Creating Possibility
Before we can begin to work on recognizing the different parts of your personality that are active at any point in time, we have to get your system into the habit of slowing things down enough to be able to see their presence. This is why mindfulness is an essential part of this program. From my perspective, mindfulness is the individual practice of building your own Self Awareness. It is often the case that when people step into completing the work involved in any type of behaviour change, they come into it with the belief that they are completely Self Aware. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case, and it definitely was not the case for me personally when I started my own journey many years ago. When I actually started to explore my ability to know what was happening inside of my own personality system, I found that I was totally unaware of the impact my thoughts were having on my emotional state.
These thoughts were attached to the many different stories, and contextual schema, I had developed throughout my childhood experiences, and building my ability to know what I was thinking, what I was feeling, and what physical sensations I was experiencing at any given point in time, was key to understanding what was keeping me stuck in old behaviour patterns. Developing this ability helps us to identify the stories we are reacting to, and it creates the possibility for us to see the difference between what’s actually happing in the world around us, and what we think is happening in the world around us. All of our reactions are based on the story that is attached to the schema that is active in our system. Whether this schema is positive or negative is irrelevant, we simply react to it in the way we always have.
At The Liberation Place, every single one of the skills we offer is intended to support you in building your capacity to live the Life you Want to Live. We do this by helping you first recognize, and then change, the personal stories and contextual schema, you are strongly attached to. These childhood beliefs are basically keeping you stuck in the life you are currently stuck in, continuously using old ways of coping with new situations, that simply aren’t effective anymore. It is undeniable that your ability to actually use the skills we are trying to develop, begins with the practice of mindfulness. Without your ability to recognize what’s happening in your system, the skills are just like words on a page. You know what they are, and you can tell somebody all about them if you’re asked, but you are not able to implement them in your behaviours when you’re triggered, because you’re not actually practicing them when you don’t need them, every single day.
Having a lack of Self Awareness means that when a story gets activated in your system, your emotions ramp up because they are tied to a particular part of your personality that is triggered to react to the schema. When you’re not aware of the personal stories attached to the schema, you blend with the part that’s reacting, and live into the emotional experience that this part is currently having. Sometimes this emotional experience is based in actuality, and sometimes its based in a created reality that’s tied to your past and playing out in the present. Mindfulness allows us to Observe and Describe each part of your personality, from a nonjudgmental point of view.
