Knowing Yourself To Know Others

Sometimes it can be difficult to know or understand other people. You can do your best to listen to them or ask questions, but what about when this doesn’t seem to work? What do you do when it seems like no matter what you do, other people (especially those close to you) seem completely foreign to you?

This is a common experience people have of themselves or their loved ones, and a common reason people come to counseling. It can seem like there is a disconnect between you and other people, or between you and what’s really going on. It can feel frustrating and discouraging to never be able to understand like you want to.

Self-Awareness...Does it matter?

When this happens, it is often because you do not know yourself. When you know and understand yourself, you can more clearly see and understand other people. This may sound cliche but it’s true. Knowing your own thoughts and feelings gives you the ability to separate those from other people, making a clear distinction between you and them. When you can see and move your own self out of the way, you can then see the other person’s thoughts and feelings more clearly.

This distinction or “differentiation” is an important part of healthy relationships. It’s the difference between seeing someone as you think they are versus seeing them as they truly are and as they see themselves. How does this happen? Let’s unpack knowing yourself more and look at the connection more closely.

Who Am I: Self-Discovery

You might’ve heard the phrase “you can’t give away what you don’t already have for yourself.” It usually means that if you don’t know or understand something for yourself, it will be nearly impossible for you to understand it in someone else. For example, if you have not eaten at the famous burger joint in town then might struggle to understand how someone else would be so committed to waiting in line there. However, if you have eaten there and enjoyed the experience, you would better understand someone’s excitement and be able to share in it with them.

It’s the same with relationships. When you are aware of your own thoughts and feelings, understanding how they feel in your body, you can recognize and relate to that experience with someone else. Without that awareness, you have nothing within your own experience to relate to.

Connecting To Other People

By now you should be able to see how knowing yourself gives you the ability to genuinely connect with other people. But how does this happen? The answer is empathy.

Empathizing is all about getting into the experience of someone else, seeing and feeling from their point of view. This requires you to put aside your own assumptions or judgments. It also means allowing yourself to be open to how they describe their experiences, which may be different from your own.

So connecting with another person first requires reaching inside yourself to connect with a something similar, then allowing that to be shaped more specifically by how they describe it. When this happens, you become impacted by the other person and their experiences. It’s not something you try to do necessarily; it’s simply a result of being open to their point of view. The other person effectively changes you. They don’t change who you are, but how you experience them based on a more complete perspective which you received from them.

The Value of Self-Awareness

Why is it so important to be able to understand other people like this? If you limit your understanding of the world to your own perspective, you run the risk of seeing others and the world from a biased or distorted perspective. Taking in new information through others’ perspectives is challenging but rewarding. It allows you to more effectively relate in your relationships, and meet one another’s needs. It gives you the ability to see more objectively, outside yourself.

This is an important skill both for interpersonal relationships as well as those in work settings. It can be less personal in a business environment, but recognizing the needs of others can produce a more cohesive team or more effective negotiations. Regardless of the context, knowing yourself and others will improve how you interact and bring clarity that helps solve problems.

Whether or not you decide to open up and share in therapy, I hope this has helped you think it through better and wrestle with your thoughts and feelings about it. If you need help getting started, book an appointment to start counseling for anxiety in Tigard, OR.

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