The Examined Life — Why Therapy Can Help Everyone
Thousands of years ago, a man dressed in blue cloth and leather sandals walked the streets of Athens when it was at the height of its power. With a wild mane and beard, the recognisable Socrates spoke to all, questioning everything and pursuing knowledge until he was put on trial. He would debate with those in the Acropolis and converse with those in the Agora. When found guilty of corrupting the minds of the youth, he had a choice. Exile or death. He chose death and spoke his famous dictum, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’
For Socrates, he had examined himself. He knew who he was and was happy with the life he had led. Therefore, death did not scare him. So, choosing to die rather than go into exile, felt like an easy choice for him. His life was complete because he knew himself. And that is a Socratic message that has seeped down through the millennia: Know thyself.
Step into Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is popping up everywhere. It is a new buzzword that you hear on business podcast after business podcast. Self-help writers, content creators, and high-performance podcasters discuss self-awareness all the time. Psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund proposed the following definition, ‘Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards. If you’re highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behaviour with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.’
The great essayist, Michel de Montaigne is seen as one of the most self-aware people in history through his work of personal essays. He says, ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’ Both Socrates and Montaigne are discussing the importance of self-awareness. Yet I don’t want to talk about self-awareness in the same way that high-performers or businesspeople do. An opening paragraph in the Harvard Business Review (obviously a publication for business) says the following on self-awareness, ‘Research suggests that when we see ourselves clearly, we are more confident and more creative. We make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. We’re less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. We are better workers who get more promotions. And we’re more-effective leaders with more-satisfied employees and more-profitable companies.’ All that sounds positive, yet for me, being more self-aware is fundamentally about being healthier mentally. That should be the priority with any business or career benefits being extras.
Life is hard work
Read any philosopher or Jordan Peterson or most of literature and there is an underlying truth that life is hard work. It is described as life as constant suffering. Constant struggle. My teenage years and my twenties have felt like that. I had a battle of sexuality and suicidality in my teens and a complete job meltdown in my mid-twenties. It has always felt like there was something. That doesn’t mean that all things in life are suffering and struggle, but that it is always a part of it.
Self-awareness is a way of helping travel through such struggles. There is a stoic idea that the obstacle is the way. Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, ‘Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ By becoming more aware of ourselves and our character, we can see ways to adapt or accommodate. We are not stopped by obstacles but are able to find a way around, over or through them.
Yet if we choose not to grow or learn, then we become stagnated. Blind to ourselves. Unable to see our strengths nor our weaknesses. We become a ghost to ourselves. Unable to recognise our authenticity and instead risk being corrupted by the ideas and values of others. Then we judge our worth by how we gain acceptance, positive regard and love from others, rather than judging ourselves worthy by the nature of our existence.
When I was younger, I believed that to be loved and accepted, I needed to be straight. I had taken on the values of the Catholic Church and being young and unaware, I could not see the damage that did me. Yet through that struggle, I grew in self-awareness and realised that my authenticity was worth more than the acceptance and positive regard of the Church. That only came through growing in self-awareness.
Therapy — Method of exploration
In the UK, there is an idea that therapy is only for those who are mentally unwell. To go to therapy, you must have anxiety or depression or bipolar or suicide ideation or trauma. I held this belief when I was struggling with my mental health. I referred myself to Minds Matter for some basic six-week IAPT therapy. As a psychotherapist, I work with people who have a wide range of mental health issues or have deep trauma. Therapy can be a brilliant method of healing. Yet that isn’t all it can be for.
Therapy is a safe method of exploring who you are. You can do it in a safe space, one on one with a trained therapist, who is bound by confidentiality and an ethical standard. It gives you a sense of permission to finally explore the parts of yourself that wider society wishes to keep quiet or unexplored. You can explore the relationships you have with your parents, your family, friends and romantic partner(s). In truth, there is no limit to what you can explore in therapy if you are willing to take the risk and look deep into yourself. Carl Rogers, the father of Person-Centred Psychotherapy once said, ‘The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.’ He means that by becoming self-aware of who you are, you then have a chance to change and develop into your authentic self. It is known as self-actualising or becoming the most genuine version of yourself.
I am a therapist who sees a therapist. Each week, I spend an hour exploring myself. For me to do good work with my clients, I need to be aware of my stuff. It goes beyond my anxiety or my depression. I explore all aspects of my life. I talk about my ego. Explore my creativity and where I want to go with it. Discuss how I feel about psychotherapy and what I might choose to do with it in the future. I examine my relationships, how the Pandemic has affected them and what I want from them moving into the future.
The key part is that you are given a space where you are empathised with and feel free of the judgements you might experience in the rest of your life. A therapist should not be telling you what is right or wrong or how to feel. They do not live your life. Only you can fully understand and appreciate your lived experiences. A therapist is there to travel alongside you as an active passenger as you explore and examine your life.
Final Note
As mentioned before, therapy is seen as a treatment for mental health only. And if that is how you see it, then I’d like you to consider this. Therapy can be a preventative measure as well as a treatment. Treatment as a therapist can sometimes feel reactive. I am helping my clients after the fact. But sometimes, I have clients who feel they want to get ahead of any potential mental health concerns. They use therapy to prevent a worsening of their mental health. They strengthen and widen their sense of self-awareness allows them to cope with the harsher realities of life.
Take some time. Consider it. Find the right therapist for you (we aren’t all right for everyone, trust me). When I speak about being a therapist, people feel a need to justify why they aren’t in therapy. They speak of feeling as if they don’t need help. They don’t have anything to explore. That they have their stuff sorted. I don’t see it like that. I see it as a chance to meet and give yourself a chance of living, as Socrates called it, an examined life.
