Know yourself

More than twenty-five centuries ago, Thales of Mileto affirmed that the most difficult thing in the world is to know oneself. And on the temple of Delphi, one could read that famous Socratic inscription – gnosei seauton: know thyself—which recalled a similar idea.

To know oneself well is a primary and important step in order to learn how to direct one’s own life, and perhaps that is why it has been posed as such a great challenge for man through the centuries.

The observation of oneself allows us to separate oneself a bit from our own subjectivity, in order to see ourselves from a certain distance, as the painter does now and then when he steps back to see how his work is going.

To observe oneself is like rising above what is happening to us in the moment, in order to have a better awareness of how we are and what is happening to us. For example, it is a very different thing to be very angry and nothing more… or to be very angry but also aware that one is annoyed; that is, to have the reflexive awareness that tells us, “Watch what you’re doing, because you’re very angry.”

To be aware of our own emotional state is the first step towards the control of our own sentiments.

A good understanding of what is happening to us can have a powerful effect on upset feelings that can invade us, and offers us the opportunity to strive to overcome ourselves and not to abandon ourselves at the mercy of the feeling.

—But there are many people who are aware that they are going through a negative emotional state, and nevertheless, they are not able to get out of it.

Yes, there are, without a doubt. They are people who often feel hijacked by their own feelings, and they realize that they are pessimistic, bad-humoured, susceptible, or depressed, but they consider themselves incapable of coming out of that state. They are aware of their situation, but in a vague way, and it is precisely their lack of perspective on those sentiments that makes them feel overwhelmed and lost. They think that they can’t govern their emotional life and that is why they do nothing effective to get out of the hole they find themselves in.

There are other people who are somewhat more aware of what happens to them, but their problem is that they tend to passively accept those sentiments. They are inclined towards negative moods, and they limit themselves to accept them with resignation, with an attitude of giving up, of letting themselves be carried along by them, and they don’t try to change them in spite of how much it bothers them to bear it.

—And do you think then that in reality they are not so aware of what is happening to them?

Exactly. The people who perceive their sentiments with true clarity achieve a more developed emotional life. They are more autonomous people, more secure, more positive; and when they fall into a negative mood, they don’t go over it obsessively, nor do they accept it in a passive way, but they are able to confront it and thanks to that, they don’t take long to get out of it. Their equanimity in their self-knowledge helps them to address their problems incisively, and to govern their affective life efficaciously.

Observe your own behavior and the behavior of others

Self-knowledge is a key point for the formation and educatoin of character and of the sentiments of a given person. Besides, that ability to know what really happens to us and why it happens is very related to our capacity to understand others well. In this sense, it is very useful to develop the capacity of observing the behavior of others and of oneself. Literature, or the movies, for example, can teach a great deal about ourselves and others, especially when the authors have a deep understanding of the human spirit and know how to reflect well about what happens in the interior of people.

—But to foster so much interest in self-knowledge seems dangerous. Couldn’t it lead to individualism and introversion?

Naturally, we are not talking about developing a desire for morbid psychological introspection, but of trying to know ourselves, to avoid living with oneself as with a stranger.

Knowing oneself well doesn’t lead one to close up in one’s own subjectivity, but to see oneself with as much objectivity as possible.

And this helps, among other things, to combat the instability of spirit that is produced when a person lets himself be carried away by his imagination: sometimes digressing into dreams and fantasies, at other times, tending to overestimate one’s own possibilities, and at other times, staying at the mercy of pessimism or indecision, underestimating one’s capacities when the circumstances seem unfavorable.

Emotional awareness is very intense in some people, while in others it is much more moderated. There are people, for example, who react to dangerous situations with amazing serenity. Others, on the other hand, can be very affected for a few days simply because someone took their pen or because their favorite team lost a game in the football playoffs.

—It seems as if you are saying that it’s a negative thing to experience intense emotions.

There is no reason why it should be that way. The excess of emotional sensitivity can lead us to affective storms (positive or negative, of exaltation or depression), and that has many risks. But neither can one say that coldness and detachment are any sort of ideal state.

In order to facilitate self-knowledge, it is useful to analyze the multiple elements that interact in our life. It is logical that, through the years, some of those facets can go through moments of greater or lesser conflict. There are painful situations that can have their origin in professional questions (difficulties in obtaining or maintaining a particular professional level, problems of understanding between managers and colleagues, failures due to one’s own fault or to the superiority of the competition, situations of work stoppage or of labor unrest, etc.). There can also be difficulties of health that limit our capacity in a short-term or long-term way, and that can be accompanied by serious physical or psychological suffering. There are affective problems that daily life with others brings about (differences of criteria between a married couple, or between parents and children, etc.). And then there are all the specific problems that can arise from life at school, from beginning a new career, from the loss of health, or the arrival of old age, etc.

And just as, for example, a concrete health problem, even if it is localized in a specific part of the body, can end up producing a generalized feeling of illness in the whole person, so too, a grave problem in any facet of life—for example, in one’s professional life or in the family—can produce an effect that transcends that facet and provokes other problems in a chain reaction: character disorders, shyness or aggressivity in relation with others, or even—when the problems are important—a tendency towards specific illnesses.

This is why, if the necessary maturity and self-knowledge are lacking, some problems of one facet of life end up blamed on another area of life, which in reality has nothing to do with it, or at least, has very little to do with it. In this way, a person can blame her husband or her children or her parents for the frustration that she feels, when in reality, that feeling is caused primarily by a problem at work, or by a simple affective immaturity. Or, she might think that her professional situation is the reason why she feels unsatisfied, when in reality it’s because she is not accepting the natural loss of her abilities or of her health, which might be getting worse because of age or because of the mood cycles that she goes through. Or, she can blame everything on certain faults of the people she lives with, when the real problem is actually that her own character is becoming more rarefied with time.

People—or at least, the majority—tend to project outside of ourselves the solutions to the problems we experience. We often put the blame on others for almost all of the bad things that happen to us. An important part of self-knowledge is to be forewarned about the presence of this subtle deception. It is certain that outside situations can always help us to resolve and overcome our problems, but we should not dismiss—neither totally nor partially—the extremely wide margin of responsibility that we have for the majority of the things that happen to us in life.

Neither should it be forgotten that laziness—with all the interior burden it can come to have in our life—tries to lead us by the law of minimum effort. For that reason, when we feel a sense of reluctance and apathy about facing a task that we know will be costly, we have to clearly identify its origin and recognize it for what it is: a reasonable tiredness that calls for rest, or perhaps a form of laziness that we have to overcome. But we should not mistakenly interpret the reluctance as a lack of aptitude, nor the ordinary difficulties as an accumulation of misfortunes or of malicious schemes engineered against us, because that would be a sad way of fooling oneself.

—But sometimes one faces problems that have no easy solution.

Then it is precisely a matter of seeking reasonable ways to solve those problems, at least as far as we are able. There will be occasions in which we can only try to decrease the negative consequences and learn to overcome them: for example, in the case of chronic illnesses, or big economic or professional failures whose solution lies outside our reach, or serious problems relating to people that we have to deal with, etc.

—And how does one distinguish between what ought to be overcome and what we should try to change?

A profound and accurate knowledge of oneself, confirmed by the attentive observation of one’s external behavior and internal reactions, enriched by the advice of those who know and appreciate us, will allow us to identify the true origin of the disturbances that we inevitably experience throughout our lives.

That’s how we will make good progress towards emotional maturity, which is a world away from those arrogant affirmations of some people (“I still think exactly the same as I have always thought,” as if the best proof of lucidity was never to change one’s way of thinking), and equally far from that variability of those who constantly change their ideals and forget their convictions as if they were a small virus that came and went, or as if the passing of the years gave them no stable lessons that they could return to.

Discern your own sentiments

Self-knowledge is an open process that never ends, because life is like an incomplete symphony which is constantly being created, which can always be surpassed, and which therefore demands constant attention.

Self-knowledge is the door of truth.

When it is lacking, one cannot be sincere with oneself, as much as one wants to be. To want to see what happens to us—and to want it in truth, with full sincerity—is the decisive point. If that is lacking, we can live like we are surrounded by a cloud, and perhaps our own imagination can hide the realities that are really bothering us.

Because to look for escapes when one doesn’t want to look inside oneself is the easiest thing in the world. There are always exterior causes to blame, and that’s why it requires a certain courage to accept that the guilt, or the responsibility, is perhaps our own, or at least a good part of it. That personal courage is essential to make progress on the path of truth, although at times it can be a path that can be very costly to climb.

Not to perceive one’s own sentiments with equanimity is easily to remain at their mercy.

There are sentiments that flow in an almost unconscious way, but which are not any less important. For example, a person who has had a disagreeable meeting can afterwards remain irritable for hours, feeling bothered by the smallest trifles and responding in a sharp way to the slightest insinuation. That person can be very little aware of her susceptibility, and even surprised—and newly bothered—if someone makes her aware of it, although for the other people around her it is quite obvious that her behavior is due to those sentiments that are boiling in her interior as a consequence of that disagreeable meeting she had earlier on in the day.

A good part of our emotional life takes a while to emerge to the surface.

There are sentiments that do not always cross the threshold of consciousness. Recognize them allows us to push back the frontier of our fully conscious sentiments, and that always presupposes a powerful means to allow us to improve.

Once we become aware of which are the true sentiments that are fighting to get to the surface of our consciousness, we can evaluate them with greater accuracy, decide to leave some to one side and encourage others, and in this way, act on our vision of things and on our mood. In this we show, among other things, that we are intelligent beings.

Whoever knows himself well can rely on his strong points in order to work on his weak points, and in this way, correct them and improve them.

It’s like an intense light that illuminates their lives and lets them make the right choices in the crucial moments, from the simplest decisions of daily life to the truly important ones.

—You mentioned something earlier about “not wanting to see”. In what sense?

There are many ways of evading reality, and they are almost always produced in a semi-unconscious way by the protagonist.

Some people, for example, talk themselves into things by rationalizing their actions. “Let me enjoy that, and later I’ll see what I’m doing” (where “that” can be some form of egoism, laziness, or escape from reality). They don’t seem to realize up to what point that error can start gaining ground in their lives and obscuring the slight relief that it temporarily produces.

There are others who deceive themselves with the reasonings of a spoiled child who prefers to stay locked in her room, bored and alone, counting her grievances and the reasons why she is anger, even though she knows it would be better to overcome her anger and come out. She prefers to remain sad in her disgrace so as not to confront her own obstinacy.

Others are like that type of person who anxiously pursues pleasure, and who experiences the gradual lessening of his relief. He knows that that path will not bring him a high degree of satisfaction, but he prefers to follow after that insatiable need, because it frightens him to see himself deprived of it.

“Our heart,” Susanna Tamaro has written, “is like the earth, which is partly in sunlight and partly in shadow. To go down in order to know it well is very difficult, very painful, for it is always arduous for us to accept that one part of ourselves is in shadow. Besides, against that painful discovery, many defenses set themselves against it in our interior: pride, the presumption of being the indisputable masters of our own life, the conviction that reason is enough to fix everything. Pride is perhaps the greatest obstacle: that is why we need so much courage and humility in order to examine ourselves in depth.”

Knowing how to express what we feel

“The tears were gathering in my eyes,” thought Ida, the protagonist of the at novel by Mercedes Salisachs, “and it was difficult to avoid them.”

“I reproached myself afterwards for my lack of vision, that cursed silence that always dominated our after-dinner conversations, that obsession of always keeping our thoughts and worries for ourselves.”

“If at least my daughter would have let show even a little of what was happening to her… If she had only come to me so that I could help her… But no. Keep silence; that was what we all did. To cover the most pustulent boils with healthy skin. It is horrible. Now I understand that I did not know my daughter.”

Some people have been educated in such a way that they often hide their feelings in a habitual way. They feel an excessive modesty to express what they really think or what really worries them, and they resist showing emotion or affection. Perhaps they desire to speak, but they are stopped by a barrier of shyness, of embarrassment, of false respect, of pride. Of course, some sentiments and feelings are only exteriorized within a certain degree of intimacy, and require a certain reserve, but to silence them always, or to cover them with apparent indifference hinders affective development and leads, among other things, to an important loss in the capacity to recognize and express one’s own sentiments.

Many emotional imbalances have their origin in the fact that those persons do not know how to show their own sentiments, and that has led them to educate them in a deficient way. When they speak of themselves, they find it very difficult to say something specific about whether they feel good, bad, or very bad. It is difficult for them to speak of those questions, and they have recourse to a highly reduced emotional vocabulary. It is not that they don’t feel; it is that they do not know how to discern well what is stirring in their interior, nor how to translate it into words. They ignore the deeper cause at the bottom of their problems. They perceive their emotions as a disconcerting bunch of tensions that make them feel good or bad, but they are not able to explain what type of good or bad it is that they feel.

That emotional confusion makes us catch an inkling of the greatness of the power of language, and understand that when we manage to express what we feel in words, we are taking a big step towards the control of our sentiments.

Reflecting on sentiments

It has always been said that if we don’t understand something well, the best thing we can do is try to start explaining it. For example, a professor often experiences the difficulty of making his students understand the most complex parts of a subject. Nevertheless, in the measure that the class advances in its development, and those concepts are faced over and over again from different perspectives, the ideas start to become more clear, and small and great illuminations come out, as much for the students as for the professor himself.

So, a good way to advance in the education of sentiments is to think, read, and speak about sentiments. As we do so, our ideas become more clear, and they will grow ever more precise and accurate. And we will gain an ever improving knowledge of what happens in our interior, in order to, in order later to try to explain it, to seek its causes, its laws, its regularities, and finally, to try to pull out some overall idea in order to improve our affective education.

The themes can be quite varied. Before, we have spoken, for example, of how we tend to cast the blame on others for all the bad things that happen to us, and of that other tendency to project our own defects onto others.

In both cases, we’re dealing with phenomena that, as often happens with everything related to the knowledge of people, can be seen more easily in others than in oneself. It is not difficult, for example, to see a very selfish person who complains about the selfishness of other people and says that nobody helps her. One might also see another person who is always complaining, but who always protests that the others are complaining; or an exhausting talker who accuses another person of talking too much; or an irascible man who denounces the ill humor of others.

Just by forewarning ourselves against these two errors—and at bottom, they are very similar—we can make great progress in this important task of self-knowledge. It is a matter of trying to see the good things in others, which there always are, and to learn from them. And when we see their defects (or something that seems like a defect to us), to stop and think whether those same defects are not also present in our own lives.

We will improve ourselves by trying to know what are our dominant defects.

In order to make it more concrete, we can consider some defects related to the education of sentiments:

• Shyness, fear of social relations, timidity;
  
• Irascibility, susceptibility, exaggerated tendency to feel offended;
  
• Tendency to dwell excessively on worries, to take refuge in solitude or in an excessive reserve;
  
• Perfectionism, rigidity, dissatisfaction;
  
• Lack of capacity to give and receive affection;
  
• Nervousness, impulsiveness, mistrustfulness;
  
• Pessimism, sadness, bad moods;
  
• Paying recourse to simulation, faking it, lies, or deception;
  
• Tendency to create discord, to be fastidious, to take the opposite point of view; stubborness;
  
• Excessive self-indulgence before one’s own mistakes; difficulties controlling onself in eating, drinking, use of tobacco, etc.;
  
• Tendency to take refuge in fantasy and daydreams; difficulty fixing one’s attention or concentrating;
  
• Excessive tendency to require the attention of others; emotional dependence;
  
• Speaking too much, presuming, exaggerating, bragging, not listening to others;
  
• Resistance to accepting the ordinary demands of authority;
  
• Tendency to whims, manias, or extravagance;
  
• Tendency to resist accepting one’s own guilt, or obsessive feelings of guilt;
  
• Not being able to handle the normal ups and downs of daily life; not knowing how to lose or how to win;
  
• Difficulty understanding others or making oneself understood by them;
  
• Difficulty with teamwork and with getting along with others, etc.