On a sunny spring day, when you pass a terrace where a number of people are sitting, you suddenly feel their eyes on you. What happens then?
It is likely that your self-consciousness is disrupting your gait: your gait becomes clumsier, less smooth, or at least it feels that way.
It is simply not possible to look at ourselves objectively, neutrally. Those who watch themselves change themselves for a shorter or longer period of time.
Asking others to pay attention to us and to tell us what they notice about us also has the same effect. Just ask someone from your immediate environment what he or she thinks of you, or what effect your behavior and reactions have on him or her in a positive or negative sense.
Breaking-out-of-old-patterns effect of self-reflection
Question and answer change something about the relationship between the two of you. You often cannot simply continue as before. That disruptive, that breaking-out-of-old-pattern effect of self-reflection is extremely important. It is a precondition for the development of new behaviour, for new rules of behaviour. Condition, in short, for self-renewal. But being creatures of habit, we tend to respond with tension or even fear to anything that takes us out of our ordinary, including self-reflection.
One of the most impressive examples of this to me is the conversation that, according to the New Testament, took place between Jesus and Peter shortly before the former was arrested and crucified. Jesus tells Peter that after his arrest he will deny him, deny to others that he had anything to do with him. Peter immediately denies in all tones that he will ever do such a thing. Such vehement denial is typical of someone who refuses to look inwardly and ask the question, “Could it be true that under certain circumstances I will indeed act unreliably, cowardly, or fearfully?”
That refusal has to do with the fear of questioning the common image that you would like to hold up about yourself and the world. Carl Gustav Jung, a student and later colleague of Freud, once compared that self-image to the shell of an egg. If we want to bring to life, to develop our being, that which dwells within the shell, the shell must be broken, the image must be peeled off. That often feels vulnerable, exposed, unsafe, even frightening, which is why we tend to avoid it as much as possible or to build a new shell around that exposed vulnerable core as soon as possible.
Pierce outside
Breaking the shell, piercing our outside, must therefore be done with a certain regularity. Hence Jung’s ‘recipe’: boil a few eggs, invite someone to your table with whom you can talk confidently and safely, break the shell of an egg and make that act the starting point of a conversation.
A conversation in which you may explain or be explained the difference between your outside and inside. There is a good chance that you will get up again as a (somewhat) changed person.