Understanding What You’re Made Of: Self-Questioning

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,: 2023

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Self questioning can help you increase your self awareness, challenge limiting beliefs. It can improve your decision making. It can help you solve problems more effectively, and it can also increase your resilience. If you want to learn more about our author Nick Trenton, visit slash Nick Trenton. But for now, here's today's episode on understanding what you're made of self questioning. What would it look like if you could be your own therapist? This is not a hypothetical question. Literally. Imagine it now. How would you talk to yourself if you were responsible for providing your own mental health care?

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Maybe you think that a really good counselor or psychologist is extra caring and compassionate, nonjudgmental nondirective wise and mature. Well, the good news is that if you want to, you can provide all these things for yourself without a stitch of formal training. There's something else, however, that therapists are really good at, and it's how we began this chapter asking questions. A therapist doesn't tell you what you're feeling, what's wrong with you, or how to solve your problems. Instead, they're curious. They ask what you're feeling, ask you to look at how you're functioning, and point you toward your own inner resources so you can start to solve your problems yourself. Why do they do this? Because they know that your life gets better when you are more aware. Telling somebody something doesn't increase their awareness. Asking them a question does.

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If you want to become your own therapist, you need to get good at asking yourself the right kind of question. The right kind means those questions that create more awareness and shed light on new solutions, unconscious material possibilities, and alternatives. Self questioning is a way to peek outside of the current boundaries and limitations of the problem we're experiencing. It's a way to find insight. What's important here is that when you ask this kind of question, you're not doing so in order to find the correct answer. You're doing so because the process of thinking about the answer is what provides insight and gets you to step outside the box of your current predicament. Ask yourself the right questions, and you can educate yourself about your problem. Clarify what you want to achieve. Assess your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. Gain insight into recurring patterns.

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See solutions and new alternatives. Find forgiveness, understanding, and compassion for your present position. We can ask questions about our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. We can ask them about the past, the future, or the present. We can ask fantastical hypothetical questions or real, concrete ones. We can ask whatever we like. There are no limits. In a therapy session, a counselor will use questions like a flashlight shining a beam of awareness onto areas of your life that you may not have looked too closely at before. Here are a few common ones what am I feeling now? In general?

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What do I think and feel in this situation? When are the times when I feel better, stronger, clearer, or more capable? What is one thing, no matter how small, that I can change right now? What am I avoiding right now? If my friend was going through the same struggle as I am, how would I make sense of their situation? What would I say to them? Are my thoughts distorted in any way? Do I have any evidence for my assumptions? What am I actually afraid of here? How would I behave right now if I were the best version of myself?

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How am I making sense of my situation? If the worst thing happened, would it really be the end of the world? You may recognize these from an earlier chapter. Are there any unproven assumptions? I'm asking right now. Have I felt this way before? What helped back then and what didn't? What core belief is activated right now? Will any of this matter in one year's time? In ten years?

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What are my values? What do I ultimately want to achieve? Before we continue, though, a word of warning. Just asking a question is not the same as self therapy. And it's not the same as actually doing something about your problem. A question can shed light on an issue, but that's all. It's still your job to take action, inspired by what you learn. The above questions may be more or less useful for you, but it all depends on your unique situation. A therapist will know the right question to ask at the right time. But if we are our own therapists, we need to pay close attention and make sure we're not getting carried away with meaningless analysis that doesn't go anywhere.

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One tip avoid asking why. This seems like a reasonable thing to ask, but it actually doesn't provide any insight. Only the illusion of insight. Such a question might keep you trapped within a certain perceptual box. Rather than showing you a way out of that box, look at the following conversation clara could potentially have with herself as her own therapist. Why are you so anxious about everything all the time? I don't know. Maybe it's my mother. She was always like that. Maybe I learned it from her.

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Why? I think I always wanted her approval or something. I think I wanted to be like her in many ways. So I unconsciously mimicked her. Why do you want to be like her? I think I grew up in that generation where little girls were kind of expected to be just like their mothers, and I actually did admire her in many ways. But I also think that there's a cultural expectation for women to be quite neurotic at times. You know, all the women around me were a bit like that. Why? I'm not sure.

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It's probably a social conditioning thing. Then again, it could be genes. Asking why seldom yields genuine why. Jokes aside, it's because you don't know the answer. For Clara, it's not really important where her anxiety comes from or who's to blame. She could write the above kind of material in a journal for an hour every day and still be no closer to being less anxious in everyday life. If you lack insight, chewing over the same bits of information over and over again will not magically create fresh insight. You'll simply reinforce all the same old assumptions, coming to faulty conclusions or going around in circles. What matters is what is happening, how and when. What matters is her scope of action to choose to do something different.

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It's useless to try to guess reasons, none of which can be proven or disproven, by the way. But it will be useful for Clara to get clear on what she wants and what concrete actions she can take right now. To bring her closer to that, be careful about churning psychological material round and round in your own head and convincing yourself that this somehow equates to making change, learning about yourself, or solving problems. As you can see in the conversation above, nothing new is learned and no shift in perception is achieved. The only thing such a dialogue can achieve is creating the illusion that you know yourself very well and are keenly on top of your own issue, while at the same time being as ignorant as ever and doing precisely zero to change the conditions of your life in real terms. The Miracle Question no matter what predicament you're currently facing, there is one particular question that's been shown to be pretty helpful in creating insight. Does the miracle question make miracles in therapy? It does for the therapist. The intervention can help find clients hidden strengths as well as new solutions to their problems. The miracle question opens doors to new possibilities because it essentially asks you to imagine what things would be like if things were different, better and problems were solved.

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This is a powerful question to ask because it focuses your mind not on the problem or on what isn't working, but on solutions, potentials and options. In solution focused therapy, the client imagines and talks about a world where all the current problems don't exist and every issue is already dealt with. What does that look like? Just imagining it can help unlock ideas that were previously hidden by a focus on the lack or difficulty in the present. The question can be asked in different ways. Assume your problem has been solved. What has changed? Assume your problem is gone. What does this mean to you? Suppose tonight, while you're sleeping, a miracle happens because you were asleep.

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You didn't note it happened, but everything you ever wanted is now there, and all your problems are gone. You now have your perfect life. When you wake up in the morning, how will you be able to tell that the miracle has happened? This last bit is important. How will you be able to tell that the miracle has occurred? What will you see, hear? Touch? What kind of person will you be? What are your thoughts, feelings? Actions?

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What would your world have to look like for you to wake up and encounter it in the morning and exclaim it's a miracle? What would other people see and notice for them to think the same thing? When you ask this question, really give yourself the time to answer it fully. Close your eyes and immerse yourself in a possible answer. Don't jump in with yes, but or reasons for why the miracle can't happen. Just assume it did. No matter how unlikely or crazy that seems to you right now. Become curious about what you notice after this miracle has completely come and gone. Be creative. If you can spend up to ten minutes doing this exercise and dwell on each detail, then what?

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Remember that we're not just asking questions for nothing. Our insight only counts if we channel it into useful, value driven, goal oriented behavior that makes our lives better. Let's look at how that could happen. Let's say Clara asks herself the miracle question and fleshes out a full answer. Clara is an anxious overthinker who can't help catastrophizing and assuming the worst outcome on zero evidence. Her core belief, if you remember, is something like the world can't be trusted, and I am not safe. She knows that. She's anxious. She imagines that one day she wakes up and a miracle has occurred. How would she know?

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She imagines herself relaxed, joyful, balanced. She really feels into this sensation of calm control, of feeling trust in herself and the world at large. It's quite a luxurious feeling. She knows a miracle has happened because when she encounters a stressful trigger, she doesn't care. It means nothing to her. In fact, she finds herself exploring all kinds of interesting new possibilities in this miracle world. If she truly miraculously felt safe in life, would she stay at her job? Stay with her boring but stable husband? She follows the visualization wherever it takes her. She would travel.

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She'd try new things and take more risks. She'd dress more creatively, take up painting, and be less afraid of speaking her mind in conversations. If she truly felt safe in herself and in the world, she realizes, she'd suddenly feel creative, inspired, curious how different life would look once she opens her eyes. It's time to put this understanding into practice. Clara now goes about her normal life again. But the next time she faces a stressful trigger or notices herself going into catastrophizing mode, she stops and asks, how would I behave if the miracle had happened? Then she does that. That's important. She needs to act, not just imagine. She's scrolling on her phone, a Kryptonite for anxious overthinkers, and stumbles upon a panic inducing news report about nuclear war.

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She can't help the automatic thought that pops into her mind the whole thing is hopeless. Sooner or later, humans are going to blow themselves to smithereens and there's nothing you can do about it. She looks at this thought and imagines how she would appraise it if the miracle had happened. Well, she'd feel a moment of stress, but then realize that there really isn't anything she can do, and that stressing about it won't change a thing. So why voluntarily stress? If she'd trust in herself and perhaps even in a higher power, she would put away her phone and decide to be grateful for her life to live right now, and to refuse to be guided by fear. If she wanted to, she could take conscious action that would work to reinforce her values, like donating to a refugee support program. Or maybe she'd go into the other room, hug her husband, and then carry on with creating the life she actually wants, like putting in a few hours of practice painting every morning, clara reminds herself of the miracle question and how it felt to be outside of her current problem of anxiety. Remember, it's not only a verbal or intellectual exercise. She's trying not only to think something different, but to really feel it.

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Every evening, she looks at how her thoughts, feelings and behaviors have changed. It will sound cheesy, but one day Clara will wake up and she will be living that miracle. The exercise will seem boring to her because she's no longer imagining anything. It's real. Part Two delving into the Shadows when most people experience uncomfortable emotions, they want to do one thing and one thing only get away from them. In fact, you may have picked up this very book with the unconscious expectation that it would relieve you from having to experience unpleasant feelings and take all of that away. However, this is the opposite of the mindset you need. As we saw above, what's required is a willingness to tolerate, accept, and be with emotions. All our emotions, no matter how uncomfortable they are, and without judgment. If you start to make awareness and self exploration a bigger part of your life, sooner or later you're going to encounter parts of yourself that you really, really don't like.

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Self therapy contains a kind of irony the process of improvement tends to bring more awareness to what isn't working, not less. However, our goal is not simply to numb ourselves or pretend away unpleasant truths. It's to genuinely improve, grow and heal. This is where the technique of shadow work comes into play. Carl Jung was the psychiatrist, author and theorist who first introduced the idea of the shadow. In simple terms, the shadow is our psychological blind spot. It contains everything that we can't see I, e. That is outside our awareness. Every person has a shadow, but the idea is that if we can acknowledge it, accept it, and integrate it back into our awareness as something that rightly belongs to us, we enjoy greater mental health, authenticity, creativity, energy, and maturity. If you engage in self therapy to any degree, you will bump up against the shadow at some point.

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How you deal with it makes all the difference in the world. When we're young, we have certain experiences that teach us that some parts of ourselves are acceptable and others aren't. In order to survive in the world and get our needs met, we unconsciously decide to disown those bad parts of ourselves and disidentify with them that we push them out of awareness. For example, our parents may tell us that our anger is bad and punish us when we yell or express frustration. So we put anger into the shadow. It hasn't gone anywhere, but we don't see it anymore. This dark side of our conscious awareness doesn't contain just bad things, by the way. We can also disconnect from and disown positive feelings, attributes, or thoughts. We may put into the shadow things like excitement, hope, silliness and so on, because of early experiences that taught us these things were bad. So what's the problem?

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Isn't it a good thing to section off the worst parts of ourselves? The trouble is that the shadow is never completely hidden. It still shows itself. However, it may do so in sneaky ways. Our shadow may express itself in strange behaviors we don't understand, in dreams, in slips of the tongue, or in behavior others can see but we don't ourselves recognize. Perhaps our anger comes out in passive aggressiveness. We may say, I'm the least angry person in the world, yet somehow others can feel the anger radiating off us anyway, it's because it's still there in the shadow. As long as we have a shadow, we'll remain at least partly unconscious of our deeper motivations and may be trapped in behaviors that are not good for us without really understanding why. On top of this, there's a sneaky phenomenon called projection, in which we end up incorrectly ascribing to others the feelings and thoughts we ourselves have but have disowned and relegated to the shadow. The classic example is the person who is being dishonest, but has pushed that fact out of awareness.

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This shadow seeps out, however, in the form of them constantly accusing others of hiding something or being dishonest. They're projecting when they say, the problem isn't in me, it's in you. In this way, what we are unconscious of can harm us. It can threaten our relationships, jeopardize our work, and weaken our potential. It can also leave us confused, immature, and fragile people who lack wisdom and self knowledge. The solution? Again, it's awareness. According to Jung, we improve our lives and heal when we integrate the shadow. That may sound like a good idea, but nobody wants to look at their shadow. Nobody wants to face up to the things they cannot face in themselves by definition.

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So how exactly do we see what we can't see? Let's explore a few fundamental techniques and look at how Nick, who you'll remember from the previous chapter, can apply them to his life. Recall that Nick is battling a lack of motivation, depression, procrastination, and an overall pessimistic and passive attitude to life. What do you think is in his shadow? Accepting The Shadow before going any further, be aware that what you don't want to do is continue to judge and condemn the bad parts of yourself. After all, this is precisely what caused it to be shoved out of awareness in the first place. No, we cannot be whole and integrate the shadow by heaping on more scorn or shame. Instead, we need to be curious, compassionate, and open minded. To engage our shadow, we need a few things. Patience, a genuinely accepting and nonjudgmental attitude.

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Honesty the willingness to be brave enough to face things we don't like about ourselves. Here are a few ways to do that. Technique one pay attention to your emotional reactions. Imagine someone has a drinking problem that they can't quite admit to themselves. In their shadow is everything they deny about themselves a lack of self control, frequent reckless behavior, even the habit of denial itself. They are unwilling to face up to the fact that they behave in ways they don't like when they drink too much, and are unwilling to accept the shame they feel because of it. In fact, they could go for years never acknowledging this problem. One day, this person notices themselves feeling extremely judgmental about a friend who smokes marijuana. They say it's totally irresponsible. Don't they care about what they're doing to their health?

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So reckless they obviously lack self control. I'm so disappointed in them. Others might be puzzled at this outburst. Why such a strong reaction? The answer probably lies in the person's shadow. Read through their thoughts again and you'll see that this is in fact what they think of themselves. The shadow can hide from awareness, but it often shows itself as judgment of others, or strong and disproportionate reactions that don't quite fit the situation at hand. In Nick's case, one day he hears about an old friend from middle school who he hasn't seen in years. He's told that this friend has made a real success of his life and is now happily married with a thriving business and two gorgeous kids. Nick hears this story and instantly finds himself angry and annoyed.

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He finds himself making snide comments about how this friend probably just got lucky. He dwells on the idea, mocking and dismissing his friend's success, even accusing him of being a fake or a sellout. When someone teases Nick and suggests that maybe he's just jealous, Nick blows up. Jealous of that idiot? No, thanks. At least I'm not some corporate moron who's happy to sell his soul. In fact, I pity him. Can you see? What's happened in Nick's shadow is everything that he sees as not a part of him. That means self esteem, pride and success.

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This friend sets Nick off because he reminds him of this disowned part of Nick who would prefer to think of himself as powerless and a bit of a victim. Imagine that what Nick says about this friend is actually what he himself is saying to that part of his psyche that represents competence, success, pride and mastery. His violent reaction to these things in someone else is evidence of just how unable he is to accept them in himself. In Nick's case, integrating the shadow would mean acknowledging that if the friend can do it, so can he. It would mean reconnecting with his own feelings of pride and success and admitting that living an impressive life is something that he does, in fact, want. It's a good idea to become aware of anything that seems to push your buttons and causes a reaction that's bigger than it should be. ParaTopics.txt Pathtofiles.txt PicList.txt PicMatch.txt Podcast.txt Podcast.txt.txt PodDate.txt PodTranscript.txt Prefix.txt PreviewEmbed.txt PreviewSocialURL.txt ProjectDuedate.txt ProjectSpecs.txt Project.txt PubdateChapByChap.txt Pubdate.mp3 PubdatePreview.txt Pubdate.txt your ears if you seem to have been triggered automatically by something and become curious why, what bothers you in others is often something you've disowned in yourself. Technique two embrace imperfection. While rage, jealousy and lust are all understandably relegated to the shadow, much of what we put there isn't really so bad when you think about it. The shadow may feel big and scary and overwhelming, but it's often like the monster under the bed when you peek to check there's nothing there.

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If you can learn to embrace flaws and imperfection and accept that you are a complex person with both good and bad qualities, then you weaken the power of the shadow. One way to do this is to consciously decide you will judge and condemn others less often. Hint to the extent you judge them, you also judge yourself. Another idea is to deliberately ask, what's so wrong with being a flawed human being? Here's an exercise to try. One identify the attributes, ideas, thoughts or feelings you most often judge in others. Two write them down I hate stupid people. Three now rephrase the sentences so they apply to you. I can be stupid sometimes. Four read through these new sentences and notice how you feel.

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Ask yourself, is it really the end of the world if they're true? Does it mean that you're not worthy of love or that you don't also possess good qualities? You may notice that the more forgiving you are about other people's stupid mistakes, the easier it is to accept occasional stupidity in yourself and vice versa. Five if you're having trouble, try to imagine a loved one who has that attribute yet whom you still adore and respect anyway. Maybe you realize that your pet Labrador is the stupidest being on the planet, but that doesn't stop them from also being the one you love the most. Imagine that you too are perfectly acceptable as you are, warts and all. Technique Three ask for Feedback your shadow is a bit like the back of your head. You can't see it, but it may be very visible to everyone else. Asking someone you trust and respect to help you see your blind spot takes some courage, but it's well worth it. Identify someone you believe knows you well.

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The last thing you want is ask someone who will accidentally project their own shadow onto you. Ask someone who themselves has been able to demonstrate emotional maturity and who'll be happy to help you look objectively at your shadow without bringing judgment into the equation. Since this may be a tall order, another option is to enlist the help of a therapist, counselor, or psychologist to help you work through the more sensitive parts of your shadow. They'll be able to hold you accountable while keeping a safe space that won't trigger more defensiveness in you. If both of these options are not feasible, you can always sit down and carefully consider the feedback you've already received from others. Can you find any themes or patterns in what you've been told by ex partners, old bosses or current ones, friends, family members, or even random people? You may already have been given heaps of feedback that consistently points to your shadow, only you haven't been courageous enough to take it fully on board. Notice if you repeatedly find yourself angry with people's appraisals of who you are. Again, it's about noticing disproportionate reactions and ask honestly if they may have a point. Think back to disagreements you may have had, or recall criticisms or advice others may have repeatedly given you.

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You may have dismissed it in the past, but could it be that others have said similar things? Could there be a pattern? The important thing about shadow work is that you're not trying to play Gotcha. You're not attempting to catch yourself out or punish yourself. If, on reflection, you notice that more than a handful of people have mentioned how over the top you can be at times. Just own and acknowledge that. Avoid getting lost in shame or embarrassment about it. Just accept it gracefully and be proud of yourself that you're able to be aware if that fails. One technique always works humor. Laugh at yourself a little.

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There I go again. What a drama llama I am. How do you put up with me? Shadow work is all about the unconscious mind, says Danielle Massey. LMFT she says that your shadow self might come out when you're upset in your relationships, or when you're feeling different levels of anxiety and depression. Rather than trying to flee this shadow when it rears its head, though, try to see it as an opportunity to learn something interesting about who you are. The next time a negative emotion arises in you, pause, become aware and become curious about what it might say about your shadow. And that's it for this episode of. The Science of Self. Be sure to sign up for our author's email list at bitly nicktretton.

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ry book today on this date in: 1822