Ten Ways to Know Yourself

How do you get to know yourself, to find yourself, to like or love yourself? You establish a foundation of self-respect and integrity. You ground yourself in your essential goodness, worthiness, and strength.

We can do this by becoming more attuned to the unconscious dynamics—drives, impulses, identifications, and conflicts—that shape our inner life. We need to break new ground in self-understanding, especially now to avoid being weak in the face of the world’s growing disruptions.

In this process, we learn of dynamics in our psyche that are indifferent and even hostile to our wellbeing. Vital self-knowledge strengthens self-regulation and makes us wiser. In this post, I provide ten examples, all interrelated, that illustrate the nature of this self-knowledge. This learning helps us to navigate the byways of life.

1. Become aware of the compulsion to experience inner fear. A new client of mine had a nighttime dream in which she felt fearful for her adult children. Yet in real life her children were safe and doing well. She acknowledged her fear, and added, “That’s what mothers do—they feel fearful about their children.” This comment was her attempt to rationalize her fear. I told her, “Your fear is not really about your children. Unconsciously, you are using your children as a means to recycle old unresolved fear within yourself. Everyone has some leftover fears from childhood, and these can be difficult to dislodge. If we don’t recognize the nature of this fear, we are fated to keep experiencing it. Unconsciously, you are using your children as a way to recycle your largely irrational inner fear.” We tend to experience in a distressful way whatever is unresolved within.
2. Watch for a fixation on injustice. Many people harp on the unfairness of life. They complain repeatedly or angrily about injustices, sometimes to the point of becoming cynical or even fatalistic. Sometimes they feel real or alleged injustice as it applies to their own circumstances. Other times they identify with the plight of people who they see as victims of injustice. Seeking remedies for injustice is commendable, of course, but many people become chronic complainers who unwittingly intensify their sense of weakness and helplessness through the feeling of being unable to rectify injustices. Or they indulge unconsciously in the powerlessness that they associate with the victims of injustice. Now their perceptions of life and sense of truth become more subjective.
3. Understand the psychological desire for certainty. Religious fundamentalists seek “the comfort” of certainty. Religious wars have been fought throughout history to protect the “truth” of one side’s certainty or to force that certainty on others. Some atheists relish the certainty of their disbelief, while many people on the political Left and Right brandish their version of certainty. Such certainty covers up underlying uncertainty and unresolved inner fear. The certainty is a desperate grasp for self-assurance. When we’re psychologically healthy (not neurotic), our childish, irrational fears dissipate. We now possess the inner strength to accept uncertainty. We now establish a healthy certainty, an emotional foundation in the pleasure of our goodness and integrity.
4. Understand the self-sabotage that arises through ignorance of one’s inner conflict. A major psychological flaw in human nature makes us suckers for grifters. We can see this in the gambling and sports-betting mania sweeping the nation. More and more of YouTube’s ads are for gambling sites. We succumb to the temptation to gamble because we’re prone to recycle and replay, as inner conflict, the sense of being weak versus strong—and bad or foolish versus good and wise. Problem gamblers deceive themselves into believing they are aggressive gamblers out to beat the system, though they’re driven by a compulsion to experience themselves through an inner conflict that accuses them of unworthiness and folly. They act out the conflict, which puts them at the mercy of fate. They set themselves up to be condemned by their harsh inner critic. This is how they encounter their dark side and are defeated by it. Self-sabotage is also widespread as people, unable to expose the dark side in themselves, vote for unscrupulous, self-seeking politicians.
5. Recognize the source of shame. A masculinity crisis is rampant among boys and young men. They can easily feel shameful when they’re failing to manifest assertiveness and power. Gone are the distinct roles experienced by previous generations, when male and female tasks, duties, and expectations were more clear-cut. Both men and women must become stronger to deal with this new orientation. We’re prone, for instance, to feel mesmerized and overwhelmed by digital technology’s instantaneous stimuli, even though much of it is trivial and misleading. We all must grow more insightful in order to recognize and overcome the inner passivity (a leftover weakness and defensiveness from childhood) that lingers in our psyche and produces guilt and shame when our inner critic alleges that we’re being weak and foolish.
6. Become aware of the compulsion to experience disappointment. Many of us are quick to feel disappointed in others. We focus on the imperfections of others, and we think we’re being objective when we feel this disappointment. But often the feeling arises because we had parents who we felt were disappointed in us. Or we might have resonated emotionally with parents who were disappointed in themselves and each other. A sense of disappointment lingers in us, and we tend to hide from our awareness our willingness to know ourself (identify with ourself) through this negative impression. This sense of inadequacy is a passive feeling, a disconnect from our better self. When we identify unconsciously with it, we easily get “hit up” with an unpleasant or painful self-doubt. But we hide from our awareness our affinity for this negative feeling by projecting the feeling onto others. We make them the source of our feeling of disappointment. We see them (or our environment) as disappointing rather than recognize our willingness to resonate emotionally with that negative feeling.
7. Be aware of your willingness to experience helplessness. Indecision and procrastination result from our unconscious willingness to experience ourselves through inner weakness. As mentioned, a major inner conflict is the conscious wish to feel strong versus the unconscious expectation of knowing oneself through weakness, self-doubt, and lack of self-regulation. People with addictions, cravings, and persistent desires are entangled emotionally in this helplessness. Through envy, people can desire intensely what they are unlikely to get. They want what they feel they are helpless to attain. Again, the inner conflict here is between the conscious wish to get and to feel strong versus the unconscious temptation to feel weak and helpless. Many people never break free from the misery of such inner conflict because they have no sense of its dynamics at play in their psyche.
8. See the passivity in digital streaming. We’re in danger of being overwhelmed by the power of digital technology as we react passively to it. When we study a subject, read an article or book, or listen to a podcast, we’re actively in pursuit of meaning, and we involve our intelligence to make sense of our experience. Not so with much of digital streaming, which can feed us as if we’re babies. When we stream digital content for hours on platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, we opt for the cheap thrills or amusement of a virtual reality rather than engage in what reality has to offer. Our level of functionality is diminished as we become mindless spectators mesmerized by trite allurements. We allow algorithms to determine our experiences, sense of reality, and even sense of self. We’re bewitched by the “magic” of technology until our passivity becomes an intoxicating mindlessness. We are sucked into this mindless void of passive reactivity, weakening our sense of agency and citizenship.
9. Understand how inner fear threatens democracy. Many people in America are anxious and fearful about the undermining of democracy and the prospect of looming authoritarianism. Of course, it’s appropriate to be concerned. But the more fearful we are, the more likely we are entangled emotionally in feelings of being helpless, overwhelmed, and defeated. Through inner conflict, we anticipate being controlled, overruled, and at the mercy of situations or other people. Through inner conflict, we anticipate the feeling of oppression. Inner conflict is, after all, a battle to escape the tyranny of the inner critic or superego. Inner fear arises, and it serves as a psychological defense that denies our hidden willingness to submit to inner tyranny and thereby experience a curtailment of freedom. We’re talking here about an unconscious willingness to forgo freedom to become, like children, dependent on overseers who tell us what to do, how to behave, what to believe, and even what or who we are. These psychological impairments undermine our better self and the effect of our citizenship.
10. See the dynamics behind impatience. Many feel anxious and stressed by their impatience. They feel forced to submit to the indifferent pace of time or change, or powerless to make things happen. Impatience can arise as our inner critic mocks us for our real or alleged lack of achievement. We might claim at such times that our impatience is “proof” we’re desperate to make progress. Impatience is both a a symptom and a defense: It implies we do want to hurry things along, yet it covers up our willingness to remain conflicted between feelings of strength and being at the mercy of time. Impatience can serve as ploy that denies our receptivity to an inner critic that nags at us because we’re supposedly not getting things done fast enough. As we unconsciously use the “slow pace” of time to replay and recycle our emotional entanglement in a sense of weakness, we produce punishment (guilt and shame) that passively accommodates the inner critic’s claims against us.

In summary, these ten examples of our psyche’s vagaries expose our willingness (or compulsion) to know ourself, to identify with ourself, through inner weakness and inner conflict. Through psychological resistance, we stubbornly hold on to our familiar, limited sense of self because it feels so much like our essence. This unconscious resistance arises largely from our ego, our shadow self, which wants to be felt as our essence.

Be kind to yourself through your transition from inner weakness to inner strength. If you let your inner critic get away with scolding or mocking you for being weak or being too slow in your progress, your inner passivity is enabling your inner critic. We’re challenged here to develop an awakening consciousness that can recognize and then bypass inner passivity’s fear and defensiveness while neutralizing the inner critic’s cruel irrationality.