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Self-Awareness Action Plans

Our goal now is to deepen our knowledge of ourselves, especially as it relates to our emotional self. We’ve noted how, in the busyness of our lives, we can easily lose touch with our real self. We all do to some degree. And as a result, we create an ideal self. For example, when someone asks, “How are you doing?” our ideal self answers without thinking, “Just fine, thank you. And how are you doing?” It’s interesting to imagine what would happen if we suddenly started answering that question honestly. Perhaps people would stop asking it and come up with another question that doesn’t expose the hiddenness of our real self.

Living with our ideal self reduces the need and eventually even the ability to practice self-reflection. We actually begin to believe we are doing “just fine, thank you.” Our spouse can typically see through the facade of our ideal self, but they only challenge our reality when they are angry with us. At other times, they protect and accept our ideal self, hoping we will in turn accept their ideal self. But over time, living through our ideal selves leads us to a general dissatisfaction. Our marriage and our other relationships eventually seem unreal and superficial.

If, instead of living solely through our ideal self, our goal is to increase our knowledge of ourselves, we are going to need a plan. And we will need to dedicate some time to working on our plan. That will require honesty with ourselves and courage to do the hard things.

Following are ten Action Plans you can do that will increase your self-awareness in general but will especially increase the awareness of your emotional world. To begin, take the time to read through them and then talk with your spouse about your reactions to all ten. Each of you should choose one that you agree would be a good starting point—any that you feel comfortable beginning with. Be sure to use the feelings chart in chapter 2 as you work on the Action Plans, as this will help you name the feelings. Working together will make the process more rewarding. If your Self-Awareness scores were low, take the time to work through all ten Action Plans before moving on to the next set of Action Plans.

Action Plan #S1—Identify Your Basic Emotional Posture When Stressed

We’ve talked about our different options when it comes to our BEP. Some of us, when stressed, have a basic emotional posture of being angry and irritable much of the time. Others may approach life from a fearful, anxious posture. There are also those who are more melancholic, seeing life through a generalized sadness, while others are always fighting with themselves over unresolved guilt or toxic shame. There is, of course, a general posture of joy, but that is often interpreted as being overly optimistic about everything.

Take some time now and identify what you think your basic emotional posture is when stressed about life. Choose from anger, fear, shame, or sadness.

My BEP when stressed about life is _______.

Talk with your spouse and see if they agree. If not, continue to talk together and work through your different perspectives until you are both clear on your BEP. Consider why you feel this is your BEP and why your spouse thinks this is the right choice for you. Then ask yourself the following questions and discuss your answers with your spouse. Be open as you listen to each other’s perspectives.

1. How were anger, fear, shame, and depression experienced in your family when you were a child?
2. Who was the family member who personified your emotional posture the most?
3. How did you respond inwardly about this as a child? What was the primary emotion that you experienced as a child?

There is something about telling your story that begins to break the hold an emotional posture has on a person. Some of these experiences are buried so deep we are unaware of how they continue to control us. But as we begin to share our story, we will remember more and have more to share.

Hearing your story also makes a difference in how your spouse responds to you. It tends to depersonalize your behavioral tendencies when you’re in the grip of your BEP. It also helps your spouse to better understand how your basic emotional posture came to be.

Now answer the following questions and discuss them together:

1. What are the behavioral tendencies you exhibit when you are caught up in your basic emotional posture?
2. How are those behaviors different from how you responded outwardly as a child? How are they the same?
3. Who besides your immediate family members influenced your tendencies to behave as you do when in your BEP?

Continue to have conversations on this issue. As you work through this Action Plan, new thoughts and insights will emerge gradually. Share them with your spouse and take the time to personally reflect on what you are learning about yourself and your emotions.

Action Plan #S2—Think about Your Feelings

It may sound strange, but in this Action Plan, you are to think about your feelings. Or, to be more precise, you are to think about what you’re thinking whenever you experience a feeling. In other words, what are the internal conversations you have with yourself related to those feelings? It is never easy to define what you say to yourself when you have a particular feeling, especially one associated with your BEP.

Take Don and Pat as an example. At the end of the last chapter, we imagined how differently they might have experienced the same potentially explosive interaction they’d had if they were more self-aware. How did they arrive at that change? As they spent some time on this Action Plan, Don recognized that anger was his BEP, and Pat recognized that fear was hers. For Pat, her fearful posture often led to behavioral tendencies of defending herself with anger when she was challenged by Don’s anger. But she typically started from the posture of fear.

Let’s follow Don’s process first. As he thought about his anger, he began with the fact that the problem wasn’t that he got angry. Anger and fear are both valid emotions designed to protect us from potential danger. So rather than simply blame the outburst on “I get angry; I can’t help it,” he had to go deeper and think about how he felt threatened, what he was saying to himself, and how he typically behaved when he got angry. He had to think about his behavioral tendencies. And that led him to the new internal conversation he was having with himself. What were the things he was telling himself in that situation?

He started his analysis by recalling what he had said out loud to Pat when he saw her wrapping the present. He remembered that he focused on what he felt was her spending too much money on her mother. And as he continued to think about how he felt Pat favored her mother, he would quickly say those thoughts out loud, and then they would both be in a heated argument and say more hurtful things.

Whenever we get caught up in our BEP, there is always an internal dialogue going on in the background that fuels the out-of-control emotional response. Because that response is almost automatic, we have to slow the process down. And we call the slowing down part “thinking about what you are feeling.” As Don slowed down, he imagined what his thoughts were about the situation, and he had the opportunity to change his internal conversation.

The internal conversation connected to anger has the element of a demand associated with it. Don was making a demand on Pat, and because it involved something that had already happened, it was unenforceable. Even if it had not already happened, any demand on another person, or even on yourself, is almost impossible to enforce. So slow down and identify that demand! That’s what Don was learning to do. When a similar situation arose, he slowed himself down, then he said out loud some of the changed thoughts he had identified. As a result, he managed to keep his anger in control.

Pat had to do the same thing. Because most of her internal conversation preceded the actual encounter, she was able to identify the things she was saying to herself that created internal tension. The language of her fear would always take the form of “What if . . .” Her fear was fueled by her negative imagination, which only set her up to fulfill her negative what-ifs. She was learning to articulate what she feared was going to happen.

What she had difficulty with was seeing what her internal dialogue became when Don started to get angry. Then her what-ifs became fulfilled prophecies. She also had to identify the demands she had started to make, such as, “He shouldn’t talk to me like that. After all, I do the same for his mother.” That took some time and effort, but she was becoming adept at playing out the internal dialogue enough times in her mind that she was also able to say it when a similar situation arose.

If sadness is your BEP, your internal dialogue will often be similar to the language of fear. When you are feeling sad, what are you telling yourself? What do you sense you’re going to lose or afraid you’re going to lose? Or maybe your sadness is about something you have already lost. If that is your posture, it is likely related to losses you experienced as a child. So your thinking about the sadness may begin with something happening in the here and now, but then it will take you back to things that should have happened and didn’t when you were very young, or to things that happened but shouldn’t have.

Those whose BEP is shame will find that they still believe some toxic false messages that were directed at them as far back as their early childhood. Toxic shame is not a naturally developed posture. It must have been set in motion by significant adults, in particular one or both parents. And it had to begin at an early age. Think through the messages you rehearse in your mind and try to remember who gave you those messages. Check out their validity by comparing them with how God sees you. God does not shame us, even when we do something wrong. His BEP toward us is always unconditional love. That is his nature. Use God’s emotional posture toward you to argue against the messages of those who have shamed you. For help on seeing God’s view of you, read and reread Romans 8:31–39.

It’s important that you take the time and risk talking with your spouse about your internal conversations, especially those related to your BEP.

Action Plan #S3—Give a Name to Your BEP

This is a simple Action Plan. It involves giving a name to your BEP. If you are a woman, give it a feminine name; if you are a man, give it a masculine name. Don’t choose a name associated with someone from your personal history, especially one related to your BEP. Give it a neutral name, for naming it has nothing to do with why it is your BEP. Its purpose is something else.

Once you have named your basic emotional posture, whether it is anger, fear, sadness, or toxic shame, practice referring to it by that name. The act of naming something means you are in the dominant position in relation to it. When a parent names a child, the parent is obviously dominant over that child. Or when you name a pet, you are in charge. When meteorologists name a hurricane, they try to make it seem less threatening. So when you name your BEP, you are saying that you are now in charge of “old what’s-its-name.”

In addition, use the name whenever you refer to that emotion while talking with your spouse. You each need to know the name that the other has given to their BEP. For example, Pat named her BEP of fear “Matilda,” so Don could ask Pat, “How did you do with Matilda today?” Don named his BEP of anger “Oliver,” so Pat could say to him, “I’m not comfortable when Oliver is around. Can you send him away?” The point is for you to be dominant over your emotions.

Action Plan #S4—Keep an Emotional Journal

Writing about our emotions helps us understand them. Harry, a husband who struggled with understanding why he would lose control when angry, bought a special journal in which he kept notes on his experience of anger as well as a variety of emotions. When he lost his temper with his wife, he went to his journal to “think on paper about his emotion of anger.”

For example, after the last argument with his wife, he reflected on his behavior and wrote down three points he wanted to remember. His first note was, “Reacted too quickly. Must slow myself down.” Then he thought some more and realized he “attributed a negative connotation to what she said without checking her words for accuracy.” Third, he wrote, “Need to share this with her and apologize.” You will note that he did not write anything about what the argument was about. He understood that the argument wasn’t about the facts. It was over their different interpretations of the facts.

Harry didn’t view the journal as a means of keeping a record of his wife’s emotions. It was a tool to help him understand his own emotions. There was a section where he did keep some notes on his wife, but it was in response to my explaining to him about how our faces express the universal language of emotions, as we mentioned in chapter 2. I told him to monitor his wife’s face, and when he saw a look he didn’t understand, he was to ask her what she was feeling at that moment. He was then to add to his journal a description of that look and the identified emotion. He reviewed his journal each evening, and in that way he became more fluent in the language of emotions.

He also started a third section in his journal, a “feeling log” of his own emotions throughout the day. Several times each day he would stop what he was doing and check in with himself regarding what he was feeling at that point in time. At first he needed to use the feeling list, but gradually he became more fluent in the language of emotions and didn’t need to reference the feeling list as often. He also tried to check in with himself at the end of each day, noting what his predominant mood was during that day. Obviously, he was very serious about becoming aware of his emotions. This Action Plan doesn’t need to be that intense. But there will be additional uses for a journal in some of the later Action Plans, so get a good one and put it to use.

Action Plan #S5—Identify Your Emotional Buttons

Who pushes your buttons the most? Your spouse? One of your kids? What typically is happening when it feels like someone is pushing one of your buttons? Everybody has emotional sore spots. And they are called buttons because it is all too easy for someone else to push them. This is especially true for how our significant others, and in particular our spouse, can set us off.

When someone’s button is pushed, they are suddenly overwhelmed by negative emotions, especially defensive anger. For example, Mary would feel like exploding with rage every time her husband said to her, “Here, let me do that for you.” He was baffled by her anger, thinking he was only trying to be helpful. They would often end up in what seemed to be childish arguments about his efforts to help her with certain things. After Mary’s last explosion, she finally decided that her husband simply had no idea about why his words set her off. In fact, she didn’t understand her reaction either. Obviously, something else was going on. He was touching a raw nerve that was tied to something painful in her past. Our buttons always have a history.

Mary spent some time thinking about her childish rage over her husband’s efforts to be helpful and gradually began to realize that she was reacting to something her mother had always done to her when she was little. It seemed so obvious now, but Mary had never made the connection before. She and her husband talked about how whenever she would start a project, her mother would just take it over and finish it for her. As she began to realize this, she also started to remember the feelings she’d had in reaction to her mother’s similar words.

Mary grew up feeling she was incompetent since her mother apparently saw her as always needing help. She didn’t remember ever getting angry outwardly with her mother, but she remembers feeling hurt and frustrated as a child. She realized that when her husband said what he did, it felt similar to what her mother used to do, and all her stored-up anger instantly came out at him. Now, though, instead of getting angry with him, she was beginning to see that her reaction was tied to one of her buttons that had been fixed in place by her mother very early in her life.

Our buttons are typically connected to very young parts of ourselves, and their mechanisms are stored in the subconscious part of our mind. The subconscious mind is like the hard drive of a computer, with the programming pretty well set by the time we are six or seven years old. In itself, our subconscious is emotionless, but it is where all of our individual “programs” are stored. It is outside the realm of our awareness—our conscious mind—so its contents need to be identified and then brought into the conscious mind, where we can gradually reprogram the subconscious.

The other thing about the subconscious mind is that it is very quick—lightning fast. That’s why when one of our buttons is pushed, we feel so out of control. But since the subconscious is still a part of us, we can work to better understand the roots of our vulnerable emotional spots and make some changes that will help us feel more grown-up. Here’s a road map for how to reprogram your emotional buttons:

1. Talk with your spouse about what you think your buttons are. Listen to what your spouse thinks. In doing this, you bring the mechanism of the button out into the open—into the conscious zone.
2. Trace back in your memory earlier experiences of reacting, or wanting to react, as if someone had pushed your button. How far back can you remember?
3. Identify the primary person who made that vulnerable spot so raw and placed it into your emotional programming.
4. Seek to understand what was broken in that person’s life that caused them to act as they did.
5. Bring that child part of yourself into the present and talk with your young self in your imagination. Continue the conversation verbally with your spouse about the process. Think of it as comforting that young part of you that has been hurt so it can be released to become part of the grown-up you.

Action Plan #S6—Pay Attention to the Physical Side of Your Emotions

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes, in his two works The Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body, suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has material properties. He said the mind, on the other hand, is nonmaterial and therefore does not follow the laws of nature. He defined the body and mind as two very different entities that may interact in some small way but are basically distinctly different from each other. His dualistic view of mind and body allowed for some excellent research on the human body over the centuries, but it also led to a separation that limited the understanding of the mind’s effect on the body, and vice versa.

Today, neuroscientists clearly believe that mind and body work together intimately. I believe that God made us an integrated whole, not segregated parts. Therefore, whenever you feel an emotion, not only do you experience it in your mind, but you also feel it in your body even before you are aware of feeling it. To understand this point, try a simple experiment. Close your eyes and imagine a situation in which you would experience fear. Picture in your mind the scene as literally as possible. For example, if you are afraid of heights, imagine standing on the edge of a high cliff. Or if you can’t stand closed-in places, imagine being alone in an elevator stuck between floors.

Stay with the scene for as long as you can and then stop. Open your eyes and reorient yourself to where you are, then pay attention to your body. What happened to your heart rate? Did your breathing change? Could you feel your muscles tightening? How did your stomach respond? In that experiment, most people experience physical reactions as well as a real emotion, even though the situation was only imagined. You can do the same with anger, sadness, and shame, as well as joy. Think of a joyful experience and notice the difference in what you experience physically. You are training yourself to become more aware of how your body anticipates an emotion.

Practice recalling different emotional situations you’ve experienced until you are able to connect the emotion to the physical reaction. Picture in your mind as many details as possible in each situation. The goal is to become increasingly aware of the emotion physically. The more you practice, the more quickly you will be able to identify an emotion even before you are aware of feeling it.

Action Plan #S7—Don’t Judge Your Feelings

It’s important to understand that there are no good emotions and no bad emotions. As some people accurately say, “Emotions just are.” Many of us have been taught that anger is a bad emotion. In a way, that can seem to be true, but God also experiences anger, so how can it always be bad? Some people hedge around God being angry by calling it “righteous indignation.” But it is still anger. The apostle Paul tells us to “be angry, and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26 NKJV). So there are ways that anger leads us to sin and ways that it does not. Therefore anger must also be said to have a good side.

One positive part of anger is that it is designed to protect us. Anger can also be good when it leads us to protest injustices or gives us creative energy, among other things. But it’s confusing if we try to define what’s good and what’s not good about anger. It’s better to see anger as an emotional signal. Its “goodness” or “badness” is reflected in how we behave when we are angry.

The same is true of fear. Sometimes it is good to be afraid. If we are being threatened in some way, it might be a good thing that fear motivates us to either freeze or run away. But if we live constantly worried, anxious, and fearful, our fear has led us into bad behavior. We are not meant to live with constant worry or anxiety.

How can sadness be good? Isn’t it the same as depression? Not really. Sadness is a part of grieving, and it helps us process our losses. There’s movement to sadness. It’s good when it reminds us of the losses we have experienced, especially those yet to be grieved. Depression is like being stuck in sadness. There’s no movement to it.

Toxic shame is always bad simply because it is toxic. We could make the same distinction by calling the bad use of anger or fear toxic anger and toxic fear, but we usually don’t make that distinction.

For the purpose of this Action Plan, it is more accurate to think of our emotions as neither good nor bad; it’s what we do with them that is the problem. So it is productive in our journey toward self-awareness to look at what our behavioral tendencies are and to judge them and not the emotion itself.

For example, what if we are angry because a student at our son’s school is picking on our son? We’ll assume that our anger is neutral, and at first it only energizes us to take some action. So we go see the principal. Because we are so upset, we start yelling and telling him how terribly he is running the school and how we’re tempted to take our son out of it, and how can he call himself an educator if he allows this kind of behavior? If we are unaware that anger is our behavioral tendency, it very easily could become a counterproductive reaction, and that kind of behavior with anger is always bad.

But what if our anger motivates us to make an appointment with the principal and calmly tell him our concerns? We listen as he tells us some of the background of what’s going on in the other kid’s life and how the administration is aware of what he is doing. He then describes what actions they are taking to work with the bullying kid and to protect our son and others. We have a productive conversation, and he promises to continue to monitor the situation. Obviously, that is a good outcome, and therefore our neutral experience of being angry led us to act in a caring and productive way. Our behavior in response to our anger was good.

Identify your behavioral tendencies with each of the four emotions. Then focus especially on either anger or fear and describe your impulsive behavioral tendencies. What gets triggered in you that leads to the impulsive response? Write out behaviors that are in line with how you want to behave in relation to your BEP, then talk together with your spouse about them. In your discussion, make sure you don’t overlook talking about your basic emotional posture. Make a commitment to helping each other work toward consistent change.

Action Plan #S8—Become Observant of the Use of Emotions in the Media

There are myriad examples of the behavioral expressions of emotions all around us. You cannot watch a TV program without observing different emotions being expressed either openly or covertly. The behavioral responses to the emotion make it clear what emotion is being expressed—what the writers want the actors to express and the viewers to feel. Make it a game—as you and your spouse watch a TV program, see who can observe an emotion first. Comment on the behaviors that follow the emotion or clearly express the emotion. Have fun with it together. Then write in your emotion journal what you observed.

Do the same when you watch a movie in a theater, except be quiet about your observations until afterward when you discuss the movie. Music is also an expression of emotions, and it is designed to stir up feelings inside the listener. When you hear a favorite piece of music, think about what emotions are being stirred in you.

If you have a favorite author, ask yourself why they are your favorite. How does this author guide you into and through the land of emotions? Great writers know how to play on our emotions as we read. They write to create a mood, to take us someplace we haven’t been, to let us experience the other ways people live. They do that by tapping into our emotions.

Art is like a book or a piece of music in that the artist is also trying to create a mood or a feeling. Can you express what mood or feeling is being stirred up in you as you observe any piece of art? How about in some of your old photos? What emotions are expressed in the photo?

Whenever one of these formats grabs your attention, take a close look at why. Odds are the reason is emotional.

Action Plan #S9—Don’t Avoid Being Uncomfortable

The path of greater self-awareness is not an easy one. It may be the most difficult part of our journey, for it asks that we be more aware of ourselves. And for each of us, it is not a comfortable process to see ourselves as we really are. For some time we have been working at avoiding painful issues and covering up our emotions, but now we are called to face reality and work through many things we’d rather overlook. And to do that, we are going to confront our discomfort with certain feelings and experiences.

To understand this is to understand how Eskimos and polar bears interact. Barry Lopez describes this in his book Arctic Dreams. To the Eskimo, the polar bear is a feared and extremely dangerous enemy, much like we might view the emotion at the core of our BEP or even emotions in general. In the Eskimo culture, a young person entering adulthood had to literally confront the polar bear. Lopez says, “To encounter the bear, to meet it with your whole life, was to grapple with something personal. . . . If you were successful you found something irreducible within yourself, like a seed. To walk away was to be alive, utterly. . . . It was to touch the bear. It was a gift from the bear.”1 A young person literally had to touch the bear and survive. Success meant that youth was an adult. The Eskimos call it “the gift from the bear.”

In the same way, we will be gifted when we deal with the uncomfortable emotions in our lives—not those in another person, but the raw, pure, and often scary emotions in each of us. Leaning into those uncomfortable emotions is like touching the bear.

At some point during the process of becoming more self-aware, especially as you look at your behavioral tendencies, it will feel like you are being called upon to “touch the bear.” What feelings do you try your best to avoid? Why do you think you want to avoid them? (Think deeper than just saying they are uncomfortable.) For example, some of us will do everything in our power to avoid feeling down. We were taught as children that sad feelings are to be avoided at all costs. The message might not have been clear and direct, but we got it!

There are also those who seek to avoid any joyful or positive feelings. They have found that too much joy suddenly snaps them into a painful down mood. So they keep all emotions on an even keel. Others have spent a lifetime ignoring the land of emotions, hoping that the painful ones will go away. Then they find that the emotions did not go away but have a tendency to suddenly resurface when least expected.

The important task associated with this Action Plan is to allow for and face the discomfort related to certain emotions, feelings, and moods. You will find that when you stay with the process, the discomfort will ease and you will learn some important things about yourself in the process. You will have experienced “the gift from the bear.”

Action Plan #S10—Describe in Detail How You Change When under Stress

What’s good about stress? Although a certain level of stress may motivate a person to persevere in an important task, stress is increasingly being blamed for all kinds of issues from depression to a compromised immune system, which leads to many terminal illnesses. That’s why it’s so important that we understand our personal warning systems about stress before our stress levels are out of control. We want to understand the early signs of what goes on in our bodies and minds when stress starts building—the stress may just be around the corner, but before long, it’s right there in our faces.

Our bodies and our minds will tell us when we are going to be under too much stress. Increased anxiety is a warning signal, as is an upset stomach. Sometimes it takes a canker sore in our mouth or increased back pain to tell us we are pushing too hard. Fatigue that says, “I can’t, but I have no other choice” is a clear signal of too much stress. The goal of this Action Plan is to clearly identify the early personal signals that indicate stress is building up—signals we often push aside as we press forward.

What does your body tell you? What are some of the things you say to yourself that indicate your stress levels are too high? Talk with your spouse about this.

It’s important that you support and encourage each other on the journey into greater emotional self-awareness. Don’t let up, and don’t expect the journey to be accomplished overnight. It will take a lifetime to know yourself, for after all, you are a complex human being. But be assured that the journey of increasing self-awareness is worth it all. Yet there is also more to come. As we become more and more aware in the land of emotions, we can grow in our ability to manage these emotions, feelings, and moods.