Self-Awareness
I say “self-awareness,” you say “interoceptive awareness.”
OK, not you.
But someone does.
Whatever it’s called, it’s the crucial first step to doing emotion work.
Which is a crucial step in staying balanced and healthy within ourselves and in our relationships. With spouses. With children. With parents. With colleagues. With students.
Simply put, interoceptive awareness is the skill of noticing what’s going on inside one’s body. It is the ability to feel physical sensations like pain, hunger, a racing pulse and emotional sensations like fear, frustration, and anger. All of these sensations signal imbalance in our organisms. All of them imply that something is wrong that needs to be put right.
The task of putting things right in our bodies is what I call emotion work. Getting help doing emotion work is what I call psycho-coaching.
The thing about interoceptive awareness — affectionately shortened, by afficionados like us, to IA — is that, as I say, it’s only the first step to relief. You have to notice that something’s going on inside you before you can do anything about it. Right?
But here’s the thing: If you don’t have any hope that noticing bad feelings will do you any good, then why notice them? Why not ignore them? Or numb them? Or just expel them in a burst of venting or complaining?
I’m here to say that cultivating your IA and then doing emotion work on what you notice inside yourself will
work wonders.
I’m here to say, further, that having negative feelings about students, parents, administrators, yourself is normal, natural, and good. Without negative feelings, you can’t know that anything is wrong. That your relationships need tuning. That your — or someone else’s — psychic survival is at risk. That you’re heading to burnout.
Avoiding negative feelings? Bad. Pretending they don’t exist? Bad. Discharging your negative feelings on other people? Bad.
Embracing your negative feelings as data pointing to the need to recalibrate yourself and your relationships?