Understanding Yourself Isn't Enough…Here's Why
Know thyself.
It's been heralded as one of the most noble pursuits—so much so that the ancient Greeks inscribed it on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
And a lot of us are trying really hard to do exactly that.
But there’s a trap here, which is that we can start to believe that if we just understood ourselves well enough—if we could get the picture clear enough—we’d finally arrive...somewhere.
We start to think, if I can figure out why I do what I do, or find the right framework that explains me, or understand exactly how my childhood affected me, then maybe I'll finally feel...something.
And that something can be hard to name. Maybe it's wholeness or a feeling of being at home or at ease within ourselves. Maybe it's just this deeper sense of connection and belonging that so many of us go looking for.
If you'd prefer to watch the YouTube video on this same topic, you can find it here.
But here's the thing: all of those are felt. They’re experiences.
And without realizing it, we can start expecting all of this conceptual understanding to somehow get us there.
The problem is, it can't.
Because understanding something and experiencing something are two distinctly different things. That's why we can understand ourselves incredibly well and still not necessarily feel more at home within ourselves.
What I've found, though, is that there's another possibility. One that doesn't ask us to give up our understanding or our self-awareness, but uses both to help us come into relationship with ourselves in a way that has the potential to change not only how we feel but also how we live.
And for me, it’s how I finally started to feel a sense of connection that I had been craving for a long time.
So let’s start here…
We all have an idea of who we are, right?
We have a story about ourselves that’s based on our history, our preferences, our personality, and what we’ve been told not only about ourselves but also about the world.
And it’s very easy to get stuck in that story. And when we do, a lot of us reach for psychology, self-help, or the healing arts to help us both expand our sense of self—Who am I beyond this story?—and solidify it—How do I find something steady amidst all of these changing thoughts and feelings?
And through these modalities we learn more about ourselves.
Maybe you’ve learned that you're highly sensitive, or recognized narcissistic tendencies in one of your parents, or learned your attachment style or your Enneagram number.
And those things can be really helpful.
Sometimes simply having language for something we've experienced our whole lives or that we’ve always felt to be true can be a huge relief. It can help us understand our patterns, communicate our experience to other people, feel less alone, and have more compassion for ourselves.
So I’m not saying that this pull toward conceptual understanding is bad.
I love understanding things and making connections. I love being able to see why something is happening and where it might have come from.
But after many years of reading and studying, something in my search for self-knowledge started to feel circular, and I began to recognize that there was a profound difference between understanding myself and the human condition and actually feeling at home within myself and within the human condition.
At some point, we have to put down the map and actually take the journey.
It’s a little like preparing to take a journey.
You can study the map, learn about the terrain, figure out where you’ve gotten lost before and why, and listen to other people talk about the journey and the mistakes they made along the way.
And all of that can help prepare you.
But there’s also a point where continuing to study the map becomes a way of not actually taking the journey.
And I think we're living in a particularly interesting time for this because we have almost unlimited access to information about the human experience. Social media has given us access to countless perspectives on the human condition.
We can listen to podcasts and watch videos and read posts about attachment styles, childhood trauma, nervous system regulation, relationships, personality types. And we can hear so many other people talk about their experiences with these things.
And because on one level we are learning and having insights and recognizing ourselves in what we're hearing, it can really feel like we're moving.
Sometimes we are.
But at some point, if we want to know ourselves in a way that isn't just conceptual, we have to put down the map and actually take the journey. We have to step into the experiential realm.
For me, the first movement in this direction was through meditation.
I meditated regularly for more than 15 years, and it taught me something that all of my thinking and analyzing couldn't. It taught me how to step back from my experience and enter an observing state.
I could notice the thoughts moving through my mind, the sadness or fear, the sensations in my body.
I began to really feel more clearly that there was a difference between what I was experiencing and the part of me that was aware of it.
And because my younger years had felt so overwhelming, initially the space I got from meditation felt like a tremendous relief.
I was watching myself—watching my thoughts and my emotions and my reactions. There was a lot more space inside.
But there was something about the way I was practicing that, over time, began to feel distant. Like I was gradually feeling more and more detached when I wanted to be feeling more connected.
And I was left feeling like I only had two options: I could be immersed in my experience and overwhelmed by it, or I could stand back and observe myself having it.
And neither felt like what I was really looking for.
But then, after studying the nervous system, trauma, and somatics in more depth, I became really curious about what happens in the middle—when awareness doesn't only observe our experience but actually relates to it.
Understanding a pattern and being aware of a pattern don't necessarily change the pattern.
Our past and our patterns aren't only stories we carry around in our heads. They live in our nervous system and show up in the ways we perceive and respond to what's happening in our lives right now.
And so if we want something in ourselves or in our lives to actually change, we have to meet these patterns and these stories where they are—which is in the experience we're having in the present moment.
And we do that not only by understanding what's happening or noticing what's happening, but by beginning to relate to what's happening differently.
And this doesn't have to happen around some huge issue.
In fact, there are a million small moments a day where we can all practice this. I've actually been getting a lot of practice with it lately because we recently got a puppy.
I love her, but she’s a puppy. And along with her cuteness, she brings a significant amount of chaos into our house. A few days a week I'm home trying to work while also managing the puppy, our other dog, our two cats, and whatever else needs to happen that day.
Here’s where self-knowledge comes in.
I know that I'm sensitive to a lot of stimulation. When there's too much happening for too long, I tend to get overstimulated. My body starts to feel uncomfortable, I get irritable, and if it goes far enough, I have a tendency to disconnect a little.
I know this is a nervous system response.
But then I'm standing in my kitchen and this big, floppy puppy is barking and biting at anything she can reach with her mouth, and I’m trying to protect my small dog while also fielding a phone call from my boss, and I can feel my insides crawling and this familiar spaciness setting in...
At that moment, WHY I'm overwhelmed doesn't really matter. What matters is the fact that I AM overwhelmed.
And this is where the distinction I’ve been talking about becomes important.
Because I can understand exactly why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling.
I can be aware of the experience while it’s happening.
And I can STILL be somewhat disconnected from myself, the person actually having the experience.
That’s the piece that has changed for me.
Rather than stopping at I know why this is happening or I’m aware that I’m overstimulated, I’ve started using that understanding and awareness to actually turn toward myself within the experience.
I might say:
Something in me feels really overstimulated right now.
And then I acknowledge the part of me that’s actually having a hard time.
Yeah. I really get why you’re feeling this way.
It makes total sense.
This is a lot.
And I’ve found that something changes when I do that.
I immediately feel a little better when I’m able to convey to myself, Yeah, it does make sense that you’re feeling this way.
And then I can do something that never really occurred to me when I was more focused on awareness for the sake of awareness: I can offer myself support.
Oh, you’re having a hard time...how can I support you right now?
Of course, how I can support myself varies from moment to moment.
Offering myself understanding is something that’s always available.
But that day with puppy madness, I thought...
Maybe a bath after everyone goes to bed would feel really good.
Maybe it’s a cup of tea or 15 minutes on the couch with my eyes closed when the puppy is napping.
Maybe a little time in the hammock, listening to the birds and letting the day fall away.
My point is that the understanding is still there.
The awareness is still there.
But now I’m using both of them to come into deeper contact with myself.
I’m in relationship with myself within the experience.
Which to me has felt almost like awareness is moving from my head—from the area behind my eyes—down into my heart.
Instead of experiencing awareness primarily as this part of me that’s watching and noticing, there’s a warmth to it. There’s a kind and caring presence right there with me.
And it’s me.
And the more I’ve moved in this direction of self-awareness and self-relating, the more I've come to think about that phrase we started with—Know thyself—a little differently.
I don’t think knowing ourselves is about developing an increasingly nuanced idea of who we are.
I think it’s more about our ability to actually stay in relationship with ourselves through more and more of what we think and feel and experience.
And for me, that's been a much more direct path toward feeling at home within myself.
And it’s why I named the work that I do now Withness.
If you're interested in exploring this more deeply, particularly how we can learn to stay in relationship with our experience without becoming overwhelmed by it, you can learn more about [Withness here].
I also have a free class called Beyond Self-Awareness that goes more deeply into some of these ideas.