How well do you communicate with yourself?
One common thing I hear from people I work with in counselling is a desire for a higher degree of personal clarity about what they want to do in life. Meaning, they want clarity about what they should do with the external circumstances of their life. They want to figure out things like, “am I in the right relationship?” or “should I stay in my current job that is boring but makes good money?” or “should I move because this city is too expensive?”.
It is also the case that these people are especially drained and frustrated because they have often spent months thoroughly debating these questions, weighing the pros and cons with friends and “spread sheeting” their available options, only to arrive at the same feeling of uncertainty.
I have found that many people relating to this situation are helped by engaging in a reflection of their current capabilities of self-communication. Most people I work with are certainly aware that we have a connected mind / body / heart system, but busy work schedules and other obligations create patterns that actually prevent us from noticing what the full system is offering us (more on this later). This means that the value of working on self-communication, either through psychotherapy or on our own, is that we develop a powerful way to interrupt patterns that aren’t working for us and to begin a new path that encourages us to use our full self-communication system.
What I do to begin this new path is introduce the idea that as a human being we communicate with ourselves through three different “languages”. The first language is mental communication in the form of thoughts in our head. The second is physical communication through sensations in our body. And the third is feelings and emotional experience through our heart.
Self-communication works best as an integrated system – we tend to get the most accurate and authentic experience if we have each language at our disposal. If our connection is disrupted or blocked from one or more of our three languages, we are likely to experience the confusion and frustration I described before. There is also a great deal of research that suggests that many types of chronic physical pain or ailments are directly related to blocked or “frozen” feelings. This shows just how amazing our self-communication system is, if in fact it is capable of transforming blocked thoughts, sensations and emotions in an attempt to get our attention.
The work that I help people with in counselling is exploring these disruptions and blockages. Everyone has the experience of blocking some thought, feeling or emotion at some point in their life. Resisting or blocking some thoughts and emotions is a necessary skill needed in various situations in life – but we want to be consciously aware that we are doing it, so that we can deal with the thoughts or emotions later. The unfortunate reality for many of us, however, is that we have been blocking our system so long that we no longer know we are doing it. Much of our self-communication, especially emotional expression, is blocked in order to be accepted by others, to be high performers in our jobs or to avoid dealing with sad and unpleasant experiences.
It is nearly impossible to feel comfortable with major decision making if we can’t decipher our own personal preferences and emotional truths from the culturally learned reactions that set debilitating limits on us. By integrating our mind, body and heart we gain access to a unified experience that helps us move out of these frustrated states of helplessness and indecision.
After a period of actively experimenting with how thoughts, sensations and emotions are inter-linked, it is often the case that we will notice a qualitative experiential shift in how we engage with dilemmas in life. Where we once focused on specific external outcomes, we will now have access to seeing how we are internally motivated. Where we once found frustration in problems, we will now see them as catalysts for our own emotional and personal growth. The difference is an experiential shift – our old dilemmas often dissolve, and we see new possibilities, even if the same external circumstances are present. Or we gain the self-assurance of mind / body / heart integration as we finally move forward, usually in directions we hadn’t even considered before.