Self-Awareness and Self-Deception

Self-awareness enables you to develop and maintain a beneficial mindset about life and yourself and it is a skill that enables you to improve your interpretation of life events and human behavior. Self-awareness is a skill that is closely linked to developing a healthy personality. Without the self-awareness skill our thinking can be distorted by self-deception. Illusions are hard to identify because many of their aspects are true and real.

Self-awareness is the first step toward acquiring self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is at the base of true appreciation of life and feeling satisfied with the life you are living. Feeling happy and fulfilled is desired by all of us and when you can answer what is for you real joy, happiness, energy recovery, ease, interest, relaxation it can help you clarify a little more of who you really are and how to make decisions that serve you.

In This Article

• Understanding AWARNESS and the power of acceptance
• What does it actually mean to be SELF-AWARE
• SELF-DECEPTION and avoiding reality
• Conclusions – on integrity an being true to yourself
• Questions for reflection

What is Awareness?

“At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.”
― Lao Tzu

Definition of Awareness

Our inner world is ever changing just like our outer world. Change is consistent in everybody’s life. Awareness is a way of opening up and embracing the reality, accepting the constraints, the limits and the change rather than resisting or denying it. In order to survive and to be successful we want to become capable to continuously adapting to a changing reality. Awareness helps us keep-up with life as it happens. Awareness is focused attention and it is a living knowledge.

Simply put awareness is the capability, the skill to notice consciously things around you. In simple words awareness is just about noticing stuff in the world. When you are aware of a tree it means that it entered your conscious noticing database. You notice things automatically all the time as you are experiencing life, but not all of that perception becomes conscious knowledge. That sounds like really theoretic stuff but it is easier to understand that it seems at first.

Let’s take an example: You are taking a walk with a friend on an average city street. It is spring time and a nice sunny day. Lets say someone stops you at the end of the street and asks you to describe what this street was like? Both of you would describe it in very different ways, because your mood, your perception and your awareness is different from theirs. Maybe you like flowers so you will tell all about the flowers and birds, cute dogs you have noticed. Maybe your friend is into cars and restaurants so he will explain all the cars and the coffee shops, the food smells he has noticed. You might be in a good mood so you talk about the spring breeze, the loving couples and the beauty of the place while the same person in a depressive mood would see the unfinished buildings, the wholes on the road, the noise of the constructions, etc. None of you is lying and you are still presenting two totally different realities. How can that be?

Awareness is your ability to focus your attention on particular parts of reality. It is the active, conscious perception and knowledge that something exists. Anchortobloom.com

You and your friend just noticed different facts, in the example above, and where oblivious to other facts. That is because there is a data limit on the incoming data in your mind. So you can not and do not notice ALL of reality. You are making a personal selection. You become aware to only some parts of reality. Basically you are all living in your personal reality in this sense.

So why are you becoming aware of certain aspects, facts of reality that others might be totally ignorant of and vice versa? You perception is influenced by your previous experiences, your mental programs and that which is emotionally active in you right now. Your awareness is influenced by your active thoughts and emotions and your set of pre-programmed data.

Raising your awareness means that you are becoming capable of noticing more consciously in the now. In other words you are improving your ability to selectively focus and be aware of those things NOW that benefit you as they slowly become you pre-programmed data set in the future. You cannot free your active attention from this pre-influenced, automatic part of the perception, but you have some influence on what goes in there. This way you are influencing what comes into your focus in the future and slowly improve the data set. So you are not changing reality around you, you cannot do that really because too many of us have a say in what we prefer, but with a little bit of awareness you can create a perspective shift and live in a better feeling reality.

What is Self-Awareness?

Self awareness is often defined as focusing your attention on yourself, but in this article we discuss self-awareness in a broader sense. In my opinion self-awareness is more about our perception, awareness of the Self and the connection and influences we have with reality. Self-awareness in this sense can be defined as your ability to become aware of your connection to the world around you. Self-awareness in a larger sense is the awareness of how your inner world is connected, reflected in your outer world.

Self-awareness is a self-generated inner state that can be cultivated by becoming aware of what you do emotionally, how you feel and how you think and how all that is reflected in the reality that you are noticing and experiencing. The reality that you are personally perceiving, the facts that you personally select from this large set of data are becoming part of your mental construction of how reality is. Your next set of data is collected based on the previously selected data.

You create connections between the bits and pieces of information and come up with a story. Based on the facts that you focus upon, you become aware of different part of the same street, the same person, the same reality. So your story of reality based on facts can be very different from the stories that others would tell. This story is than becoming the basis for your decisions, thoughts and feelings and your future awareness. It could be called the loop of awareness.

Note : This is a simplistic presentation of a really complex concept so of course it is lacking a lot of detail. A lot more detail is discussed in other articles around the blog and a lot more articles around this topic are coming soon.

Self-awareness is more than just knowing how you feel. It is the knowledge that how you feel matters in the way you see the reality that surrounds you. When you are having a good days things seem to be so beautiful and when you are having a bad day it just all seems dark and boring. It seems to you that the world around you is changing continuously, but what if it isn’t the facts around you that are in such a great fluctuation? What if reality isn’t changing that much and it is your mood that drives you attention to selectively focus on facts that match your mood and discard all other data? What if all the nice data bits are all there even on your bad days and all the nasty pieces are all there even on you good days and you just don’t notice them? What if you are just capable of seeing their beauty one day and are uncapable of becoming aware of them on other days?

The level of self-awareness we develop allows us to understand how we perceive and create our own realities. When one consciously becomes able to notice inward and outward that’s when we start to speak of self-awareness. But that is just a beginning. Awareness is active knowledge. Our awareness and self-awareness can improve our overall clarity of thinking over time and it would be a very simple thing to do, if there wasn’t for self-deception.

What is Self-Deception?

Self-deception in simple words means that one is lying to oneself or even better said one is avoiding the truth. You try to trick the universal intelligence so to say. The word Self-deception is a little misleading, because it gives the impression that a part of ourselves would intentionally deceive other parts of the self. But that isn’t what’s happening most of the time. The self is both the deceiver and the deceived. We don’t typically do it knowingly or consciously. What happens is more like part of our intellect unconsciously, automatically, compulsively creates illusions of reality in order to avoid facing a difficult reality.

Why would we do that? Why would we try to avoid and negotiate reality?

Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian writer and theatre director came up with the term “vital lies” and I borrow that term for this post because I find it a useful when it comes to describing how self-deception works. Self-deception works based on a defense and relief mechanism. The lies avoidances, distortions are felt vital to maintain harmony, but all growth flexes the boundaries of harmony. In order to grow some discord has to be allowed, accepted, dealt with, integrated and passed over. We tend to deceive ourselves when we don’t have the resilience and ability to take life as it comes. This mechanism is usefull until we are little, because we can be getting into situations that are too complex for a kids emotional intelligence skills, identity and understanding. So the mind creates this protective bubble temporarily for survival, balance and maintaining sanity. It functions like a safety net.

Self-deception is a mental mechanism that usually tries to balance a trade-off. It happens most often when one is faced with complex situations and/or a difficult decision. In some sense all difficult situations are merely difficult decisions. Difficulty can come from the lack of skill needed to synthetize a complex structure of data, or the emotional difficulty coming from facing data that seemingly contradicts our identity or our path to our desires. For example we want something but we have core beliefs that contradict our desires, or new information shows up that is challenging the status quo of who we are.

What happens when a core belief is challenged by new information? Contradiction in values, desires create the self-deceiving behavior to maintain a sense of balance. Self-deception is a process that relates – just like self-awareness – to the act of perceiving reality and making sense of the data that was collected. When we speak about self-deception here, we mean the process of distorting reality without one’s conscious awareness. The reality negotiation process ultimately comes down to the story we put together using the information collected daily about reality and its complexity. The information, the pieces of data by themselves can be real facts and one can still put together a story that is bending reality.

Avoidance of the truth can maintain a superficial mental harmony but can cause serious long term damage to our identity. Blaming someone or something relives stress and pain on the short run but it makes you feel like you are not in control of your life on the long run. It is possible to distort reality both ways. Self-deception can be in either negative or in positive directions.

Conclusions

At certain moments in time we all create our bubble of negotiated reality that gives us the illusion of defense. We all deny sometimes the problems instead of facing it. We all stayed too long in relationships where we were not honored and respected. We all have bought things we didn’t really need just to impress others. Self deception can significantly damage our capacity for personal and moral growth when it becomes a habit instead of a temporary safety net. As our awareness expands and our thinking becomes sharper and more capable of complex understanding we become skilled at seeing solutions that were not available before. Staying true to yourself is all about mastering how to live life authentically. Authenticity and integrity means that we take responsibility for our life and we are shifting from compulsive reactions and autopilot behavior to conscious awareness. It is only through awareness that we can change and grow.

Reflection Questions:

• Can you recognize people who live in self-deception? What are their behaviors?
• Can you remember situations when you deceived yourself for a while but than you realized it isn’t worth it and faced the situation?
• What emotions are you trying to avoid with self-deception?

References and further readings:

What Is Self-Awareness and Why Is It Important? ; Definition of Self Awareness – What Is Self Awareness?; What is Self-Awareness ; Developing Self-Awareness; Recognizing Signs Of Self-Deception, Power Tool: Authenticity vs. Self-Deception; Where Is The Fine Line Between Realism and Self-Deception?

Featured photo credits: P0- pch.vector ;