Personal Discovery: Defining the Relationship with Self Part 1

Before we can examine our relationships with others, we must understand our relationship with ourselves. Every relationship we have consists of ourselves and another person. As we are the ones that have spent the most time with ourselves throughout our lifetime, it is fair to say that in every relationship, we should be able to understand ourselves more than the other person. But, sometimes, that’s not true. We spend so much time trying to figure out how another person ticks that we neglect to find out how we ourselves work.

“The sky has never been the limit. We are our own limits. It’s then about breaking our personal limits and outgrowing ourselves to live our best lives.” – Author Unknown.

When we are asked to define ourselves to others, we often come up with the labels that we most associate with ourselves. We use these labels as a way to explain the person we are to others in a way that others automatically understand, using them to evaluate each other quickly, to fit each other into specific patterns of action and reaction in face-to-face interactions. With each label comes a sort of mutual understanding of what each label means in the context of the social situation with all the accompanying connotations and references inherent in them. Even from a very young age, we are often judged using these labels. As a result, we also begin to judge ourselves by these labels. Think back to your early schooling. How many times were we told to line up according to height? Or are split up into boys or girls group and told to play separately? These labels are reinforced over and over in our daily lives and we get so used to ourselves as defined by them that we actually change the way we think and treat ourselves.

There was a study on college-aged women who were asked to take a standardized mathematics examination. They were randomly split into two groups. Half were led to believe that the test showed gender differences, implying the stereotype that women did more poorly than men. Those led to believe this did poorly on it compared to the men taking the exam. The other half, who was told nothing except that it was a math exam, did equal to the men taking the exam. Why? Because they had this pre-existing notion inside of them that said women did not do as well at mathematics as men. This is simply not true and yet, they felt this to be true and so in turn, affected their own reality to match their feelings. They handicapped themselves subconsciously.

How do we define ourselves automatically? How are we affecting our own lives, our own thoughts, and our own actions subconsciously? In order to determine this we need to determine not only the labels we associate with ourselves but also which are important to our particular mindset.

Activity:

Pretend you are a private detective hired to find out information about yourself. Compile a dossier of facts that is public information or part of public record: height, weight, ethnicity, hair color, eye color, number of siblings, address, marital status, hometown, occupation, etc. Just list them all out. Then go through each one and think through them carefully:

• What does this fact mean to you?

• How does this fact affect the way other people look at you?

• How does this affect the way you look at yourself?

• If this fact were to change, would you change the way you react to situations? Would you change the way you perceive yourself? Would you have more or less confidence in yourself? Why?

Don’t worry, sometimes, a fact does not affect us at all. In that case, move on to the next one. Not everything will be important to us. The key is to find the ones that are. }

Labels have associations and connotations related to them and when applied to an entire group of people, they become stereotypes. We can become so focused on how others stereotype us; we don’t realize that we can stereotype ourselves just as much. It can be easier to act out the stereotypes especially when we are uncertain about whom we are ourselves. They become the patterns of our own behavior, no matter whether it is functional or dysfunctional. The important thing is to be mindful of them, to be aware that we are following these patterns and to be aware whether this is beneficial to us.

What deserves even more focus are false labels we put on ourselves. These are labels that we identify with but are not really who we are. An extreme example of this are people who have anorexia who believe that they are too fat and act accordingly by extreme dieting even though they are in reality, causing themselves to become too skinny.  One way of identifying false labels is to talk to a trusted close friend who will tell you the truth, no matter what, and have a conversation with them about what qualities you have as a person.  This can be an enlightening albeit uncomfortable experience.  Another way is to delve into your self-reflections and use the process to find what qualities you truly believe yourself to have and using objective qualifications to truly identify whether these qualities are correct.  For example, if you believe yourself to be unintelligent, find what you determine to be an objective way to measure intelligence and then test yourself according to that.  The danger of using false labels is they still affect us in a very real way. They can still change the way we perceive ourselves or affect our patterns of behavior to something that may be untrue in reality but true to our own minds, an illusion. No matter the false label, we need to discover what is the important motivation behind it. This allows us to see what we are hiding behind our false labels for. The motivations, themselves, are true to us so we need to figure out ways to refocus these motivations into other avenues of expressing themselves that ring truer to our real self.