Self-awareness is the most important aspect of counselling.  We say so over and over. But what makes it so essential?

A brief answer to my own question.  People seek counselling in order to bring  change, whether that change be internal or external or both.  All the skills in the world, however, if not supported with self-awareness, will not prevent us from being drawn into at least some of our caller’s or client’s fictions or self-deceptions. Or prevent us, for that matter, from drawing them into some of our own.  Therefore without the counsellor’s self awareness the blind will lead the blind –and won’t know it to be so.  Little or no change will result.

Or an answer from another perspective:  while we commonly imagine that we feel things and then talk about them, I suggest that reality is rather more complex than that.  It’s when a caller or client finds the words to talk about their feelings that they can really be said to ‘feel’ those feelings.  So a counsellor, in order to help someone in the task of languaging and then ‘feeling’, must at least have done some of this same work previously.   It’s as feelings are talked about, named and felt, that they can emerge, be accepted, and provide the direction and energy for change.

So what’s involved in the process of my becoming self-aware?

It’s a learning to become open to my own scrutiny, through the assistance of a trusted other (or others), and means taking a series of steps towards knowing myself and others without the illusions that I have for whatever reason adopted. 

What is most important in this learning is an atmosphere of acceptance.  What we like to hide from others and ourselves are those aspects of ourselves for which in the past we have felt (at least the threat of being) shamed, blamed, or punished in some way.  And likely we have taken an active role ourselves in the shaming, blaming, or punishing.

Feeling accepted and being able to accept is the foundation of self awareness and of change.

If there is a danger involved in all of this, it is the possibility that we will end up putting the ‘self’ at the centre of everything.  Being self-aware is rather a matter of placing ‘the self and other’ at the centre.  This is because the process of becoming self-aware requires both the mirroring that (appropriate) others provide, and the recognition that I am not an island but rather one among many. 

As one among many, I am able to see that not merely as a statistical fact, but also as a statement of human being-ness. 

Becoming self-aware is really a process of coming to know myself among others.