GETTING TO KNOW YOURSELF

One might think that living with yourself and looking in a psychological mirror might be sufficient to 'know yourself'. Sadly it is not. There are so many factors to inhibit that process. Negative feedback from early childhood, inability to win approval from those who control you and on whom you depend, the ego defenses (of denial, repression, rationalization, etc), and one's biology are very integral to the formation of a self-concept. Add to that the amount of nurturing and early physical contact one might have had in preparation, or lack of it, for a good self image. All these elements contribute to the definition of who we are in our heads. If you throw in traumatic stress, it is like knocking out the underpinnings of any structure previously standing.

These facts are what explain why, a person being told how they shouldn't feel, what they should ignore, and that they should 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps', doesn't work. Eventually, just as one can quit smoking or drinking only when one makes a firm commitment to doing so, people can begin to form a new self-image. No matter how others may tell you how positively THEY see you, until your own self-image can be super-imposed on their impression of you, congruently, will things become clearer to you about who you really are.

Therapy helps pull people back into events that they experienced as children and have never moved away from that solidified-by-time memory of the experience. They blame themselves when they are blameless, they are feeling worthless because those they had thought of as omniscient and omnipotent didn't seem to find them lovable or sufficiently worthwhile to rescue. In therapy, when they can re-experience these memories as an adult, it occasionally becomes possible for these adult children to realize they were not to blame. They are not unlovable. They do not have to go through life hiding from the world. It is most gratifying to vicariously experience when that hood of blame, shame and guilt can be thrown off and acceptance of their lack of blame and guilt ceases to cause them shame.

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