SELF-UNDERSTANDING

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, with a New Afterword (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1980, 2003) ("The capacity for self-understanding presupposes the capacity for mutual understanding. Common sense tells us that it's easier to understand ourselves than to understand other people. After all, we tend to think that we have direct access to our own feelings and ideas and not to anybody else's. Self-understanding seems prior to mutual understanding, and in some ways it is. But any really deep understanding of why we do what we do, feel what we feel, change as we change, and even believe what we believe, takes us beyond ourselves. Understanding of ourselves is not unlike other forms of understanding--it comes out of our constant interactions with our physical, cultural, and interpersonal environment. At a minimum, the skills required for mutual understanding are necessary even to approach self-understanding. Just as in mutual understanding we constantly search out commonalities of experience when we speak with other people, so in self-understanding we are always searching for what unifies our own diverse experiences in order to give coherence to our lives. Just as we seek out metaphors to highlight and make coherent what we have in common with someone else, so we seek out personal metaphors to highlight and make coherent our own pasts, our present activities, and our dreams, hopes, and goals as well. A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives. Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of your experiences to yourself. In therapy, for example, much of self-understanding involves consciously recognizing previously unconscious metaphors and how we live by them. It involves the constant construction of new coherence in your life, coherence that give new meaning to old experiences. The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself." "The experientialist approach to the process of self-understanding involves: Developing an awareness of the metaphors we live by and an awareness of where they enter onto our every day lives and where they do not[;] Having experiences that can form the basis of alternative metaphors[;] Developing an 'experiential flexibility'[;] Engaging in an unending process of viewing your life through new alternative metaphors." Id. at 232-233.).