This is about getting to know deeper about ourselves.
The Assessment
the gathering and integration of data to evaluate a person’s behavior, abilities, and other characteristics, particularly for the purposes of making a diagnosis or treatment recommendation.
There is a session before therapy with a psychologist called assessment. The assessment that I write is not really about me. It’s all about my trauma, my diagnosis (Bipolar, BPD, & OCPD), and my unstable relationship with almost everyone. But the shocking part is my psychologist, lead me to get to know about myself. Because when we start socializing, it starts with ourselves.
The trauma
any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning.
Back when I was in high school, everything was traumatic. The bully, the school, the teachers. I never enjoy my youth. I always feel alone and also dependent. I have social anxiety where I got nausea if I were in a crowd.
Then here I am in college, fucking need to be socially stable but the trauma got the fool of me. This is where I realized I need therapy.
Who are you?
the fucking usual question, but when it hits, it hits.
It hits me when my psychotherapist asked me, “Who are really you, Jessica?”. The clock was ticking loudly and I still have no idea who the hell I am. The loud clock moment was over when I finally gave up and said I have no idea who Jessica is.
I did a little research before I write this and found something interesting. In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. Asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: ‘Know yourself.’ Knowing yourself has extraordinary prestige in our culture. It has been framed as quite literally the meaning of life.
Many of us wandering the earth, accomplished in many ways, capable of fulfillment at points, but with a fundamental wound that stops us from becoming who we might be: we don’t quite know who we are. It isn’t, of course, that we can’t remember the basics of our biographies. We’re unsure around two things in particular: we don’t have a stable sense of what we are worth and we don’t have a secure hold on our own values or judgements.
Without knowing who we are, we tend to have a particular trouble coping with either denigration or adulation. If others decide that we are worthless or bad, there will be nothing inside us to prevent us from swallowing their verdicts in their entirety, however wrong-headed, extreme or unkind they may be. We will be helpless before the court of public opinion. We’ll always be asking others what we deserve before seeking inside for an answer. Lacking an independent verdict, we also stand to be unnaturally hungry for external praise: the clapping of an audience will matter more than would ever be wise. We’ll be prey to rushing towards whatever idea or activity the crowd happen to love. We will laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, uncritically accept undeserving concepts that are in vogue and neglect our truer talents for easy popular wins. We’ll trail public opinion slavishly, constantly checking the world’s whims rather than consulting an inner barometer in order to know what we should want, feel, and value.
We need to be kind on ourselves. No one is born with an independent ability to know who they are. We learn to have an identity because, if we are blessed, in our early years, someone else takes the trouble to study us with immense fairness, attention and kindness and then plays us back to us in a way that makes sense and that we can later emulate. They give us the beginning of a true portrait of our identity which we take on and enrich over the years and use as a defense against the distorting verdicts from hurried or ill-intentioned others.
Knowing who one is, is really the legacy of having been known properly by someone else at the start. This early identity-building tends to unfold with apparently innocuous life-saving small steps. ‘It must really have hurt,’ a parent might say in response to an upset thereby validating an infant’s own feeling. Or: ‘it’s okay not to feel happy on your birthday,’ the parent might say another point, delicately upholding an infant’s less typical response to certain events.
A feeling of unreality is the direct consequence of emotional neglect. Realizing that we lack of a stable identity is a sobering realization. But we can, with a fair wind, start to correct the problem at any point. We need to seek out the help of a wise and kindly other person, perhaps a good psychotherapist, who can study us closely, mirror us properly and then validate what they see. Through their eyes, we can learn to study, perhaps for the first time, how we really feel and take seriously what we actually want. We can, by being witnessed generously, more often take our own sides and feel increasingly solid inside. Trusting ourselves more than the crowd. Feeling that we might be able to say no. Not always swaying in the wind and feeling that we are in possession of some of the ultimate truths about us. Having come to know ourselves like this, we will be a little less hungry for praise, a little less worried by the opposition — and much more original in our thinking.
We will have learnt the vital of both knowing and befriending who we really are.
