What is Self-Awareness, Why is it Important for a Successful Relationship, and How to Attain it

WHAT IS SELF-AWARENESS?

Self-Awareness is a process by which you get to know yourself better. You can then understand what controls your attitudes, thinking, reactions and behaviors and drive you to sabotage your relationships. As you attai
Self-Awareness you can realize the factors that exert power over you, de-activate their power and stop harming your relationships.

Developing Self-awareness enables you to become conscious to the following 8 factors:

1) The messages, beliefs, opinions and values you have unconsciously internalized while growing up. These influence your attitudes, thinking, reactions and behaviors in your adult life.

2) The traits you deny and reject which are part of “who you are”. Unwilling to accept them as part of you, you project them onto your partners thus harming the relationship.

3) The unfinished business from the past that sabotages you.

4) The needs and deprivations that rule you and drive you to harm your relationships.

5) The fears that control you and lead you to sabotage your relationships in a variety of ways.

6) The expectations from partners and relationships that mislead you and cause you to hurt yourself in relationships.

7) The fantasies about partners and relationships you hold on to which hurt you.

8) The automatic reactions and behavioral patterns you are used to. You repeat them throughout all your interactions, not able to consciously choose other reactions and behaviors, thus harming your relationships.

Not being aware of these factors you don’t realize the part they play in driving you to harm your relationships. Taking the time to develop self-awareness will enable you to realize the damage they cause, to stop them from influencing you, and to become empowered to cultivate a successful and satisfying bond.

WHY IS SELF-AWA
EESS IMPORTANT FOR A SUCCESSFUL INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP?

Self-awareness is important for a successful intimate relationship because only when you attai
Self-Awareness you can understand the factors which cause you to harm your relationships over and over again. Only then you can de-activate the power they exert over you and become empowered to develop a successful and satisfying bond.

HOW TO ATTAIN SELF-AWARENESS?

To attai
Self-Awareness, you need to go through the following 8 steps:

1) Seriously ask yourself what drives you to fail in your relationships - and be motivated to find the true answers.

2) Observe yourself and begin to provide the answers you are seeking. You can observe your interactions with your partner, and also observe – in retrospect – your interactions with previous partners. As you observes you should look for patterns which repeat themselves throughout all your interactions.

3) Gather information: based on your questions and observations you need to “collect data” and begin to understand what this data tells you about yourself and your patterns of thinking, reacting and behaving with your partners.

4) Identify what exerts power over you (such as the needs and fears that control you, your belief system, messages you internalized during childhood; your expectations and fantasies, and so on);

5) See the how your thoughts, attitudes and feelings are connected to and influence your reactions and behaviors.

6) Realize how you interpret things. For example, your needs, fears and belief-system might make you think that your partner is always “against you”; that you partner “never loves you enough”; that your partner “controls you all the time”, and so on – all of which affect your reactions and behaviors and harm your relationships.

7) Honestly report to yourself what you see. If you deny and reject what you have found out about yourself you will continue behaving in exactly the same way you have until now, thus continue to harm your relationships.

8) Acknowledge and accept what you have noticed and learned about yourself: It is only when you are willing to acknowledge and accept what you have noticed that you can stop your self-sabotaging behaviors and choose new ones, vital to cultivating a successful intimacy. For example, you might need to accept the fact that you are a controlling person, a fact that until now you might have refused to admit to yourself, claiming that you “love your partner so much” that you do everything possible for him/her (to the point of not letting your partner make even one decision).

BECOMING EMPOWERED TO CULTIVATE A SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIP

Becoming empowered to cultivate a successful intimate relationship is achieved when you actively pursue the following 8 activities:

1) Become truly motivated to find out what’s going wrong and what you can do to change it;

2) Get up the courage to admit to yourself that you have been sabotaging your relationships;

3) Begin to develop Self-Awareness;

4) Get to know and understand yourself better;

5) Realize the ways in which you have harmed your relationships;

6) Understand what exerted control over you and drove you to sabotage your relationships;

7) De-activate the power the different factors have had over you;

8) Consciously choose new ways of reacting and behaving –

YOU THEN BECOME EMPOWERED TO CULTIVATE A SUCCESSFUL INTIMATE REALTIONSHIP.