Quotes About Self-awareness

It turns out that most of us aren't aware of how we actually spend our time or what we really do all day until we break it down hour by hour and say it out loud.

Therapists tell their patients: Follow your envy—it shows you what you want.

Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs. This happens to therapists when we're providing therapy, and it happens to our own therapists too. We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can't yet see.

Some people hope that therapy will help them find a way to be heard by whoever they feel wronged them, at which point those lovers or relatives will see the light and become the people they'd wished for all along. But it rarely happens like that. At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you're in charge of your choices. You have to move to the front seat and be the mommy dog driving the car.

not that she's hiding her feelings; it's that she can't access them. There's a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

But sometimes — more often than we tend to realize — those difficult people are us. That's right — sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

And so it begins, at last. Charlotte doesn't leave this time. Instead, she stays in therapy until she learns to drive her own car, navigating her way through the world more safely, looking both ways, making many wrong turns but finding her way back, always, to where she truly wants to go.

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

Is this something that's being done to me or am I doing it to myself?

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing.

The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls." But he also said this: "Who looks inside, awakes.

Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If

early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present

I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life.

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion — an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments,

That's right - sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our own difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we'd never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said this: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

We may want others' forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.

Feeling your sadness or anxiety can also give you essential information about yourself and your world.