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Living in a Blameless World Part 3

The importance of self-awareness and taking ownership of the way stigma impacts you.

By S PPublished 7 years ago 5 min read
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“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung“Becoming acquainted with yourself is a price well worth paying for the love that will really address your needs.'" – Daphne Rose Kingma

My third part of this section is going to be about stigma and taking care of yourself through taking ownership of your actions and self-awareness. The reason why is simply without fully looking at every aspect of your situation, you cannot really see it for what it is. Yes, it is 100 percent factual that outside circumstances do play a role in how we perceive our lives. What also plays a role along with these outside circumstances is each of us personally and what we either do or do not do in order to either improve or make our lives worse.

One major issue which people tend not to understand as totally as they should is the vital role they themselves must play if their treatment is to be successful. In order to discover and ultimately be successful in being the person you wish to become, you need to first fully understand yourself. Having a complete truthful knowledge of who you are is undoubtedly one of the most important steps in your growth as it can help you in so many avenues you may encounter. It can help you recognize negative triggers and thus be able to not only cope with these triggers but also to deal with them in a manner which will produce positive results, instead of ignoring them.

Understanding yourself and why you feel as you do can produce many positive results in your life such as your ability to develop more positive coping skills and a more consistent approach to your treatment. As a result, this can bring about a positive improvement to your overall health in general.

These are just a few of the important things that can occur as a result of you having a realistic view of who you are! The better you understand yourself, the better you will be able to understand the world around you and the better you will be able to communicate with the people who play important roles in your life.

An awareness of your strengths and weaknesses can enable you to see not only what you need to improve on but also have an understanding of the things which are more effective and also least effective with your treatment and your life in general.

Another aspect of self-awareness is self-acceptance. You need to first accept the things which are in your life and role in how others impacted these things. What is also very important is understanding the role that you play within your own life your various life experiences. As a personal example, when I first got diagnosed with ADHD, I was embarrassed because of a lack of understanding it. Through my childhood without treatment of any kind severely affected my self-confidence.

I'm fairly intelligent, that doesn't mean that I'm perfect. I have many weaknesses. By accepting that I have ADHD, I needed to realize that there would always be limitations that it causes me within my life. Through self-awareness, I realized many times that there are also workarounds for those limitations.I constantly make a proactive effort to understand what I need to be a stronger person, and I break down my goals in a realistic way, in order to make myself a better person.

I recommend taking a look at the following questions and really thinking long and hard about what your answer is and for the questions you negatively answer or don't have an answer for, ask yourself why.

  • What are my strengths?
  • What are my long-term and also short-term goals?
  • What do I want to change?
  • What are my weakness and how can I use my strengths in order to improve on my weaknesses?
  • What are my core values?
  • How does my mental health issue coincide with my life?
  • What are my triggers and what can I do in order to strengthen them?
  • What do I do directly and also indirectly to sabotage myself?
  • Do I constructively deal with stressful situations or am I doing repetition compulsion? (Which is putting yourself in situations where you have had negative experiences in order to subconsciously gain control over the experience, in order for it to have less control over you)

It's questions like these that make you understand yourself because unless you understand you, then you shouldn't expect other people to understand you!

For this reason, I will be mentioning ownership next and the importance of ownership!

The reason ownership is an important part of self-awareness and self-acceptance is that when you do not own up to the things that you do that negatively affect your life, then you will be constantly be making the same mistakes over and over, in one shape or another!

With stigma, it's not something that you can always change with a person. What you can change is the way that stigma affects you! You do this by understanding yourself, because when you have the resources (which many people do not) then you have the tools within yourself to make the proper decisions to positively impact your life. You become equipped to make the behavioral, therapeutic, and social changes within yourself to make positive decisions in how you perceive life events!

This isn't easy! I will admit I still have issues with this! Even with my educational background, I still have to make a conscious effort to deal positively with the ignorance of some people clearly seem not to care how their actions affect someone's life directly or indirectly as long as they are in their own personal comfort zone.

When you take ownership of yourself and have a strong sense of self and knowledge base, regardless of what the irrelevant opinions are, you learn that the power is not in how you impact them. The power is that they have no impact on you!

Essentially the power by understanding these fundamental principles makes you one step closer to understanding yourself!

The more you understand yourself, and why things impact you the way that they do. Then you will have an easier time knowing what you can do. In order to change something from impacting you in a negative way to a positive way

Also by answering these questions and understanding yourself, it is an important step in figuring out what type of coping mechanisms effectively work for you.

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About the Creator

S P

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