It’s easy to see how carrying this uncertainty with us into adulthood could shake our sense of identity and limit us in different areas. To break this pattern of behavior, it’s valuable to acknowledge what’s driving it. We should always be willing to look at the source of our most self-limiting or self-destructive tendencies.
When we try to cover up or hide from our past experiences, we can feel lost and like we don’t really know ourselves. We may take actions automatically without asking why. In his book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Dr. Siegel wrote of an interaction with his son, in which he’d lost his temper. After reflecting on the incident a bit later, Dr. Siegel realized that his emotional outburst had more to do with feelings he’d had as a child toward his brother than with his perception of his son today. He wrote of the experience, “I realize once again how many layers of meaning our brain contain, and how quickly old, perhaps forgotten, memories can emerge to shape our behavior. These associations can make us act on automatic pilot.”
By reflecting on the past, using a technique called mindsight, “a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds,” Dr. Siegel was able to make sense of his experience, then talk to his son about what happened and repair the situation. “With mindsight I was able to make use of the reflections that arose from that conflict to arrive at more clarifying insights into my own childhood experiences. This is how the most challenging moments of our lives can become opportunities to deepen our self-understanding and our connections with others.”
By engaging in this type of thinking and being willing to face the memories that arise, we gain invaluable insights into our behavior. We can then start to consciously separate from the more harmful influences from our history and actively alter our behavior to reflect how we really think and feel and how we choose to be in the world.
2. Differentiate
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