How well do you truly know yourself? We usually tend to think that we know who we are. There are simple questions a person can ask about you that you can answer instantly. Others, for some reason, we struggle to answer. But why? This week in Deeper Thoughts I’m going to talk about the answer to that question, Why do we fear being alone with ourselves?
Some questions about us are easy to answer. What makes you angry? What do you fear the most? What makes you happy? What makes you sad? How long did you take to answer each of those? That’s all well and good for basic small talk with someone while you’re riding the bus to work. But what about going deeper?
Let’s look at Sarah. If you ask her what she’s afraid of, she’ll quickly be able to tell you it’s spiders. Okay, but why is she afraid of spiders? Sarah’s response is because they’re creepy and scary. But now let's ask her why she thinks they’re creepy and scary? She can only reply “I don’t know, but they just are.” Do you know why she can’t answer that? She only knows herself at the surface level. She hasn’t sat with herself to understand that fear is based on a trauma, like all our learned fears are. If she did some parts work and went within she would eventually remember that time when she was seven years old she had a traumatic event when she woke up from a nap with a spider crawling on her face.
Let’s go with a more extreme example and ask Brad what he hates. His answer is, “I hate being poor.” When we ask him why he is poor then, his responses are all about the “evils of capitalism,” and “how the rich just take from everyone beneath them.” Brad hasn’t sat with himself to look in the mirror to see and admit he’s poor because he spends his money frivolously on take out, new video games, and alcohol instead of budgeting, savings, and proper investing. He hasn’t taken the time to realize his mindset, habits, and patterns are holding him back and keeping him locked in poverty.
These are just two examples showing how if one sits alone with themselves and goes inward they could learn much more about themselves. But why do so few people practice this? Deep down most people are afraid to be alone because they’re afraid of, or hate themselves. This alone time, where you journey inside yourself is where so much of your growth will stem from. This is when you work through your pain to see the traumas and fragmentations that have taken place and heal them.
Why would you not want to heal from these things? Well, one reason is that in doing so you have to take ownership of your actions up to this point. You realize the situations you’re in now are the result of the actions you’ve taken in the past. Even with external forces present, the way you respond or, in many cases, react is what puts you in the situation of your current existence. That’s a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, especially if they have a lot of shame based trauma.
So due to this subconscious fear of looking in the mirror, many seek escapism. Bouncing from relationship to relationship, alcohol, drugs, gaming, anything that means they’re not alone with their own thoughts. They're afraid of what they’ll see if they follow the rabbit hole of those thoughts.
What they don’t realize are the things they’re missing out on. Yes there will be a lot of painful moments as you heal and reintegrate your fragmented parts. Yes you relieve traumas. But you create a connection to yourself. You’re given opportunities to show yourself love and compassion. You get the chance to become your best friend and biggest supporter. This doesn’t mean you have to go monk mode and not talk to or see anyone for months or years at a time. It just means if you want to grow and expand you need to know who you are.
I once asked a girl what was something fun about herself that not everybody knows about? She couldn’t think of anything. I could see it on her face. She knew there was an answer to that question, but she couldn’t think of one. She couldn’t believe that she couldn’t come up with an answer. It was because she didn’t really know who she was.
Make an effort to spend time alone with yourself. Get to know who you are. There’s a lot you can learn about yourself, some bad, yes, but there’s a lot of good in there too. So many unknown talents you could be using if you only took the time to learn about yourself. I hope you’ll take the time to start practicing this so when someone asks you a deep question about yourself, you’ll be able to answer instead of shrugging and saying, “I don’t know.”
Thank you for reading, and have an enlightening day.
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