Self-Knowledge

"Know thyself" - Oracle of Delphi (469 B.C.)  
"You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" - John 8:32  

After discovering who I am, the place I occupy and the time in which I live, through the practice of self-awareness, the search for the meaning of my life requires me to question my identity, to know myself, to understand who I am, what I am, and how I am.

To live life meaningfully, I need to know my talents, natural inclinations, and tendencies, my flaws, my way of being and acting, so that I know what I can count on before deciding what to do with my life.

A Continuous Process
Human beings are not physical objects that can be delimited, measured, and weighed, nor can they be placed in a test tube; they are not static and thus are not the same over time; they grow, change, and transform. There are as many general rules as there are exceptions, so a final definition is not possible, because human beings always escape any kind of conceptualization.

Although it is not possible to define the human being completely and once and for all, we can nonetheless find constants, feelings, emotions, ways of acting and thinking that repeat themselves, revealing a certain type of character and personality that can guide us in living the present moment with meaning. These are inconclusive conclusions that serve to formulate other questions and to gradually give direction and purpose to our lives.

The Johari Window
This technique helps us to understand clearly the relationship we establish with others and with ourselves. Like the traditional windows in our homes, it is divided into four small panes and two intersecting areas. The first area concerns what others know and do not know about me; the second concerns what I know and do not know about myself. From the intersection of these four areas, various types of "self" emerge: the open self, the blind self, the hidden self, and the unknown self.

The Open Self: This is made up of the attitudes, values, and behaviors that I know and others also know about me. This is the public self, an area that contains information that is known to everyone: name, age, facts, talents, etc.

The Blind Self: This is made up of things I do not know about myself, but others do. This is proof that human beings are social beings. Our individuality is formed in continuous confrontation with others, starting with those who are most significant to us, like our parents and siblings.

We are incapable of seeing our face as it truly is. The image we see in the mirror is always a distortion of reality since there are no perfect mirrors. Others see my face as it really is; thus, one of the keys to my intimacy, to my self-knowledge, lies with others. One who is inside the forest sees only trees and not the entire forest; the other brings me objectivity and a global view of who I am…

 "Who do people say that I am? (…) But who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:27, 29). Others may have a very different idea and image of me, and theirs is just as true as mine. I am, at the same time, what I think I am and what others think I am.

It is important to maintain a friendly relationship with a person who is significant to us, so that he or she can always give us feedback on who we are and how we are perceived by others. Even Jesus himself needed this feedback from His disciples.

The Hidden Self: This is made up of what we know about ourselves that we choose not to reveal to others, out of fear or for other reasons; it is what we call our privacy and intimacy, feelings, and past experiences we prefer not to disclose. In general, if this area is too large, we may be judged as lacking authenticity.

It is psychologically healthy to have someone who knows everything or almost everything about me; it is essential to have a friend with whom I am an open book, with whom my self is fully open. But, for safety’s sake, there cannot be too many of these people.

It is not without reason that people say, "May God protect me from my friends, for I can defend myself from my enemies," or, "Do not reveal your heart, even in pain, for he who bares his heart betrays himself”.

The Unknown Self: This is made up of all the material in our unconscious that sometimes surfaces without warning when something unexpected happens; it is information about ourselves that is still undiscovered and unknown to us or to others; areas of recognized talent, potential, motives, or childhood memories that lie dormant, influencing our behavior in ways unknown to us.

The unknown self is subject to a maxim of psychology that could well have been inscribed in the modern-day Oracle of Delphi: what we know about ourselves we can control; what we do not know controls us. It is in this sense that Jesus advises us to know the truth, for only by knowing the truth about ourselves can we be free, can we have our lives in our own hands, possess ourselves so that we can give of ourselves.

As for the unknown self, we are a mystery to others and to ourselves. We are not a mystery only to God. In this sense, we can compare ourselves to an iceberg: there is a large part of our personality that is not directly and voluntarily accessible, like a database for which I do not have the password.

However, it is not entirely concealed and locked away like a safe. There are moments and circumstances in which the unconscious reveals itself; these are moments that are out of our control and which we must take advantage of. We can say that these are messages that our unconscious sends to the conscious, messages that must be understood, decoded, and used in daily life.

Lapsus Linguae: These are statements we inadvertently make without meaning to and sometimes out of context; this is what people call "a slip of the tongue” that reveals the truth. It is a way the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious. Since they are unconscious, the person who says them is not aware of them, but a friend or a therapist can reveal them through feedback.

Dreams: We all dream, we always dream and dreams are always exclusively about us. Each object, each character, is part of us. Dreams are always subjective, never objective: if I dream about my father, it is not truly him I am dreaming about but the kind of relationship I have with him, how I perceive him, etc.

Working on or analyzing a dream is like traveling into the subconscious. Often, dreams are metaphorical, phantasmagorical, or even ridiculous; these are ways the unconscious draws our attention to something.

Body Language: What I say, what I do, is conscious; body language is unconscious, only the other person is aware of it and can interpret it. Because it is unconscious, what I say through body language is truer than what I say out aloud. In fact, as we say in Portuguese, "gesture is everything”, and much of our communication is non-verbal. It says more than what I say in words because I do not control it.

Growing as a human being is synonymous with growing in self-knowledge. This knowledge is not solely the result of introspection; a psychotherapist once said that no amount of introspection or self-examination will be enough to know ourselves. We can analyze ourselves for weeks or meditate for months and not advance even an inch; it is like trying to smell our own breath or making ourselves laugh by tickling ourselves.

Introspection is obviously a factor in the process toward greater self-knowledge, but it is not the only one. The process consists of two other factors that act in the form of a dynamic triangle.

What I learn about myself through introspection is complemented by feedback from people who are important to me; in this way, the four selves are harmonized and somehow fused into a single self. When I live in a loving relationship with people who care about me, their feedback can help me know more and more about my unconscious.

The Adventure of Living  
"The situation makes the thief" – Feedback on who I truly am is not always given to me by others, but by the situations in which I find myself and the experiences I go through. Mistakes, failures and successes say more about me than introspection. To know who I am, I must observe my behavior, whether or not I meet what is expected of me. I can only know if I have a talent when I try to use it when the time is right.

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained" – I do not know whether or not I have a talent until the day I am confronted by a situation that requires it. Winston Churchill and what he represented to England in World War II cannot be understood without it. It was this man's response to the challenge of the moment, WWII, that made him great. Heroes, saints, are made and known when they are put to the test, when faced with great challenges.

Tools for Self-Knowledge
There are psychological theories that have become very popular and can help people know themselves better. In the line of religion and mysticism, we have the Enneagram; in the line of Freud's existential psychology, we have Transactional Analysis; in Jung's line, we have Myers/Briggs.

Conclusion - Self-knowledge is an ongoing and never-complete process of uncovering who we are, harmonizing our talents and limitations in order to live with meaning, purpose and authenticity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC