YOUR SELF
What is your self? What a strange question. We all know who we are—don’t we? Who are you? What does it mean to be yourself? What is someone's self? Although we should know who we are, many people can only come up with vague ideas.
It is a good idea to know what your self is if you want to become more of it. Some people think you can never define the self. This appears to make some sense because your self always changes through growth in each moment. An ever-changing entity cannot be defined except the moment in which it exists, for even if we could define it in one moment, it would be different in the next. The definition is only elusive to us when we try to stop the self to determine what it is. When we maintain awareness of it in the continuous stream of moments it manifests itself in, we can embrace it and its definition.
Some people may claim they do not change. They say they feel like the same person they had been twenty years ago. However, we all are continually involved in the process of ourselves becoming. People may feel the same—themselves—even though their selves have been growing. The discrepancy comes from them having been there, feeling their selves, the whole time they have been growing. What they experience is their selves, selves which are in continual change; but the change is so small, moment to moment, that it does not feel like change at all. As we live each moment being ourselves, we gradually grow without notice of the change. If we could spontaneously become transported back into ourselves of twenty years past, then we would feel the contrast of change because the leap would be a twenty year span rather than just moment to moment.
So what makes you yourself? It has to be something unique because you are different from everyone else. Is it all the friends you have had, the different places you have lived, the education you have received, or the good and bad things you have done? Let’s label all these simply as experiences. Is yourself, then, all the unique experiences you have throughout your life? What about the feelings and thoughts you have as you experience your life? Certainly experiences play a large part in who you are, but they are not part of yourself. Our experiences are something external to us. How we are affected by our experiences is through feelings and thoughts from experiences. Our feelings and thoughts are internal to us. Maybe they are closer to the essence of ourselves.
When you consider feelings and thoughts, you may question which of the two is more yourself. If we discover which one of these internal processes is more influential, maybe that one is also more of yourself. The one with greater influence would have to be one which occurs before the other in time. This follows the rules of cause and effect. One thing must occur before the other in time to be considered the cause of the other. Do you think first and then have a feeling? do you have a feeling and then thoughts spring from that feeling? or do both occur simultaneously?
Well, let’s think about this issue for a moment. It requires some thought. By the way, why are we even concerned about it? What is motivating us to think about it? Were there some feelings that came first which motivated us to think, or did we just start thinking? Why did you even buy this book if you knew you would have to think? Were there some feelings you were having, motivating you? My guess is that you had some feelings that then motivated you to understand more of what being yourself is about. This whole book and all the growth necessary to write it were motivated by my feelings. I wrote it straight from my heart, which means from my true feelings. My feelings came first, then thoughts, then this book.
Feelings come before thoughts. Think back to the last time you saw a new born infant. Does the thought that it is hungry come to its mind first, and then it feels hungry? Or does it feel hungry, and then it thinks about food? The infant feels first. It does not know what food is to be able to think about food. Thoughts of food—which kinds may be most pleasing, memories of different tastes—all develop later. The baby is just feeling hungry! If it has any thought, the thought would be hurt from being hungry. However, it does not even know the word hurt, so it could only sense the hurt as a feeling or develop its own thought symbol of what hurt is.
Let’s consider the example of a baby that has reached a developmental level in which it can think about food. Let’s presume it thought of milk first and then started to get hungry. Some adults may also have had this experience. Even though it appears differently, the baby and adults in these situations had been hungry to begin with. Because they were pushing hunger away, they were not feeling it. The thoughts of food only released the feeling that had already been existing, pent up behind a wall of suppression. This suppression may have existed as simply a busy activity. The adult may have been busily working and the baby may have been busily playing.
You are basically your feelings. This is why I can use the words self and feelings interchangeably throughout the book. Our thoughts are so close to ourselves that they may feel like a part of ourselves, but our feelings are more of ourselves. Thoughts are the closest expression we can have of our feelings, but our feelings are the expression of ourselves. If you feel only hunger, that is what your self needs at that moment, so that is what you will be consumed with. You will use your thought process either to obtain food to satisfy the feeling or to suppress the feeling. The expression of your feelings is the window into yourself. This is why to be ourselves we cannot have only feelings; we must have feelings and at least one expression of them: thoughts.
-Try to define yourself in terms other than your feelings.
-Break down your self-definition into the simplest form possible.
-Can you do this without that definition somehow leading back to feelings?
-Have someone else test your definition to see if they cannot make it lead straight back to feelings.
Some Expressions and Suppressions of Ourselves
Language is merely a symbolic representation of thoughts, and like thoughts, it is either an expression or suppression of feelings. When you were a baby, you mainly expressed your feelings of hunger, hurt, and anger through body-language. As you developed, you acquired the symbolism of verbal language to help express how you felt: "Ouch!” “I’m mad,” “Stop doing that,” “I want this,” “I’m hungry." You also used thoughts and language to suppress your feelings: "That doesn't hurt,” “I’m happy,” “I don’t care what you do,” “I don’t want pudding,” “I’m not hungry." The symbolism of language helped define you through expressing and repressing yourself, getting much more complex as you grew older. Though even in its complexity, it is still simply an expression or suppression of your feelings.
When you are hurt, speaking truthfully with someone who listens may make you feel better because you are expressing some of your feelings merely through honestly talking. Conversely, you temporarily may feel better when you strengthen the suppression of your feelings through speaking lies to someone who accepts the lies.
Watch people closely as they talk. They continuously have some feeling of some level. Look at them without hearing their words and just try to see a moment in which no feeling is being either expressed or suppressed through the act of talking. You will never find such a moment unless you are suppressing feelings, blinding yourself to their feelings as well.
Some thoughts are so abstract that they are difficult for our selves to relate with. It is when teenagers in high school have difficulty relating math to their lives that they have difficulty studying it. Abstract thinking, such as in mathematics, can be an expression of a feeling; yet if people cannot relate their feelings in such an abstract way, it is difficult to have motivation to use the expression. Math can be related to more personally by adolescents through relating it to their feelings, as parents often learn. A parent might say, "If you don't study, you will not be able to go dancing tonight."
Our actions are also expressions or suppressions of ourselves. When we go to a movie, read a book, or go out with someone, we express or suppress a feeling, perhaps emptiness, loneliness, or desire. Consider the situation of someone having punched you, leaving you feeling hurt. The hurt partially expresses itself through your thoughts of why he punched you, of whether you should punch back, and of what other actions can best express the rest of your hurt without getting into more hurt. You might continue to express yourself by the action of calling the police and reporting an aggravated assault. As you talk with the police, your hurt may further release itself through that expression, making you feel better.
Feelings and Motivation
People who are honest with their feelings have motivation to do what they want. They do not have a part of themselves they are denying, motivating them to do stuff they normally would not. Because they honestly face their feelings, they have the motivation their feelings offer to assert themselves and speak, giving them more opportunities of growth.
Your feelings are the force which brings passion and life into your life. Your sense of right and wrong, morality, opinions, and sense of self all come from having feelings. You learn that what is right is what makes you feel good and what is wrong is what does not. When you get hurt, you begin to have strong opinions about issues you normally would not have feelings about. Let’s say you did not know what fire was and stuck your foot into it. You would quickly develop feelings, motivation, and opinions about this formally unknown entity. Your foot initially would feel pain from the heat. You then would gain motivation to move your foot out of the fire as an expression of the pain (perhaps accompanied by a grunt or two), gaining opinions of what fire is, of how close you want to get to it next time, and of whether you want your kids hanging around it or not. Our feelings make it possible to gain knowledge and truth through motivating us to know about something. After we have felt the power fire has on us to distribute pain, we may explore the different possible uses of it, such as in war, ceremony, or healing.
Such motivation may also be observed when a group feels the burns of discrimination. The group develops opinions about itself and the groups which discriminated against it. If, however, people who are touched by fire do not listen to their pain, they may not have opinions with strong enough conviction and motivation to put out the fire. Denying the pain from discrimination fizzles motivation to stop the discrimination. Because the part of their selves is denied which could have grown through facing and integrating the pain, that part does not exist to fight against the discrimination.
Hurt and loss are extremely valuable assets to ourselves. They are the motivation for our growth. Without pain from the threat of our eventual death, we might just decide to sit on a couch and watch television for ten years. Without pain of hunger, we may not have the energy to peel ourselves off the couch to get food. Without pain of an empty life, we may not have the motivation to fill our lives with things that satisfy us and other people: work we enjoy, people we love, and things we like doing.
Positive feelings also motivate people (positive feelings generally can be defined as an absence of negative feelings). If you never experienced the joy of some activity, you may not have motivation to go through what is necessary to engage in that activity. Some people wonder why surfers get up so early on cold mornings and go into cold water. These people have experienced the enjoyment (lack of pain) surfing gives them, so they have the necessary motivation to repeat the activity, even in unusually unpleasant circumstances. If they experienced no positive feelings from the activity, they would sit at home or be somewhere where they did gain positive feelings.
Feelings are not just motivational forces; they are yourself. The self has built into it motivation and energy to help it continue being itself. If the stream of your feelings were turned down, you would also have your motivation and energy turned down. Your life, self, and gifts to humanity would all be turned down as well. But if your feelings are allowed to exist—no matter what you are feeling, be it pain or joy—you have motivation and energy for growth.
-List some things you really enjoy doing.
-What feelings do you get from doing each activity?
-Would you continue engaging in the activity if you did not get these feelings?
-List some activities you don’t like doing.
-What are some of the feelings that come from doing each activity?
-Do you find yourself having less motivation for the activity than for things you enjoy doing?
-If not, are you getting some positive gain, such as money, attention, security, sex, etcetera. Perhaps this sustains your motivation to continue the activity. If you think not, explain what gives you motivation to continue?
-Do you deny your negative feelings about the activity so that you can have motivation to continue in it?
-If so, do you notice yourself becoming more depressed, feeling bad about yourself, or thinking more negative thoughts?
-When have you been self-destructive?
-What do you think caused the motivation for this?
-What pain were you not admitting?
-What can you do differently to help prevent this self-destruction in the future?
-When has denying your feelings limited your growth?
-What can you do differently to help prevent this in the future?
When You Stop Being Yourself
When you deny a hurt, you limit the process of your self-existence. This fuels anger which has been kindled within you from being hurt. If you continue to hold in your feelings, the anger becomes directed at yourself for keeping your self from yourself. This self-anger leads to feelings of guilt or depression (the cycle of feelings was conceptualized by David Viscott){2}. The guilt is just anger directed at yourself and takes form as feeling bad or at fault. The depression is just the result of taking too much of yourself away, causing so much self to be gone that your energy drops.
Simply the act of holding your feelings inside consumes energy. This works similar to how a dam behaves. The wall of a dam exerts just as much energy on the water as the water exerts on the wall, keeping static equilibrium maintained between the two. In regards to your emotions, when you deny a part of yourself, you use up energy maintaining force on the wall that holds your feelings inside.
Your body likes to be as efficient as possible with the limited energy it has. So when you use up energy through being depressed for years on end, your brain may adjust chemically to that energy drain, establishing a new chemical equilibrium which makes the depression more easily attainable with less expenditure of energy. In other words, your body adapts to the depressed state by making it an easier process to engage in. Over extended time, the depression will be seen by your body as an adaptive process that is desirable for you to achieve. Your body wants to be in equilibrium not in a constant chemical struggle to hold back electrical impulses in your brain of stored hurt. Your body will adapt by trying to maintain this state of depression as if it were a natural state. The result is chronic depression that may need to be treated with antidepressant drugs as well as psychotherapeutic means.
The act of a person’s self taking away from itself causes him to trust his self less. If you were around someone who took away from you, hurt you, and did not care for your feelings, you would learn to distrust him; so it is the same with your self. If you do not take care of your feelings by accepting, acknowledging, and giving voice to them in some form of expression, you will come to trust yourself less. You will come to believe you are not the best person for yourself.
When you do not trust yourself, you have good reason to walk around in fear. You are not able to trust your feelings because your feelings are the closest expression of your untrustworthy self. If you were walking on a narrow bridge, and you could not trust your eyesight, you would walk with much more anxiety, not being sure of yourself. Your eyes could deceive you, which would then cause you to fall off the bridge and hurt yourself. This is why anxiety is so common among depressed people. It stems from not knowing when they will hurt themselves again through denying their feelings.
The person who can live in the moment is most honest with themselves and lives most in reality. Living in the moment is done by being with your feelings and allowing them expression. If you only partially allow yourself to manifest itself in the moment, where is the other part? The other part is stuck in the past as the moment it belonged to passes. This part no longer belongs in present reality and thus has potential to give you a distorted view of the present. Extreme cases of distortion are when the self rejects itself so much that it lives in other realities, making you feel like you are “crazy.” It takes energy denying your feelings to maintain these other realities. Since the body wants to be as efficient as possible with its use of energy, over years of rejecting yourself, a chemical change may occur in the brain to make the rejecting process easier to uphold. The body will see your continual self-rejection as an adaptive process to your environment and will facilitate this adaptation.
The chemical developments which cause chronic depression and chronic psychosis, however, are not just a function of psychological and environmental influences. Genetic links place some individuals at greater risks to adapt through biological-chemical changes in the brain. Nevertheless, people who can spontaneously be with their feelings at each given moment maximize their self-manifestation and are most free in being in reality as themselves.
When you have held in some painful feelings from childhood, that part of yourself is still a child as the old feelings of hurt resurface. The part which was rejected and not allowed expression is brought out when you finally embrace it. This explains why people begin to act, talk, and feel like a child when feeling old hurt from childhood. You need to embrace this part of yourself and not push it back down again, even though you may have falsely learned this part of you is bad. Allow the feelings to come forth to integrate back into yourself, so you can be more fully yourself. That part of you is not bad; it is you. You need to take that self back into yourself, so your complete self can fully connect into the present world.
It is not your feelings that are bad; it is holding them in that is bad. The extent you deny your feelings is the extent you have potential for what society labels as bad. This is because your feelings are what steer you to do good. If you have no feelings or decrease their volume, you have potential to act hurtful. You may act without feeling, being hurtful to people. You may explode at innocent people because you have pent up anger that seeks opportunities for release.
When holding in some of your feelings, all of your feelings get held in to some degree. The good feelings that come when you do something loving are not as strong, nor are the bad feelings of guilt when you are hurtful to others.
Your ability to empathize with people decreases because when others speak of their pain, you are reminded of yours. Since you are trying to deny your pain, you will tend also not to hear theirs.
Good and bad do not exist except through our definitions of them. We usually define love as good and absence of love as bad. What makes you more loving is good, and what makes you less loving is bad. The difference between good and bad in yourself is how you deal with your feelings: if you are open to your feelings, you have potential for good; if you are closed to your feelings, you have potential for bad.
-List some important times when you had stopped being yourself?
-What happened after you stopped being yourself?
-What feeling did you feel afterwards, if any?
-Were you more easily irritated?
-Did you feel more happy?
-If so, when did things begin to get worse?
-Why did they get worse? Did feelings come up from not being yourself earlier?
-Do you think things would not have been as bad if you had been yourself earlier? Why?
-What were other people’s feelings who were around you?
-Did you feel like a bad person?
-Why?
Self Realization
Some people have not been being themselves for so long that they don’t know they are not being themselves. They don’t even know what being themselves is about. They are unable to tell when other people also are not being themselves, and when they are in the presence of someone being himself, they feel threatened. They have submerged into a safe niche which limits their self-existence. Out of fear and desire for stability they continue to cling to this niche.
Very few people, even those who claim commitment to truth, realize who they are. It is difficult to be aware of yourself even when you give it a hardy effort, so if you do not try at all, you easily get lost. As an evolving species, we have spent most of our time being self-ignorant, for we only recently have developed the intellectual capacity to be self-aware. Life has been evolving since around 3,000,000,000 years ago,{3} while humans capable of conscious thought probably have only existed in the last 3,000 years or so.{4} (Even if the date of conscious thought were earlier, in comparison to 3,000,000,000 years, it would relatively still be considered “recent”.) We are still in the process of evolving a conscious sense of self.
Part of the difficulty in being aware of yourself is from you having to be the only one who can do the perceiving. It is like trying to look at your face: a mirror does not work because it reverses the image; a photograph does not capture the essence because it is only how you look as a perfectly still creature from one angle. These images are not really you. A videotape is more accurate but not 3-dimensional like yourself. Think about how difficult it is to truly see yourself just on the physical level! Now imagine trying to perceive yourself on an abstract, intangible level, such as the spiritual.
Let’s say you were feeling good about yourself one morning and decided to look in the mirror. The image of yourself was pleasing to you. Later, while at school or work, someone you liked called you “big nose.” You felt understandably hurt. This hurt quickly turned into anger, but since you feared rejection from this person, you didn’t get angry at him. You denied your feelings and did not express yourself. The anger directed itself back at you because it was not going anywhere outside of yourself. This made you feel bad about yourself, your nose in particular. When you looked in the mirror that afternoon, your nose looked bigger! After having expressed your hurt and been loved by your family during dinner, you felt a little better, and your nose stopped appearing to be so big.
Can you relate to this? Have you ever had similar experiences where how you felt affected how you perceived yourself. If your feelings are you, and you are the one who is doing the looking, you can get in the way of seeing yourself. More specifically, how you deal with your feelings affects how you see yourself, both physically and mentally.
If you deal with yourself by denying your feelings, you do not see yourself correctly. When you deny your feelings, you are basically denying yourself. The self that is denied cannot be seen by yourself, and the self that remains distorts the view of the rest of yourself.
Knowing Yourself Is Safer Than Not
When you do not know yourself, other people can use that blindness to manipulate you. If someone knows yourself better than you, he knows what makes you tick and what buttons to push to make you move. By not knowing a part of yourself, you cannot be responsible for that part. Someone can take over the responsibility of yourself which you don’t have, gaining power over yourself (see section on responsibility).
I personally have experienced such a situation. Before attending graduate school, I worked at a group home for abused children. I gave up my control there by denying my need to be seen as a good, loving person (this need stemmed from denying my hurt and anger from not being loved the way I needed as a child, resulting in feeling a deep sense of being unlovable). The children at the group home easily found my need and used it to manipulate me.
One such example was when a child climbed up on furniture. I sheepishly told him that he should get down and play on the floor. He responded by telling me I was being mean, so I turned away from him and focused instead on the other kids. I was setting inappropriate limits for his behavior, swayed by my hidden need. The influence of the hidden need, however, can not remain hidden. It’s influence lead me to allow the child to do whatever he wanted so that he would not tell me I was bad.
This child kept climbing over furniture and got increasingly louder and more active. I became more uncomfortable with the situation and less able to keep my attention on the other kids, yet I still chose not to act. I demonstrated a temporary inability to love the children through the lack of my attention. More of the presence of myself withdrew as I was not acknowledging and expressing my uncomfortable feelings. Anger rose inside me. It shielded any love I could give the children in those moments. The child then began jumping off furniture, becoming a danger to himself and others. At this time my supervisor, a person open to her own needs (also open to her hurt and anger), walked into the room and was able to take control of the situation. I was left feeling unlovable and bad, exactly what I had feared the most.
It is in your best interest to be open to yourself. By not knowing parts of yourself, you lack the self-protection feelings offer. If you do not know you are hurting as you place your hand on a hot stove, your hand will burn. If you do not know you are hurting from some life-experience, your soul will burn. When you choose not to know your feelings, you do not know a part of yourself that tells you to get out of situations which are bad for you. Since you do not have your whole self available to you, feelings that normally would have existed will not exist. When hurt is occurring or might occur, you will not receive the warning it offers. If you will not know yourself, you are choosing to be less responsible for yourself.
Battered women exemplify the above self-destructive dynamics. They have a need to be seen as lovable because they doubt they are lovable. Battered women do not know of this need and how it operates within their relationship. They do not see the influence of it, yet this does not stop the need from acting in their life. Since they do not believe they are lovable, they get into relationships that meet this expectation—becoming involved with people who do not love them. The doubt in their lovableness causes them to believe they are responsible for their beatings and that the beatings are their fault.
In truth, the beatings are their fault, but they believe so for the wrong reasons. They believe the beatings are their fault because they have not acted with enough love towards the batterer. The beatings are their fault because they have not been honest with their feelings. The anger they dismiss from being battered gets directed back onto themselves. Because they continue to feel unlovable from holding in so much anger, the need to be loved by the abuser is reinforced, perpetuating the vicious abusive cycle. They feel guilty. They believe they have a chance at being lovable if only they act so the “loving” batterer could tolerate them.
Their belief that the batterer is loving is reinforced by their lack of awareness of their need to be lovable. The need causes them to see the batterer as loving so that the need can remain hidden without having to deal with it. If the batterer is loving—they reason—then he chooses a relationship with someone that is lovable. This is how they pacify their need to be seen as lovable but do not change it.
If you don’t know yourself, you don’t know what to work on to get stronger and become a better person. When you take risks, you don’t know how to prevent the falls that are caused by your weaknesses. Knowing your weaknesses is part of being strong. How do you think a body builder with weak calves gets stronger and bigger calves? Does he work on his already incredibly big biceps? No, he builds his weak calves up by acknowledging they are weak and in need work.
Think about all the times you have sat there and complained about being weak. Well, you do not get strong by turning away from your weaknesses. You do not get stronger by focusing only on your strengths. Your chance to grow stronger is happening right now. Will you turn from this excellent opportunity only to complain and wish you were stronger at some later date?
Why have you held on to your needs and weaknesses for so long? Why have you been walking around in the dark for so long? Knowing yourself is like shedding light onto a darkened room so that you can find things, see where you are walking, and discover what else needs to be in the room. Whom haven’t you forgiven for not loving you to make yourself feel so unlovable that you will not grow stronger?
Be aware and understand when you allow your needs or weakness to dictate your behavior. This way you can grow. You need to be aware of your healthy self that already feels lovable, and acknowledge that self when it shows itself. You have to know yourself and maintain an openness to yourself in the continual stream of moments that make up your life.
Many people spend time hidi