Awareness – Skilled Helpers Collaborative

Awareness is multifaceted and can be dealt with in many ways and at many levels. Given, that I tend to focus on how things, situations, circumstances, events and relationships impact me directly, I would like to approach awareness through a personal lens and how it relates to individual egocentricity.

We navigate our personal lives via many dimensions – the spiritual, physical, material, personal, interpersonal etc. We are each endowed with capabilities, strengths, shortcomings, the will to act, minds to think and heart through which we express. As such humans have a lot going on to make sense of both within ourselves and our perceived reality. Compound this with rapid stages of growth – life appears very demanding.

The process by which we try to make sense of our lives in a way ties into awareness, in particular, Self-awareness.

Self-awareness explains my current state, my past and a possible future like nothing else does.

Growing awareness has helped me understand myself better – what I know about myself, what I don’t know about myself, what others seem to know about me and what I still need to discover about myself, which is referred to as the shadow.

A considerable amount of my time is spent focusing on how to increase my self-awareness and consequently I have also questioned how egocentricity plays into this type of relentless inward focus.

After all, if I focus so much of my time and energy on myself, isn’t that highly ego-centric?

If we really think about it, each of us is highly egocentric. We are all always thinking about ourselves all the time. Whether it be in relation to our individual story, work, relationships, time, efforts, focus, purpose, goals and visions. It stems from a need to make sense and meaning of our lives. Even when we are helping another, it is because at some level it offers us a sense of purpose and value. Towards this end, we are able to share ourselves with other people too. When we are focused on creating a vision for our lives and accomplishing goals, it offers us the sense that we are using our time and resources usefully. We can adequately justify our focus as helping others but at a fundamental level it is tied to us. We cannot take ourselves out of the equation, however hard we try.

So, if we are ego-centric in that we focus on ourselves at an individual level, where does self-awareness fit in?

My investigations have led me to believe it offers a healthier way of dealing with our egocentricity. From one perspective, it helps us to come to terms with who we are and how we can change for the better and balance our needs with the needs of others.
Without self-awareness, we are consumed by our egocentricity. Within this perspective, we are unable to differentiate our needs with those of others and we might be very well helping ourselves at the expense of others. This might be underpinning our behavior however altruistic our actions and motivations might appear to be on the surface. We are driven by a need to meet our own needs above all else.

Let us now consider what lies at the other end of self-awareness – it is self-deception. Self-deception is a common ego-based defensive mechanism that we employ automatically to survive from our earliest days. In having to deal with challenging situations, our defensive strategies come into play and we learn to cope. Given we all possess an ego that is a defensive structure we learn ways to deal with life as it is presented to us. This form of dealing might not necessarily be the most effective for our overall wellbeing.

We learn to pretend and learn helplessness. We learn how to manipulate and get our way with others. We pretend to be okay even when we are not. We suppress our feelings even when it is dangerous to hold onto unwanted emotion. Each of us within our individual circumstances use our readily available defensive mechanisms to function and cope. Over time, such seemingly innocent and common processes lead to our habitual patterns. We soon become unconscious to our maladaptive strategies and fall into a form of self-deception. We deceive ourselves in believing coping is thriving and being okay is all there is. We maintain our lives by putting on all sorts of masks to survive, cope and fit in. As we grow older the patterns of self-deception are so automatic, we don’t even realize we are using them. We just begin to accept many of these strategies as part of our personality.

So, what is holding us together withiin a false sense of security is self-deception that offers us the promise of survival.

As humans we also come with a whole lot of needs, wants and desires. Equipped with an egocentric structure and self-deception in place we go about getting our needs met. When we live in self-deception we do not recognize how much we remain shut off from ourselves.

I use the example of the popular model called “The Drama Triangle” to demonstrate how self-deception blinds us. The model highlights three roles we might readily adopt to get our needs met. The victim who is being victimized, the villain who victimizes. The villain does this by denying the needs of the victim or taking advantage in some way. Then, the rescuer who satisfies his/her own need for being useful by keeping the victim in need of them. It is when we are facing life’s challenges that we are most often in survival mode. The challenge might be stressful and beyond our current capability to handle…and without realizing it we step into one of these three roles.

Within certain contexts, we behave like a victim, in others we behave as a villain, and yet in some others we play the rescuer. The drama in our everyday lives is the consequence of us being driven by the play of our own egocentricity tied to self-deception, in trying to get our needs met, along with life’s/other’s pressing demands.

The alternative to self-deception, is self-awareness. By noticing our self-deception and thereby increasing self-awareness we are giving ourselves the opportunity the shift from egocentricity to what I consider as ego-centeredness.

Ego-centeredness is a term I use to describe when we can stay focused on ourselves in order to discover the many ways, we are self-deceptive. It offers us the promise of living instead of coping and pretending.

Among so many other things, awareness helps us understand how we are wired, our default tendencies, habitual patterns, deeper motivations, emotional baggage, drivers, challenges, the choices we make, decision-making strategies, the needs we want to meet both for ourselves and others and so much more.

Life without a doubt can be periodically challenging, and we each have to grow up fast. And so, we do. However, we not only grow up fast we also land up moving fast. In moving fast, we think fast, in thinking fast we cope and do not pause to consider the ramifications of coping. We don’t realize the importance of slowing down and holding space for ourselves to really understand what is driving us outside our conscious awareness. In moving fast, we act from our habitual unexamined patterns that have come into existence based on our past conditioning, inherited world views, and self-deceptive egocentric defensive strategies.

Born in egocentricity we unconsciously perpetuate drama because it helps us get our needs met. The problem remains when we do not become mindful and pay attention to ourselves in a manner that questions and examines the self-deception that has come to run our lives.

What might offer some resolution to many of our personal dilemmas is a reorientation to ego-centered self-awareness.

From a place of ego-centeredness we can hold more space for ourselves. We can slow down and consider all that we are and have become and what we are capable of becoming. We can engage with our own life using a truly unifying perspective.

This unifying perspective that self-awareness offers, speaks to me like this: “me, my needs, you, your needs…and I don’t have to meet my needs at your expense, because I am willing and capable of meeting my own needs”. This unifying perspective that seems to grow with self-awareness also functions to reduce much of the unnecessary everyday drama.