Self-awareness

Recently I signed up to a program to help people with mental health problems on their recovery journey. This is a program where the process requires you to have experienced a situation that is relatable and personal, so that it can be healing and beneficial to the participants in the program. 

A year ago I experienced a lot of stress at work due to the workload, the restructuring of staff and short unrealistic deadlines. This gave me such an anxiety that eventually I decided that it was time to remove myself from this toxic environment. Looking back this has decreased my self-esteem. I went to work on myself and understand how gradually I stopped putting less and less safe boundaries in order to prove myself at work so that I would grow within the business. All this has proved to be to my detriment until the anxiety took a toll on me and became physical manifested in a panic attack as a sign to wake up and change something. 

Where I want to get with this is the fact that in order to achieve this change in behaviour, a sharp sense of awareness is needed. So back to the story, at this program we were given training, when I started to acknowledge the variety of mental states of some people and how they take certain words as facts. An example, it was me talking about many things in general such as biohacks, science, being yourself etc and after I made a comment that I’d better stop as I could go on about this forever, as I like to talk and made a cheeky smile. The person asked me quite bluntly, really you can speak forever? When are you at home alone do you talk to yourself? Do you ever stay quiet? At that moment I realised that this conversation was very different to what I am used to and it was taken literally as something that I am doing instead as a metaphor. In this moment I realised the impact my words could have, and how controlled my talking should be. It’s a lesson yet it requires practice and discipline. Definitely is not a comfortable state of being, where you lose yourself in the topic you are passionate about and where the other person listening, can filter through the story, discern the reality and take the insights and the intended meaning. This is not the case here and it makes me feel rather disturbed by the event. I am not used to talking in a different way. I have a sense of guilt for not being more present and whether or not I have affected negatively the other person since they are going though a difficult time and to some extent, I have a responsibility towards what they might do as they now seem easily influenceable. This is a vulnerability that could easily cause hurt to the person. 

I am honest with myself. I know we are the only ones responsible of how we feel, think and behave, yet this requires a mastery in coping skills and emotional maturity which not many have harnessed, including myself. Yet this is not the environment I am comfortable being in, because I see it fragile, like walking on thin ice. While I know I would benefit from being alert, present, self-aware, yet to me my unconscious biases give me a resistance to want to stay too long in this sort of environment where there is a risk of hurting others with words as well as losing myself in the process of talking out of passion. I want to be true to myself. Of course, showing empathy, compassion is a given, yet the influence of the environment might work in my detriment as I would have to adapt and be more restrictive of myself. I say this because I feel that I would not be entirely myself, passionate, honest, etc as I usually am. I did not have a strong sense of awareness during the discussed event, but gradually I started to notice the unusual change of what was meant to be a casual, normal chat.  Definitely some rigorous training would alleviate the sense of lack of knowledge and increase the sense of presence on how to handle certain difficult situations.