How to Check in on Ourselves

It’s one of the peculiarities of the way we’re built that we lack immediate access to many of our most important emotions. When people ask us ‘how are you?’ and we reply in vague and superficial terms, we aren’t often simply hiding our real feelings from our audiences, we may not be in touch with them ourselves. 

It’s possible to spend a good deal of our lives with our attention trained firmly outwards. We might be chairing back to back meetings, drawing up budgets or travelling from one location to another – and all the while have little active sense that we are – in fact, in the background – exhausted, enraged, jealous, heartbroken or nostalgic. The people and situations that made us so could have disappeared long before we develop any active sense of what they provoked in us. We might be the stated owners of our whole beings; yet we consciously inhabit only a very small part of ourselves.

Our incapacity to know our minds directly can be traced back to our early years. We tend to realise how we’re feeling only to the extent that other people once took an interest in how we were feeling, especially in emotions that may not have appeared entirely ‘normal’ or ‘good’. Perhaps, as children, we expressed occasional wishes that granny would die, that the school would burn down or that we could get rid of our younger sibling. It’s the mark of a sound parent to be able to bear to listen to such complexities without censorship – which in turn allows the child to be less frightened of, and readier to explore, the less well-lit corners of their own minds. The central legacy of having been heard by others is a greater capacity to hear oneself.

To start to regain a better hold on our true feelings, we should submit ourselves to an artificial exercise: we should ask ourselves a series of structured questions. We should, when we have time off, probably late at night or in the early morning, lie somewhere quietly without interruption, perhaps close our eyes and interview our minds as if they belonged to someone else (they sort of do). 

We should direct the following questions at ourselves, not thinking too much as we answer, simply saying what comes immediately to mind (our real selves tend to hide or lie if given too much time to respond).

1. I feel…

The answer might be sadder, more hopeful or more repetitive than we had imagined or wanted to imagine.

2. I really need…

We are so busy with the requirements of others, we typically forget to observe our own stifled needs. They may not fit the standard view of who we should be or what it is respectable to want, which makes their honest acceptance all the more important. It made not be perfect that we want to go back to our ex or tell our mother we despise her or curl up in a small ball and cry. But it’s extremely helpful to know that these are our wants, which prevents our minds shutting down into depression or anxiety – or our bodies having to nudge us to insight through a twitch or a cold or another bout of back pain.

3. I’m angry that…

From the earliest age, we were probably told not to be too angry, but that doesn’t stop us from being so, indeed, it’s the very underlying suggestion that anger is bad that leads to a build up of true volcanic fury.

4. I’m hurt that…

We are more delicate than we imagine. No hour goes by without some wound to our sense of integrity. We learnt to be tough but the armour only covers our external self. Inside, we’re as often in tears as a four year old.

5. My body wants…

It’s odd to think that our bodies might want anything at all. But they have as much to say to us as our minds. And if we keep not listening to them, they’ll have to start to insist on sending us their messages in the only way they know how: via illnesses.

After twenty minutes of self-interview, we’re likely to have a slightly different sense of who we are to what we’d imagined. We’re stranger no doubt, but we’re also far more interesting and vivid. We exchange a plastified identity for the truth. The more we can be aware of what we truly experience, the lighter and more unburdened we can feel.