Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  Self-awareness begins with learning to be more conscious of our feelings and emotions, since—as we have already seen—this is the area where we learn to shut down from our earliest years. During this process we inevitably experience a series of varied emotions. The art of awareness consists of observing without interfering, but initially this can be a very frightening experience. We may not know why we are feeling what we do or what feelings may arise in the next moment. We may experience the panic of being out of control. But panic is only another emotion.

  As we become more and more conscious of the flow of our feelings, we become more and more conscious of the impulses behind our actions. We learn to notice, for example, when we are being propelled by a fear or anger we may have disowned or not even recognized. We begin to discover our own projections, such as a repressed hostility within ourselves that we falsely attribute to others. We can become more conscious of how our relationships affect us and more sensitive to which activities we should and should not pursue.

  In terms of expanding self-awareness, there is a difference between experiencing an emotion and merely naming it to ourselves—and this difference is profound. Suppose I am in a rush, agitated over something connected with my work, and barely aware of my state of mind. My wife asks, “How are you feeling?” I answer, a little abruptly, “Fine”—and then, when I see the way she is holding my glance, I add, in an attempt at greater truthfulness, “Irritated.” My wife says sympathetically, “It looks like you’re really feeling distressed about something.” I sigh, and the tension begins to flow from my body. In an altogether different tone of voice, I respond, “Yes, I’m upset about my writing today. I can’t seem to get anything right. Everything I put down on paper is choppy and out of focus. I feel worried and miserable.” Now I am no longer trying to outrun my emotions; I am no longer tensed against them; nor am I trying to dismiss them by labeling them “irritated.” I am allowing myself to experience what I feel.

  In this example even my initial labeling of my emotion is incorrect. I may be irritated, but I am a good deal more: I am worried, agitated, troubled. I might have answered my wife’s original inquiry more correctly by saying, “Worried, agitated, troubled”—but in a tense, abrupt tone of voice, that would have signaled, “Don’t ask me to feel what I am feeling!” I could have named my emotional state correctly without actually experiencing it in any meaningful sense. My self-awareness would have remained at a superficial level. In allowing myself to experience my feelings, I deepened my awareness.

  Experiencing our emotions rather than merely naming them is necessary for self-healing. A professional singer preparing for his first important role in an opera came for therapy, complaining of extreme stage fright. Even as he described the problem, I could see him tensing his body against his feelings, producing still greater tension, even panic. I suggested to him that instead of hiding his anxiety, he try to experience it more intensely. He looked at me with horror. It took considerable urging to persuade him to make the attempt. I asked him to describe his feelings, both his emotions and his bodily sensations.

  After much faltering, he came out with “I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, going a mile a minute. My chest is tight, it feels like it’s being pulled in two opposite directions. My breathing is shallow, my breath keeps jerking in and out in little spurts. My throat feels tight, feels constricted, I feel like I’m choking. I’m aware of tension in my legs, my thigh muscles feel strained. My arms are shaking.… I just had a flash of myself on the stage, and now I feel myself beginning to perspire. At the thought of all those people looking at me, I feel terrified.” I asked him, “Would you say, very loudly, ‘I feel terrified?” He gasped and shouted, “I feel terrified!” I asked him to shout it again; he did so. I had him do this a few more times, then inquired, “How are you feeling now?” He paused for a moment and then brightened. “Better,” he said. “I’m beginning to feel relaxed.”

  When we are aware of and experience our unwanted feelings, they diminish. The opposite happens with wanted feelings: they grow stronger. Thus, in allowing myself to surrender to my feelings of love for another human being, the love intensifies and inspires behaviors that deepen the love. In pausing to experience fully the joy I take in my work, my passion for my work is augmented, my excitement rises, and I am inspired to give my best, which nurtures my love for my work.

  I often recommend the following exercise for opening oneself to emotional awareness. Simply sit quietly, eyes closed, and breathe deeply and gently through the mouth into the stomach, while paying attention to the smallest details of what you experience within, just noting, just observing, without analysis, without self-criticism, without speculation as to meaning. The apparent simplicity of this exercise belies its power to awaken feeling. People may find themselves weeping, angry, sexually excited, euphoric, depressed, or ecstatic—and in awe of the richness of the emotional life to which they had previously been oblivious.

  Another exercise I sometimes recommend can be done standing up or lying down. Tighten successively all the muscles of the body, moving upwards from the feet, holding the contractions as long as possible, then releasing explosively, letting everything relax at once, allowing the body to breathe as it needs to breathe, without interference. Go through the entire procedure five or six times, then stand or lie down quietly and mentally observe yourself, breathing into the feelings that arise within, not fighting back by tensing muscles against the emergence of whatever emotions and memories arise. Do not distract yourself with such questions as, Should I be feeling this? or What does this feeling mean? or, worse still, What does it imply about me that I am feeling this?

  If our purpose is simple perception, psychologizing and moralizing are deadly.

  In cultivating self-awareness, we want to remember that we know far more than we are aware of knowing. The mind does not have a sharp division between the conscious and the unconscious; rather, it has (or consists of) a continuum of awareness. The degrees of awareness range from focused awareness to peripheral awareness to total unawareness or unconsciousness. The points on this continuum blur into one another as adjoining colors on the spectrum do. The barrier between focused awareness and the unconscious is nowhere as formidable as Freud supposed. The sentence-completion technique presented throughout this book offers a stunning illustration of that fact; more than one psychoanalyst has expressed surprise at seeing clients through sentence completion bring up the kind of material, in minutes, that is presumed to require months or years of excavation to uncover. But any number of psychological processes apart from sentence completion, such as guided fantasy or psychodramatic exercises, similarly demonstrate the potential accessibility of “the unconscious.”

  Given the appropriate circumstances and approach, that which is apparently unknown to a person or only implicit in his or her understanding can be brought into consciousness. Here are some simple examples.

  We will begin with hypnosis, because it clearly demonstrates that by altering our state of mind we can gain access to material not normally available. An adult professes to have little or no memory for his early years. When he is hypnotized and age regressed, guided back in time to the first years of life, we see his posture and facial expression changing, as if he were becoming younger before our eyes, and forgotten or repressed experiences are awakened within him. And, usually with considerable emotional involvement, he reexperiences and/or reconnects with events that had been submerged and inaccessible to his conscious mind. The altered state of consciousness does not create the memories but allows them to emerge.

  Another well-known technique for connecting with what we know but are not aware of is used today by psychotherapists of many different orientations. Originated early in this century by Jacob Moreno, founder of psychodrama, and later adopted by Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, the technique involves talking in fantasy to a significant person in our life, one with whom we have unfinished business. In the Moreno version someone plays the
part of the significant person; in the Perls version there is only an empty chair. The principle is the same in both, however: if we truly move into the spirit of the exercise, we cannot avoid shifting to an altered state of consciousness, a state in which it becomes possible to express thoughts, verbalize feelings, and experience attitudes that have been denied explicit awareness.

  For instance, a woman in therapy speaks with apparent apathy about the death of her husband. Her eyes are dull, her voice is muted, her manner is dejected. She claims to feel nothing. The therapist asks her to imagine her husband sitting in the chair opposite her and talk to him out of her direct and immediate experience. As she begins the exercise, she says, “Looking at you, I feel nothing. You are gone. I don’t care. I knew you would leave me. Everyone leaves me.” She begins to cry. “Mommy and daddy died and left me. Why did they do that? I always knew I would end up alone. When you came home from the doctor and told me you had cancer, that was it. I was finished right then. In that moment, it was over. I am angry. I am so angry at you. Why did you have to leave me, too?”

  An example of a different technique may be found in my version of a well-known fantasy exercise. We imagine an encounter with a wise old person in a cave or on top of a mountain or in some other remote place. This wise being knows the answers we desperately need after our long journey. In fantasy we ask questions such as, Who am I that I do not yet know I am? or How am I standing in the way of my own growth? or What do I need to do to let go of the pain of the past? We listen very carefully to the answers; sometimes they come in words, sometimes in images. And then we meditate on, or discuss with our therapist, the marvelous and illuminating things we learn from this wise old person who resides within the self.

  The simplest technique (if technique is not too grand a word here) is a strategy that I unearthed one time late at night. I was feeling a little tired and asked my client a question I was sure he could answer. When he looked at me blankly and said he didn’t know, I said jokingly, “OK, you don’t know. But if you knew, what might the answer be?” He proceeded to answer the question I had originally asked. After he left the office, I remained in my chair, mildly stunned and convinced that something important had happened. It was as if the original version of my question had evoked some kind of pressure—perhaps the obligation to be “right”—that caused him to lose contact with what he knew. When I conceded that he did not know, the pressure disappeared, and when I shifted from reality into the realm of “if” and “might,” he felt a freedom that gave him access to the appropriate answer. Sometimes when I am stuck on some question or problem I think I should have an answer for, I tell myself, “OK, you don’t know. But if you knew, what might the answer be?” Surprisingly often, the answer appears.

  Let me introduce a distinction implicit in the preceding discussion, the distinction between an absolute “I don’t know” and a contextual “I don’t know.” Again I will refer to hypnosis. If a person does not know what she received for her fifteenth birthday and is then assisted to know through a hypnotic trance, it is clear that her “I don’t know” is contextual. That is, in the context of her ordinary state of awareness, she truly does not remember what she received for her fifteenth birthday. A change in her state of consciousness makes it possible for her to know. On the other hand, if we ask her for the population of a small town in Africa of which she has never heard, she would say, “I don’t know,” and no hypnotic technique could draw the correct answer from her because the correct answer does not exist in her. It is not buried on some deeper level of mind; it is not forgotten or repressed; she is ignorant of the answer in the absolute sense.

  When a client says, “I don’t know”—“I don’t know what I feel,” “I don’t know whether I want to remain married,” “I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish by doing that,” “I don’t know what I see in her,” “I don’t know whether I was molested as a child”—I assume, until it is shown otherwise, that I am being confronted with a contextual “I don’t know” rather than an absolute “I don’t know.”

  The sentence-completion technique makes it possible to achieve just that shift in consciousness necessary for us to gain access to material that may not be readily available in awareness. We can use this technique in a group, or working with another person, face to face, or talking to ourself in a mirror or into a tape recorder, or writing in a notebook; in any case, the important thing is to say or write whatever comes to mind, freely and spontaneously, without worrying for the moment about the literal truth or falsehood of any particular ending.

  Here is a sentence-completion exercise you can use to begin to explore aspects of your emotional life. Write each of the following stems at the top of a blank page, then do a minimum of ten endings as rapidly as possible.

  For exploring feelings of pain or hurt: “I can remember feeling hurt when—”; “When I was hurt, I told myself—”; “Sometimes I feel hurt when—”; “Sometimes when I am hurt, I—”; “One of the ways I sometimes hide my hurt is—”; “One of the ways my hurt comes out is—”; “If I ever fully admitted when I feel hurt—”; “A better way to deal with my hurt might be—.” (The purpose of the last stem in the sequence is, of course, to allow us access to a deeper wisdom concerning ways we might deal with our pain.)

  For exploring fear: “I can remember feeling afraid when—”; “When I was afraid, I told myself—”; “One of the ways I sometimes hide my fear is—”; “One of the ways my fear comes out is—”; “If I ever fully admitted when I feel afraid—”; “A better way to deal with my fear might be—.”

  For exploring anger: “I can remember feeling angry when—”; “When I felt angry, I told myself—”; “Sometimes I feel angry when—”; “Sometimes when I’m angry I—”; “One of the ways I hide my anger is—”; “One of the ways my anger comes out is—”; “If I ever fully admitted when I’m angry—”; “A better way to deal with my anger might be—.”

  For exploring sexuality: “Sometimes I feel sexually excited when—”; “Sometimes when I am sexually excited I—”; “One of the ways I sometimes hide my sexual excitement is—”; “One of the ways my sexual excitement comes out is—”; “If I ever fully admitted when I feel sexually excited—”; “A better way to deal with my sexual excitement might be—.”

  For exploring feelings of joy or happiness: “Sometimes I feel happy when—”; “Sometimes when I am happy I—”; “One of the ways I sometimes hide my happiness is—”; “One of the ways my happiness comes out is—”; “If I ever fully admitted when I feel happy—”; “A better way to deal with my happiness might be—.” *

  We can readily understand the fear that may accompany the prospect of encountering painful emotions. But sometimes joy, too, can be threatening. A woman who had not worked outside her home for many years took a job to augment the family income. Being highly competent, she was rapidly promoted. But she concealed from herself the extent of her pride and happiness at what she was doing, because she intuitively felt it would disturb the equilibrium of her marriage; she sensed that her husband would feel threatened. Participating in one of my Intensive Workshops, “Self-Esteem and Romantic Relationships,” and introduced to the technique of sentence completion and, specifically, to the sentence stem “Sometimes I feel happy when—,” she was brought face to face with the sudden realization that many of her greatest moments of joy took place in the office where she worked.

  In the course of talking about her reaction to this exercise, she became aware of why she had been blocking and disowning. She began to confront tensions in her relationship with her husband that she had chosen largely to overlook. Like a string of exploding firecrackers, one burst of awareness led to another, from a recognition of the kind of programming she had received from her mother about “a woman’s place,” to the amount of boredom she had endured while doing what she regarded as her duty, to her previously unadmitted contempt for religious teachings about self-sacrifice, and on and on and on. She reported an enorm
ous increase in self-assurance and internal freedom, even though she felt some trepidation concerning what her husband’s reactions might be when she shared her feelings with him. She declared herself willing to face whatever might need to be faced. Her husband was present at the workshop, and from observing him, my guess was that they would be able to negotiate successfully this transition in her development—but I do not know the ultimate outcome.

  I think it is clear by now why we are far better off knowing our needs, feelings, and wants than being oblivious to them. Where there is knowledge, there is the possibility of action. But why, for example, might it be desirable to know about an unmet need from our past, from our childhood, a deep-seated frustration of long ago, where it would seem that action is no longer possible?

  Very often we resist knowing about a need or a want we see no possibility of fulfilling. Our father may have died when we were young. He may have been impossibly distant and remote, unloving and rejecting, or nonsupportive. And to diminish our pain, long ago we buried the knowledge of how much we would like to have had a different kind of father. We tell ourselves, “I am an adult now—why do I have to think about it?” But only when I am prepared to experience how much the child in me wanted and needed a father, only when I am prepared to feel the pain of his absence, only when I can give comfort and understanding to the child within for what he or she never had, only then can I complete the unfinished business of my past and move into a freer, more harmonious adulthood. This may entail a kind of mourning, a period of allowing myself to feel the pain I never acknowledged before, a time of talking in fantasy to the child within, leading to the point when the past is finally laid to rest—really laid to rest. To grow up is to assume responsibility for parenting the child within.