Quotes About Self-awareness

discover you've been in the box. Do keep trying. Don't deny that you've been in the box when you have been. Do apologize; then just keep marching forward, trying to be more helpful to others in the future. Don't focus on what others are doing wrong. Do focus on what you can do right to help. Don't worry whether others are helping you. Do worry whether you are helping others.

if I'm sure I'm right, there is little hope of seeing where I am failing. So I keep trying the same old things-

7. In the box, we invite mutual mistreatment and obtain mutual justification. We collude in giving each other reason to stay in the box.

Kate's story raises for me an astonishing point, Tom. And that is, when I'm in the box, I need people to cause trouble for me — I actually need problems.

Merely knowing the material doesn't get you out of the box. Living it does. And we're not living it if we're using it to diagnose others. Rather, we're living it when we're using it to learn how we can be more helpful to others—even

The bigger problem was that I couldn't see that I had a problem.

Self-betrayal" 1. An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of "self-betrayal." 2. When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal. 3. When I see the world in a self-justifying way, my view of reality becomes distorted.

That's right. The truth is, her faults seemed relevant to whether I should help her only after I failed to help her. I focused on and inflated her faults when I needed to feel justified for mine. After I betrayed myself, the truth was just the opposite of what I thought it was.

Self-betrayal" 1. An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of "self-betrayal." 2. When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal.

I don't feel the same now. Which means that he hasn't caused me to feel how I've felt. I've always had the choice.

Let's say that after I got in the box, I saw someone who knew me, and then out of shame, not wanting to appear insensitive, I turned and helped Mordechai gather his coins, all the while fuming that I was being made to do it. In that case, would I have been seeing him as a person while I was helping?

I carried a heart at war—a heart at war with others, myself, and the world. I had been using my stuttering as a weapon in that war and had gotten myself into a place where I was seeing and feeling crookedly and self-justifyingly. That was my problem.

That's the way it seems to me too," agreed Lou. "In the box, whether I'm a skilled communicator or not, I end up communicating my box—and that's the problem.

the more sure I am that I'm right, the more likely I will actually be mistaken. My need to be right makes it more likely that I will be wrong! Likewise, the more sure I am that I am mistreated, the more likely I am to miss ways that I am mistreating others myself. My need for justification obscures the truth.

Because then we're all doomed. That's to say that our entire experience, even our thoughts and feelings, are controlled and caused by others. It's to believe that we're not responsible for who we've become.

But that wasn't true. The only thing that happened between the time that Bud felt irritated and angry and the time that he didn't was something that Bud did — his own self-betrayal — not something that Nancy did. So Bud's feelings were lying to him!

Self-betrayal" 1. An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of "self-betrayal." 2. When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal. 3. When I see the world in a self-justifying way, my view of reality becomes distorted. 4. So—when I betray myself, I enter the box. 5. Over time, certain boxes become characteristic of me, and I carry them with me.

But that is not what Carol is suggesting. She hasn't said anything about letting Cory off the hook. She's only been talking about not letting herself off the hook.

That I am responsible for how I have been feeling, not only for what I have been doing.

Helpful skills and techniques aren't very helpful if they're done in the box. They just provide people with more-sophisticated ways to blame.

And I'd certainly never explored being tall before. It had always just been a fact. I am tall. I buy tall clothing. I date tall men. I can reach high things. The end. But when towering over the grocery store checkout line or out with my friends, I still felt like I didn't quite fit into the group.

Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl.

I think about all the time I spent vigilant, preoccupied, trying to decipher my mother's relationship with Marcus, Lucy's relationship with alcohol. It had never occurred to me that both situations were whatever they were, whether I figured them out or not. And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.