Month: April 2022

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Insight and Reflection

  • Usually people start therapy (or struggle) because there is some ongoing dynamic they can’t solve or change. Things like: “I can’t find a partner”, “I don’t have great relationships with my friends”, “I’m angry all the time” etc.
  • The journey then begins to try and uncover the mystery of what may be happening. The starting block of this understanding is reflecting – i.e. getting in touch with thoughts and feelings (and perhaps putting some patterns together that can help you better understand what has happened and why).
  • But for many, developing insight, which is awareness into how our way of being effects those around us (and subsequently our relationships), is desperately needed to inform a sense of direction, yet is inaccessible to discover (or accept) – perhaps because it requires a level of vulnerability from us.
  • To develop insight there needs to be a willingness to see ourselves outside of our rationalizations, explanations, and justifications for why we behave the way we do. It requires a willingness to see parts of yourself you like and don’t like and to examine how those parts of you effect others and your relationships. 
  • Very often, a reflective stance (where we get in touch with thoughts and feelings) is confused with an insightful stance (where we understand our impact on others). Having the capacity to reflect can lead to insight, but we can spend a lot of time reflecting and still not seeing how we are participating in creating outcomes in our lives.
  • An example: Imagine it’s hard for me to open up because I fear rejection. When I am reflective I’m aware of my fear of rejection and being hurt. I might explore the current impact of prior experiences of rejection. When I’m insightful I’m aware my guarded nature creates a wall between me and others making it difficult for others to get close to me.
  • When we can see how we effect others, we can start to see how we may inadvertently get in our own way. We can use the knowledge we gain from our newfound insight into our impact on others to help us experiment with making changes that will enable us to relate to those around us in ways that are more likely to lead to the outcomes we want.
  • In our example, I might need to take a leap of faith and work towards being more vulnerable with others in spite of my fears. This path might not otherwise cross my mind given my fears of rejection if not for my insight that the ways in which I withhold from others creates a barrier to having the close relationships I want. 
  • We can “hold on” (internally) to our insight about what changes are needed as a guiding path at those times when we realize there is a disconnect between what we want in our relationships with others and how we participate in them. That insight can anchor us to help us muster up the bravery to try something new.
  • More in today’s post about how to build insight and the differences (and links between) reflection and insight.

People come to therapy with a lot of beliefs and assumptions about “what it’s supposed to be like”.  For many people that includes some version of getting in touch with and processing their thoughts and feelings, revisiting and processing formative moments in their lives, and making connections about what’s happening now and what has happened in the past.


All of these are excellent uses of therapy and can be the building blocks of developing insight. Folks can get stuck, however, in therapy (and in life) when they struggle to more directly work towards taking that next step, which is building insight and awareness into how they effect others, the environment around them, and how they participate in the outcomes they have experienced in their lives.


When we are busy justifying, defending, or rationalizing we often too wrapped up in ourselves to notice how we may be effecting others and the outcomes we experience. To be insightful we need look at the facts of how we treat others from a perspective that isn’t informed by all the awareness we hold about how or why we are justified in doing or saying what we do or say. Empathy can be a component of self-awareness: imagine yourself in the shoes of the other party and think about how you might react toward you if you were on the receiving end of your own words or actions (without the internal information you hold that informs your decisions to treat others or behave the way you do).


To try and build more insight get invested in the idea that you are likely effecting and contributing to the outcomes in your life, even if you don’t want that to be the case. Ask yourself, “how have I participated in this?” What might I be communicating with my action / inaction, tone, body language, or responsiveness?”.  Pay attention to dynamics like reciprocity. Ask yourself how much trust or suspicion informs your stance in a relationship. Although others can’t read our minds, they can pick up on cues from us that inform the dynamic between us.


Reflection and self-awareness are different from one another, but both important in understanding yourself, making changes in your life, and improving your relationships.

Comments:

  1. Insight and self-awareness are used interchangeably in this post, and some would call “insight” holding an awareness of your thoughts and feelings. I’m using the term reflection to refer to having awareness of your inner world, and insight to have the awareness of your impact on others as a way to highlight the different nature of these two components of emotional and relational awareness.
  2. What I hope we can avoid here is too much confusion around semantics. I’m less concerned that you pin point when you are reflecting versus demonstrating insight, and am more interested in having you be invested in both, seeing the value in both, and recognizing an opportunity to incorporate both into your life (and – if applicable – your therapy). I’m also not communicating that reflecting is “inferior” to insight. Reflecting is important because it helps us find patterns, make connections, and get in touch with our inner world; it’s valuable in and of itself. 
  3. One thing that’s a bit tricky about building insight is we aren’t often told (directly) by others how we are impacting them or the community around us – people don’t usually say “you’re not getting that promotion because you can’t collaborate well and take in others ideas and so others around you see you as controlling and domineering” it’s often more like “we’re looking to see you continue to grow and work as a teammate with your colleagues, try and work on delegating”. So we have to do a bit of intuiting and piecing together based on patterns we observe and feedback we do get. This can run right into predispositions we hold to make assumptions or read situations based on our histories, so sometimes our attempts to build insight can be thwarted because we are trying to understand how we may be effecting others without necessarily having all the information. A tip here: Ask a safe, nonjudgmental person in your life for their honest feedback if you have a theory about how your way of being might effect them (or others). Another tip: Take a look at how you act/behave and what you say, and then work to observe how others around you handle similar situations (and how folks respond to them). You can learn a lot from watching what works (and doesn’t work) for others. I personally had a very transformative experience once when I went into a store and silently watched how a friend handled a return (in a way that was foreign and un-intuitive to me, but effective). There can be small teaching moments for us to tap into in our lives if we are looking to make use of them.
  4. A potential blockage to self-awareness / insight?: Anxiety or Depression. In our efforts to cope with our emotional state we may start to ask for things like reassurance, only be comfortable interacting under certain conditions, have difficulties tolerating conversations where others don’t agree with us etc. Ultimately, all of that effects our relationships with others AND simultaneously feels necessary for us to cope with our emotional state. This is where learning new coping skills can come in very handy (once we have a sense of how our response to our symptoms is effecting others and our relationships).
  5. You can think of “coping by distancing” as an example of a time when our thoughts, beliefs, and coping mechanisms may effect those around us in an unintended manner. Another example of us coping in a manner that might negatively effect our relationships is displacement.
  6. This post encourages you to make changes. This post is full of tips on making changes in a sustainable manner. 
  7. For more on how we can inadvertently participate in creating outcomes in our life see my post on cyclical psychodynamics.
  8. Looking to try and build more awareness into how your thinking informs how you approach others and problem solving? See my post on Internalizing and Externalizing.
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Why We Need Coping Skills

  • It’s not uncommon for many people, mental health professionals included, to think of coping skills as “a crutch”.
  • Many folks get stuck because they hold beliefs that they (or their patients) “should be able to feel their feelings as they are”, rather than accept that people may need to learn how to tolerate their emotional world through the use of moderators (like coping skills) that make emotions tolerable enough for us to be present with and then make use of.
  • We all have varying levels of skill at interfacing with our emotional world constructively. Those of us that didn’t have strong models for accepting, managing, and constructively expressing emotions are more likely to need to learn coping skills. Those of us that had them modeled for us are likely to find the tactics and concepts intuitive.
  • When we are not as skilled at naturally accessing our emotions in a constructive manner we may feel overwhelmed by them or numb and unable to be in touch with them. This is where the intentional use of coping skills tailored to you and your individual strengths and needs come in.
  • Those that struggle with flooding / emotional overwhelm may need distraction and present centered coping mechanisms (like grounding or meditation). Those that struggle with finding and feeling their emotions may need embodiment based coping skills like body scans, or deep breathing which help you connect more sustainably to yourself.
  • Even if you have strong emotional regulation skills (whether they were learned or came to you intuitively) there are also conceptual coping skills that are useful for everyone to learn and practice that help improve relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, and your communication.
  • There are many conceptual coping skills (see comments for ones I have covered in this account). An example: approaching a situation from a nonjudgmental stance. Instead we work to be descriptive and in doing so reduce the likelihood that judgments get in the way of our ability to get to the core of our reactions, preferences, values, and needs.
  • Other conceptual coping skills include acceptance, (where we work to acknowledge the limits of our control, and the reality – as it really is – in front of us) and willingness (which means openness and readiness to interface with your situation in in a manner that has your short and long term goals in mind).
  • Many of us get stuck because our life long way of doing things, feeling our feelings, problem solving, and addressing conflict feel like a core part of us – just who we are and how we are. But, if we can be open to expanding our approach, and integrating coping skills we can change lifelong patterns that haven’t served us.

One of the things I encourage in my practice, as well as in this account, is being able to live in harmony with your inner world, which does require an ability to tolerate your feelings and respond to them in a constructive manner. However, many of us get stuck because we don’t know how to feel our feelings without ruminating (I.e. keeping them activated in a cyclical manner without working though them); or some version of numbness (where we can’t feel our feelings and experience ourselves as cut off from them).

When we struggle to have a harmonious relationship with our feelings we can get pushed out of our window of tolerance to a place where our thinking world and our emotional world cannot work together. At those times, it is difficult to step back and get to a reflective place where we can notice, make sense of, feel AND think through what may be happening in an integrated manner.

A lot of therapists and self-help books encourage you to “feel your feelings”, which yes! We need to do. But we need to do so constructively and in a manner that helps of make use of them. Our emotional worlds can be chaotic and overwhelming; coping skills are tools that help us manage, navigate, and make use of our emotions in a constructive manner so they don’t overpower us.

There are in the moment coping skills like deep breathing or body scans that help to alleviate the intensity of emotion, or help us get in touch with our emotions. There are also conceptual coping skills that are windows through which we are work to see our lives, relationships, responsibilities and goals. When we use conceptual coping skills we are shifting our mindset so we can respond to the moment with what the moment needs, and what we need to bring about long and short-term success.

Often, once we’ve developed a regular practice with coping skills we actually have an increased tolerance for our capacity to feel our emotions at depth; this is because we know and trust we can feel deeply without being overrun. Our therapies, relationships, capacity for vulnerability and communication are all positively effected because we can fully feel our feelings, think and reflect in an integrated manner.

Comments:

  1. *For the mental health professionals out there*: you may recognize this post as talking about the division we so often see between the cognitive / behaviorally oriented treatments and psychodynamically / relationally oriented treatments. I hear time and again how there is this divide in the field, often with skepticism about the validity of the treatment the other party offers. From my perspective, folks who are seeing limited progress from the relationally or psychodynamically based approaches may need some of the coping skills I describe in this account that fall into the behavioral or cognitive category. The coping skills provided by those interventions can create internal safety for our clients, which eventually enable them to lean more fully in to the psychodynamically and relationally oriented treatments which often require a level of collaboration and openness that may not be accessible without having some core distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and cognitive challenging skills. Similarly, clients who have solely done skill building work may eventually benefit from the insight oriented and relationally based work of a more psychodynamic and relational oriented therapy; having the tools to tolerate their inner world may enable them to not just use skills, but to work to begin to relate and connect to others (and them selves) in new and more effective patterns. It is not uncommon for me to work with psychodynamically oriented clinicians and see their “stuck” patients for skill building. Similarly, for my clients who I work with from a more relational or psychodynamic perspective, sometimes our work needs to shift into skill building to tolerate the depth of the insight oriented work. It doesn’t need to be either/or!
  2. *For folks in therapy that feel stuck*: Talk to your therapist about the style of therapy they are doing with you! Do you feel like you can’t think / feel / reflect at the same time? You might need something more concrete from your therapist to get you adequate coping skills to handle what arises in your life. Alternately, do you feel you have great coping skills, but haven’t seen the kind of pattern change you would like? Talk to your therapist about looking at patterns and doing insight oriented work to help break old patterns that are no longer serving you.
  3. I briefly mention “non-judgmentally” in this post. I have three extensive posts on this. If you (and most of us do) struggle with judgments please read further on how to take a nonjudgmental stance, how to deconstruct judgments, and the problems judgements create for us .
  4. More here on a conceptual coping skill on finding balance in relationships, and effectively considering ourselves and others (at the same time).
  5. For Communication coping skills to reduce conflict see this post on taking a pause from conflict; this post on patterns to avoid in your relationship and in conflict.
  6. For help with the conceptual coping skill of acceptance see, more here.
  7. For help with tolerating very difficult times see a collection of coping skills under the acronym IMPROVE.
  8. For help with learning how to be in the present (which is useful if you are prone to flooding or disconnecting) see posts on being one-minded; meditation, and for newbies to meditation I’d encourage you to start with introductory meditation for mental health.
  9. This post contains a fusion of perspectives from attachment theory (which prioritizes finding safety), DBT (which emphasizes the role of therapist as both supporter and teacher), and mindfulness based therapy. For more reading on any of these topics see Daniel Siegel’s mindsight (which goes into more depth on the impact of leaving the window of tolerance), Marsha Linehan’s textbook on DBT (this book is VERY dense and is a textbook used in graduate level classes), and David Wallin’s Attachment in Psychotherapy which is meant for clinicians but is more accessible to a non-clinician audience than the Linehan book.
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