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How to Understand Yourself,
Feel Better and Get Along with Others
— Joel Rachelson, Ph.D.
An important article to help you
create a better quality of life.
Self understanding is not rocket science. Nor really
is feeling better and getting along with others.
It's simple really, although not necessarily easy-and
it does require commitment, effort and patience. But what better
thing to be the object of your efforts than your own inner and outer
well being.
The purpose of this brief article is to introduce
you to a map of your insides with operating instructions It is a
simple approach to knowing yourself. This map and operating instruction
will begin to help you learn how to understand yourself, feel better,
and get along with others.
The Basis of Understanding
The basic mapping tool for understanding yourself
is that you are not a single self but a symphony of selves. Inside
of any one person there are many different parts or selves. The
cacophony of voices in your mind telling you "do this"
or "do that" can be rationally explained, understood and
harnessed in your best interest. But in order to do this you must
get to know all of your inner selves. There are young parts of you
and there are old parts of you. There are emotional, irrational
parts and judgmental critical parts as well as kind, nurturing and
rational parts of the self.
The first step in self understanding is knowing the
difference between your inner tuba player and your inner violinist.
The next step in feeling better is appropriately tending to the
players in your symphony. And the third step in getting along with
others is having an inner conductor to direct who is playing you
at any given moment.
Should the trombone be playing when your spouse's
timbales are playing or should it be your bass? And why is your
trombone player so dang loud?
As with any symphony, there needs to be inner contentment and harmony,
inner cooperation and a good conductor in order for there to be
good music.
Everyone has different inner symphonies. Some have symphonies with
stronger emotional selves that react in certain patterned ways.
Some have stronger critical or judgmental aspects. Some are more
nurturing, and some are purely rational or analytic. It could be
that your trombone player gets loud every time your spouses' timbales
tinkle .One part of you or another could be "soloing" or in the driver's seat of your personality at any given moment.
Which could be a good thing or not. The goal is to become fluent
with your own inner parts or selves. And you can.
Training Your Inner Conductor
The first step in feeling better involves the conductor
getting strong and wise. Toward this end, there is the knowledge
that bad feelings, of most any kind, reside in our emotional self
parts. When the emotional self parts are happy, we are happy. When
they are not happy, we are not happy. As your conductor develops
psychological wisdom and skillfulness in working with these parts,
then the bad feelings will lessen.
There are three areas, or causes, for the emotional
parts of our inner symphony to be struggling and feeling sad and
unhappy, anxious and fearful, frustrated and angry. These areas
or causes compose the operation instructions for how to feel better
and get along with others.
The first cause of unhappiness is pretty straight
forward: It is the idea that psychological problems are the result
of stored, blocked and avoided emotions. Unexpressed emotions cause
irritability, anxiety and depression. Blocked emotions cause misperceptions
and overreactions in our relationships.
This is not to say that the answer is to let them
fly, so to speak, because these stored feelings may have been around
for a long time. The goal is for your inner conductor to become
more fluent in the what, why and when of emotions and then to determine
the healthiest ways of reworking them, clearing the stored files
and then not letting more undealt-with emotions build up.
The second cause of generalized or specific unhappiness
is unmet needs. The emotional self parts have psychological needs
in order to feel OK, secure and happy. These emotional self parts
have a young quality and need love, support, attention, acceptance,
appreciation, respect, and nurturance. Every tuba player needs love,
and a well loved tuba player plays well with others.
The goal here is to become one's own cake and get
the icing from the outside. An over reliance on the outside is all
too often a disappointing attempt to get too many of our needs met
either through personal accomplishments, job performance or significant
others.
So the goal here is to become more fluent and accomplished
at tending to our own needs. This involves teaching and building
the conductor (the positive grown up) to be a better, more fulfilling
needmeeter for those younger emotional inner selves.
The last cause for bad feelings is bad internal programming
or scripting. This means our inner symphony is having to play a
gloomy or faulty composition. This is a good news-bad news scenario.
The good news is that we can easily see and understand the problematic
programming which is causing negative beliefs, poor attitudes and
bad reaction patterns to outside events and others. The not so good
news is that the parts of us that hold the programming are not easily
changed.
There is hope
The wise conductor/grownup learns to recognize bad
life compositions and then goes about the task of rewriting them.
This rewriting requires effort, persistence and patience, but what
better project than to write yourself a new script for a better
quality of life on all levels.
This business of self understanding and self management
is not murky rocket science. It is at times elegantly simple and
at others exquisitely multifaceted. Sometimes we just need a little
help in knowing how to look at ourselves and what to do with what
we find out. Sometimes we just need a little push to look inside,
and if there is a map then the looking will seem easier to do.
So if you:
- feel rotten chronically or are too prone to fall
into bad feeling places or
- don't have good emotional/psychic shock absorbers
in relation to the bumps in life's road or
- feel emotionally unmet and depleted, driven to
perfection or constantly chase the next accomplishment or thing,
or
- are clingy or fiercely self-sufficient or
- struggle with negative beliefs and perspectives
about yourself, others, relationships, work, money etc…
You might want to consider making a commitment to your own wellbeing
by learning more about how to understand yourself better. This
is obviously not automatic, or we would all feel great all of
the time. And sometimes we just need a good teacher to help us
learn new skills, like training our inner conductor, working through
and out of old emotional roadblocks, and finding our inner harmony.
Our relationships in the world depend on the health and happiness
of our inner selves, yet the language is new. But the task is
within reach, and all of us can take steps right now to learn
how to feel better and get along better with others in our worlds.
It may mean reading more…or calling a therapist…or consulting
a coach or mentor. Please feel free to call on me. I offer individual
sessions, groups and couples counseling in Atlanta, and would
love to help you .
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