A Practical, Real-Life Example of How Self-Awareness Is Transformative

As a young, highly-sensitive child, I started cutting my own skin. Self-harm is an attempt to regulate the feeling of being out of control, being dysregulated. Cutting is a trauma response.

Being a cutter arose from the reality of deeply distrusting myself inside, and paradoxically, some quality of intelligence that was at least trying to regulate myself; I was doing my best to survive.

I didn’t have the tools I needed and so, I used what I had. Unfortunately, I caused myself a lot of harm. It’s been a long time since I’ve been swept up in self-harm and self-hate, and I owe it all to the gift of emerging self-awareness.

Which is why it feels important to share this message: one thing that transforms patterns of self-harm is getting into relationship with self on the inside.

Hurting and hating myself arose out of a toxic and unconscious relationship I had with my sense of self. When my mind runs the show and I’m not aware of my thoughts and thinking, it’s painful! Because every movement of my mind felt like a serrated knife with edges of meaning slicing me open. I believed my thoughts. I believed they were me. My mind became my own worst enemy. As unreal as those thoughts were, they caused real pain and real reactions.

To live beholden to painful thoughts in the head is exhausting, and maddening. Looking back at my own attempt to regulate, I now recognize the root cause driving my behavior was that I didn’t know how to communicate with myself. I wasn’t in relationship with me on the inside.

Being conscious and self-aware, deeply intimate within the interiority of myself, I trust this relationship with myself, it just feels right. I know it’s key to healthy self-regulation. Self-awareness empowers me to appreciate and enjoy my mind for what it is, rather than unconsciously letting it run my life.

That instinct to hurt myself arose from an attempt to control those painful narratives in my mind. Cutting was my escape-hatch from the noise. And many of us are living life according to and reacting to that noise. There are endless ways to self-harm. It’s a painful way to live. And even more than that? The matrix of domination, dehumanization and white supremacy depends on us being tied up in or escaping our minds, rather than discovering who we really are on the inside. People who are in relationship with themselves are dangerous to the status quo.

This is what I mean when I say we are experiencing a revolution of self and mind. The revolution describes the developmental trajectory from an unconscious relationship with self into conscious intimacy within self. We have only scratched the surface of what minds are capable of because mostly, unconscious minds are running things. I often imagine a day when this is not the case, when we’re collectively intimately aware of self and mind, how does that impact the state of our world?

Suddenly the potentiality of self and mind are redirected, amplified and reimagined in exciting ways. In nurturing self-awareness there appears a completely new paradigm for us to play in.