When Self-Awareness Becomes Another Place to Hide

Isn't it funny when someone points out how defensive you get when you feel criticized, and before they even finish, you’re already nodding.

“Oh, I know. That’s because…”

And off you go.

It’s this weird moment that happens when you’ve gotten pretty good at understanding yourself.

You know what triggers it. You know where it came from. You can explain why your reaction makes complete sense and probably connect it to three other patterns you’ve already identified in yourself.

It’s a very impressive analysis of the behavior you are still actively doing.

Look at you, right? All self-aware and reflective.

And really, that does feel like progress, doesn’t it?

There was probably a time when you wouldn’t have seen any of it. You would’ve just been annoyed that they said it. But now… you can recognize what happened, why it hit you the way it did and maybe even catch yourself while it’s happening.

That’s huge.

Except...

you’re still getting defensive.

I know.

Dang it.

And that’s the part I keep getting stuck on, because once you start paying attention to yourself, it’s kind of amazing how much you begin to see.

You catch yourself overexplaining and know exactly why you’re doing it. You hear “Sure, I can do that” come out of your mouth when you really wanted to say no and immediately think, Ohhh… I gotta stop doing that.

You start noticing what sets you off. Why certain conversations make you shut down, or why you automatically take over when you feel uncertain.

Why being needed feels good right up until you’re resentful that everyone needs you, or why you say you want help and then make it almost impossible for anyone to actually help you.

And when we can finally put a name to it, there’s relief in that.

Okay. So I’m not crazy. There’s a reason this is hard for me.

I can tell you when I’m trying to control something because uncertainty is making me uncomfortable.

I can tell you why I can think something to death when all I really want is to guarantee that nothing will go wrong.

I can even recognize when being useful feels a whole lot easier than admitting I need something.

It all starts to make sense, doesn’t it? Understanding gives us language for what’s happening instead of just feeling like we’re reacting all over the place.

And yes, this sounds perfect.

But there’s one problem.

Knowing why we do those things has not made us stop doing them.

I know. Wonderful.

So apparently we can understand a pattern really, really well and still live inside it.

You understand that you tend to disappear inside other people’s needs, but here you are at the end of another week realizing everybody got what they needed except you.

You know why criticism hits you so hard, and you still spend the next two hours building a closing argument in your head about why the other person is wrong — even though you know you probably won’t even say any of it out loud.

You know exactly why you have trouble saying no, yet still hear the words “Sure, I can do that” come out of your mouth before you’ve even checked your calendar.

Doh.

Sometimes you can even recognize the pattern while you are actively doing it.

Which feels a little unfair.

I thought noticing was supposed to fix this, right?

Apparently not.

But I do think we quietly expect it to sometimes.

We read the book, hear the podcast, have the conversation, finally connect a few dots and think, Mmmk, great. Now that I understand why I do this, surely I’ll stop doing it.

Sure. In a perfect world.

But alas alack… insight is not a software update.

You don’t discover the root of a pattern on Monday and wake up Tuesday with an entirely new operating system. We start by understanding it, and then suddenly we start seeing it absolutely everywhere.

Which can get a little obnoxious.

Because before you understood it, you could just do the thing. Now you’re doing the thing and watching yourself do it.

You say yes while some part of you is thinking, We literally just talked about this.

You take over because someone isn’t doing something the way you would while simultaneously recognizing that taking over is exactly what you said you wanted to stop doing.

You explain why you’re fine instead of admitting you need something while some part of your brain is basically yelling, Come on. We know this one.

Joking aside, this really is a big deal.

Change starts with being able to see what’s happening, and now you can. You’re recognizing the behavior or the pattern inside yourself even if you’re still very much in the middle of it.

So I don’t think the takeaway is that self-awareness isn’t working.

I think we may just expect it to do more than it actually can.

Understanding helps us see the pattern. It doesn’t magically change what happens when that pattern wanders into a random Tuesday.

And real life is where everything gets a lot less tidy.

Understanding that you’ve spent years making yourself easy to accommodate is great right up until somebody asks where you want to eat and you have to actually name a restaurant instead of saying, “Whatever works.”

You can completely understand why you need to delegate instead of taking on every task known to man because you’re convinced you’re the only one who can do it right. Then somebody offers to handle something, does it completely differently than you would, and suddenly all that understanding has to help you keep your hands to yourself.

Good luck.

That’s where I think we can get stuck without even realizing we’re stuck, because thinking about change is a whole lot easier than encountering the pattern in real life.

I can sit alone and understand myself beautifully. I can journal about my patterns and tell you where they came from, what triggers them, what role they served and why they once made complete sense.

Nobody is disappointed in me while I’m journaling about boundaries.

Nobody pushes back while I’m reading about using my voice.

The uncomfortable part comes when the ordinary moment shows up again.

Now, stick with me here, because I’m not saying, “Enough reflecting. Just change already.”

Sometimes understanding really is the work.

There are things we need language for before we can do anything with them. There are experiences we may have spent years dismissing, minimizing or misunderstanding, and finally understanding why something affects us the way it does can bring compassion to places where we’ve mostly given ourselves criticism.

We need that.

But there’s a difference between letting an explanation help us understand ourselves and letting the explanation become the end of the conversation.

I think you can hear it in these two sentences:

This is why I learned to do this.

This is just how I am.

The first one gives us context.

The second one starts sounding suspiciously like a permanent address.

That’s where self-awareness can become another place to hide.

I don't think we're deliberately avoiding anything. But sometimes understanding feels so much like movement that we don’t realize we’ve stopped there.

There’s always another layer to uncover, another book to read, another concept to learn, another explanation, another thing from childhood to connect to something we did on Tuesday.

And listen, we are complicated people. We could probably keep trying to understand ourselves forever.

But eventually, self-awareness has to start moving a little closer to the actual moment.

At first, you recognize what happened thirty minutes later.

Ohhh. That’s why I reacted like that.

Then maybe it’s ten minutes later.

Eventually you’re halfway through the conversation and suddenly think, Yep. Doing it right now.

And every once in a while, you catch it just before.

That may not feel like much.

But it is.

Because the point isn’t to get so good at explaining our patterns that we could give a TED Talk about them while continuing to do exactly what we’ve always done.

It’s to recognize what’s happening sooner.

And please don’t criticize yourself because the pattern still shows up. Of course it will. You can expect that. But have some compassion for yourself when it does.

Because understanding it and being finished with it are two very different things.

Think back to that criticism at the beginning.

At first, maybe you only understand your defensiveness after the whole conversation is over.

Then one day you hear yourself getting defensive while you’re doing it.

And eventually there may be this tiny moment where you feel it starting and think:

Oh. I know this one.

You haven’t fixed yourself.

You haven’t erased the pattern.

You’ve just gotten close enough to the moment to see it happening.

And for now, I think that’s exactly where self-awareness needs to take us:

from understanding the pattern afterward to recognizing it while we still have room to meet the moment differently.

🎧 Listen to Ep. 68: The Awkward Middle: Why Understanding Comes Faster Than Change →