[Essay] Self-Awareness and Effective Use of the Self are Key Components of Good Social Work Practice

Form the website www.encyclopedia.com “self-awareness is the ability to perceive one's own existence, including one's own traits, feelings and behaviors”. In an epistemological sense, self-awareness is a personal understanding of the very core of one's own identity. It is the basis for many other human traits, such as accountability and consciousness, and as such is often the subject of debate among philosophers. Self-awareness can be perceived as a trait that people possess to varying degrees beyond the most basic sentience that defines human awareness. This trait is one that is normally taken for granted, resulting in a general ignorance of one's self that manifests as odd contradictory behavior.

Philosophers and scientists have long debated what it is about human beings that distinguishes them from the rest of the animal kingdom. What attributes do people possess that make them so different from even their closest relatives on the phylogenetic scale?

One promising answer to this question is that human beings have a much more highly developed self than any other animal. Although researchers have shown that many of the great apes have a rudimentary sense of self (Gallup 1977), no other animal can engage in the sophisticated types of self-referent thought and self-regulated behavior that we can. This unique ability to think consciously about ourselves appears to underlie many of the complex behaviors that we regard as uniquely human.

Because we have a self, we can purposefully remember what we did yesterday and consciously plan for what we will do tomorrow. We can imagine ourselves in situations that do not exist and thus can consider in our minds the consequences of various things we might do. We can intentionally seek information about what we are like, ponder over who and what we are, and then regulate our behavior on the basis of who we think we are and who we want to become. With the help of our self, we can deliberately change our bad habits and plot new directions in life. We even defend our self-images against information that contradicts them or makes us feel bad about ourselves, and we can think about how we are perceived by other people and adjust our behavior to convey the impressions we want them to have of us.

The highest human achievements involve these abilities, all of which require a highly developed self. Without a self, we would have no literature, no philosophy, no formal educational systems, no government, and no religion. We could not plan weeks or years ahead to work toward either self-improvement or the betterment of our society. Put simply, civilization as we know it could not exist if human beings did not have selves.

Despite the fact that the human self has played a role in these remarkable achievements, the human capacity for self-thought has come at a high price. Much unhappiness in life--our anxiety, depression, and guilt, for example--springs from our ability to ruminate about the past, fret about the present, and worry about the future. Because we have a self, we can obsess over imagined problems as well as worry about real ones. We live much of our lives inside our own heads, creating unnecessary misery and missing out on the real world as our selves chatter away at us. Often these thoughts distress us so much that we seek to escape them through such means as drinking, binge eating, or even suicide (Baumeister,1991). Our conflicts with one another go beyond skirmishes over territory, food, and mates to fights over abstract self-created ideas and disagreements about who we are. We hate and reject other people because they are not like us, a distinction that obviously requires a self. In fact, people have died defending their identity.

So the self-awareness is very much a mixed bag--a source of human achievement and accomplishment, yet an instigator of harm and unhappiness.

References:

Baumeister R. F., D. M. Tice, and D. G. Hutton. 1989. "Self-presentation motivations and personality differences in self-esteem". Journal of Personality 57: 547-579.

Gallup G. G., Jr. (1977). "Self-recognition in primates: A comparative approach to the bidirectional properties of consciousness". American Psychologist 32: 329-338.