My colleague and friend, Dr. Elizabeth Wahlberg, wrote this article in her blog. The article talks about the need for behaviour therapists to have a basic level of self-awareness. She calls it the self-awareness of mind and says that, just like we have different levels of awareness in different parts of our brain, we have self awareness going on in different parts of our personalities.
Basically, Elizabeth said that we have to figure out how to recognize our moods. We’re all different, so what’s normal for one person might be very off-putting to someone else. That’s what I’m talking about. You know you’re anxious or excited or angry or bored, but how can you tell? By observing the way you’re behaving.
So, in order to achieve that, Elizabeth said we have to learn to recognize our own moods. We are a society of emotional beings and we have to learn to recognize them. I know Ive said that self-awareness is the ultimate behaviour modification and that it would be foolish to try to change people who don’t want to change.
The main part of the story is that people with self-awareness are able to act upon their feelings and reactions. It would be really difficult to change people without self-awareness. So, it’s more like a person with self-awareness and self-awareness is able to react in a way that makes them feel different about themselves. So, it would be like if the world was built up of people who feel different.
That’s why I’m so happy that we’re having this discussion. There are so many people in the world who are very anxious about change. For any of these people, I hope we can create a space where we can come together and talk about things.
The reason I think of these as “people” is because they don’t want to be the people they are. If you get in the way of them being the people they are, you can’t move forward without breaking down. They don’t want to be the ones they are.
The problem with people who want to change is that they always see the change as something they have to do, instead of something they have to adapt to. It’s the way they feel that they couldnt be the person they were before. I know what you’re thinking, “but I’m not doing anything wrong”.
People who feel like they cant be the people they are feel like they have to be better than they are for a while, and then that makes the person feel like they need to change. They dont want to be the person they are for a while.
We see it all the time with our loved ones. We want to be the person we were before. We want to be the person we can be. We want to be happy. But if you do something that hurts us, then you make us angry and sad. And that is a bad thing. So, if the best thing you can do for us, is to make us angry and sad. Then you have to keep doing it.
One of the things we found in our study of 4,000 people was that 80% of people who had experienced abuse were also abused in childhood. This isn’t news to anyone, but it’s worth noting here. We found that in children who had experienced abuse in their childhood, they were six times as likely to become abusive adults, and that the abuse didn’t have to be physical for it to have that effect.