Memento Vivere
Illuminating the Facts About Behavioral Health and Rising Above the Stigma
The Power and Truth of Self-Awareness
The reality is life is hard and sometimes even painful, but so is the truth. We shouldn’t cover up the truth and we shouldn’t hide from life out of fear of or submission to hardship and pain.
Many of us have things in our lives that we’d like to change, in the hopes that it would make our lives better. Maybe it’s our past, maybe it’s something we’re struggling with right now, or maybe it’s something we fear happening in the future.
The last great Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, wrote in his journal Meditations, that nothing is ever as difficult as what we make it out to be. We allow our troubles to be troubles. We allow our thoughts and our worries to trouble us.
Psychologist Julian Rotter pointed out that when we focus our thoughts outward onto external things beyond our control, we cause ourselves to suffer due to that lack of control and the never subsiding worry.
There really is something to an awareness of focus. Awareness of our attention and energy. It’s called self-awareness and we need it in order to ever begin the journey of wellbeing.
Understanding that we have the power to control, influence, or not control, makes this hard life a little more manageable. The rest is all attitude.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, wrote in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that the last of human freedoms is the attitude we choose to have in any given situation. It’s the one thing that cannot be taken from us.
With self-awareness we can begin to observe our own attitudes, behaviors, and choices. These things we have the power to control or at the very least influence. Autonomy and self-efficacy lay out the path before us. A path leading away from the past, a path that guides us through the present, and a path that promises a different future. All we have to do is choose to walk it.
All of those external things: other people’s attitudes, behaviors, choices, their opinions of us, they are all out of our control, and therefore, we should not waste our time, energy, or focus on them.
When someone says something to us in anger, they offer us that anger. We can either take them and allow their words to make us angry and spiteful, or we can choose to brush those words off of us. By not allowing the words of others to influence our emotions, we take away their power over us. We get to choose how we feel and we get to choose how we act on those feelings.
Kēphen
Memento Vivere 