Sippi Lovin'

Our own image looking back at us in a mirror carries a very different attraction and energy than the image of someone else. We are drawn to it in a half-embarrassed way, excited and intensely involved. Do you remember the last time someone showed you a picture of yourself, or you watched yourself on video? Wasn’t there a surge of feeling and a deep curiosity about how you appear to others?

-Seymour Fisher, Body Conscious: You Are What You Feel

Self-awareness has warranted brief mention in only two of my graduate-level courses and not much in excess of that. In Clinical Interviewing, we discovered that self-awareness could aid us, as clinicians, in knowing how our personal biases and emotional states influence and potentially distort our understanding of clients. In our text, we read that there were multiple forms of self-awareness: physical self-awareness, psychosocial self-awareness, developmental self-awareness, cultural self-awareness, and awareness of interviewing expectations and misconceptions. No one form was more important than any other and a familiarity with each form provided valuable information for aspiring clinicians. A similar message was conveyed in Cultural Bases of Behavior, of course, with an added emphasis on understanding how our culture aids and inhibits us from understanding our clients.

The exploration of self has always intrigued me and I feel it merits more consideration in the Clinical Psychology curriculum than I have experienced thus far. As Seymour Fisher points out, a fascination with self is normal, and I believe that in order to be at our best, as clinicians, we must fully understand who we are as individuals. Furthermore, I believe that a full understanding of self can only be accomplished through rigorous discussion with others. (Any apprehension regarding the aforementioned contention should be dispelled easily enough, by countering with the assertion that a full understanding of self is then most readily accessed through discussion with others.)

The rigorous discussion of self that I described with such fervor is not happening here at USM. Again, while we have learned that we must have self-awareness, we have never explored the matter in earnest inside the classroom. In closing, I will conjecture that if “normal” individuals have a half-embarrassed fascination with self, then many aspiring clinicians likely have a fascination with self, bordering on perverse. It is in the clinician’s nature to be curious about human kind, and what better case study than oneself?