I want to understand myself. Where do I begin?

“I want to understand myself” is one of the very frequent and rather vague requests that a psychologist hears. Usually, it means that the client is confused and does not understand themselves very well. The client feels a rather strong discomfort inside (with a weak one people rarely go to a psychologist) and at the same time, there are very few points of reference – where it is wrong, what exactly needs to be analyzed.

And we begin to refine, gradually narrowing the circle. It’s like at a doctor’s appointment when a doctor asks the patient: where does it hurt? How long has it been going on? And the pains are sharp or dull? Such is the process of diagnosing. And how would you diagnose without asking all these questions?

Alesha visited a psychologist with this very request – “how to understand myself”. And we begin to figure it out. The first thing we clarify is what happens in the client’s life in general – how they live, what fills it, who is present in their inner circle, and what priorities they have currently.

Alesha is 32. She has a good job – she is an architect. She is well respected at work, everything is good in this area of her life. She is not married but is dating a man. They have been together for two years. It seems that everything there is OK too. But Alesha complains that she does not understand herself. Everything is fine, but she does not feel happy: she often feels sadness and apathy… She can’t figure it out.

We continue to explore Alesha’s life. All is well, but there is sadness. It appears as if out of the blue, like a fly in the glass of chardonnay. We begin to explore the area of ​​her desires and needs.

What does she want? What is missing in her life? In passing, Alesha says that Paul, whom she loves very much, does not want to have children. Never. This is his principled position. To the question of whether she wants to have kids, Alesha replies after a brief hesitation that the main thing is love, and she and Paul have it. The rest is optional.

We immediately felt the zone of tension: there is a discrepancy between the desired and the actual. Somewhere Alesha is deceiving and misleading herself, trying to be happy and ignoring something very important.

During the subsequent conversation, it turned out that Alesha always wanted children. But she thinks that this would mean parting with Paul. So, she suppressed these desires and said to herself that “it’s perfectly fine not to have children”. This defense mechanism is called rationalization. It is this mechanism that she uses trying to convince herself that she does not want something that she does want. Hence apathy and sadness. And if you ignore them, life will skid like the wheels of a car in quicksand.

If you want to understand yourself and are ready for everything that you can uncover:

1. Start with your story: what and who you have currently in your life: what is important and what is not.

2. Clarify the zone of desires and needs: what you want and what you dream about.

3. Evaluate what is available and what is not available and not being planned.

4. Think about how you can introduce what is missing into your life.

When it is difficult to “understand yourself” – it almost always means tension in the zone of feelings, desires, and needs. This area is often well protected by psychological defenses, but it is quite possible to explore it. Sometimes this may require professional help.