Self-Discovery

 

Where and how do we find ourselves? There are seven directions to look:
front, back, left, right, up, down, and inward:

• When we identify others as the source of our problems and
  wholeheartedly adopt (or reject) their standards, we have not learned
  to turn inward.

• When emotions are experienced as a vague sense of uneasiness,
  lethargy, or physical complaints instead of the full range of feelings
  that accompany life’s joys and hardships, we have not learned to turn
  inward.

•  When we avoid or dramatize anxiety instead of contemplating and
  internally transforming it into some constructive purpose, we have not
  learned to turn inward.

Mastering the seventh (inner) direction happens little by little through the
formation of the self—the container of our separate, unique identity that
can adapt to changing situations by expressing and realizing authentic
wishes. Six or more items marked below suggests that an exquisite
gyroscope lies within that can negotiate the terrain of life.

Adaptive Personalities

• Can experience a wide range of feelings with depth, vigor, and
  spontaneity.

• Have confidence to achieve goals, experience pleasure, and
  overcome obstacles.

• Can take initiative to achieve goals and assert desires while
  tolerating related anxiety.

• Can maintain commitments to relationships and goals in spite of
  setbacks.

• Have the self-esteem to recognize their skills, abilities, and limits.

• Have a continuous sense of their value that is unchanged by
  successes or failures.

• Can flexibly change usual ways of thinking or acting to solve
  problems.

• Can soothe themselves when rejection, criticism, or failure occurs.

• Can manage their lives alone (for extended periods) when others
  aren’t available.

• Have intimate relationships without fear of abandonment or
  suffocation.

THE ORIGINS OF THE SELF

When needs for support, independence, self-expression, and limits are met
according to a person’s inner timetable, he or she is able to manage the
journey from total fusion with caretakers in infancy to the adaptive self of
adulthood. This happens in stages:

• Toddlers begin the dance of balancing conflicting needs for
  independence and support. “Drunk” with their own power to move,
  taste, and explore, they still need to know there is someone bigger
  and stronger who can contain and support them.

• Preschoolers have internalized many contradictory images, are
  beginning to fuse them, and are starting to realize that the mother
  who scolds and the mother who hugs are one, and the self who
  cooperates and the self who disobeys are the same. As this
  consistency develops, young ones can identify with caretakers and
  control their own impulses.

Reference

Criteria and descriptions of the “adaptive self” were adapted from
information in The Search for the Real Self by James F. Masterson (The
Free Press, 1988).