Peer Support: The Importance of Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is becoming aware of our thoughts and feelings. By understanding ourselves, we are better positioned to understand others and help them in their healing journey.

As peer supporters, self-awareness is essential to preparing to encounter those we support, their families, and the system. While we have many encounters, we must be aware of our biases to practice equity and fairness. Self-awareness allows us to create better emotional intelligence and support our peers in the reentry.

What is the Importance of Self-Awareness as a Peer Supporter?

It is a powerful tool.

Self-awareness, or the understanding of one's knowledge, attitudes, and opinions, is a powerful tool. When done regularly, it can do more good for the peers you support than anything else you share with them To make real, impactful, lasting change, it is helpful for people to look inward and become familiar with that internal environment.

It is a top priority.

Building self-awareness should be a top priority for our clients. For example, you can support someone with bad habits and give them 1,000 ways to break them. Still, if they don't understand why they tend towards these bad habits, they might never break those habits or they will quit for a while and pick up where they left off when things get tough.

It helps the peer supporter.

Self-awareness will help the caring peer supporter avoid getting too wrapped up in their peer's problems or seeing them through their skewed lens. To truly help someone, it's essential to see things from their perspective, and that requires being self-aware enough to put our thoughts and feelings aside sometimes.

Self-awareness is the ability to see yourself clearly and objectively through reflection and introspection. Self-awareness is an understanding of oneself, including one's knowledge, attitudes, and opinions. Being self-aware is important for making changes in one's life. We can begin to heal by understanding how we think, feel, and behave, our strengths and weaknesses, and the memories that haunt us. Knowing oneself is the start of the healing process. With self-observation, we encounter discrepancies between our ideal selves and our lives.

Habits of People Who Are Self-Aware

Self-aware people listen more than they talk.

Some people believe that you can self-reflect your way into self-awareness. In other words, if you think hard enough about yourself, you'll understand yourself deeper. But that's not necessarily the case. Accurate self-awareness comes from genuine interaction with other people in conversation. Conversation is where communication happens on a deep, meaningful level. To get there, you need to be able to listen. To really listen. And real listening can be a surprisingly tricky thing to accomplish, much less make into a habit.

The key to gaining meaningful self-awareness through listening is to manage your thoughts during a conversation. It's hard to truly listen when formulating your ideas and only halfway paying attention to what the other person is saying. That means building the habit of being a good listener is mostly about learning to undo unhelpful habits. Suppose you can practice not listening to yourself and your ideas in conversations and turning your attention toward the other person. In that case, you're far more likely to stumble on something useful about yourself and improve your self-awareness.

Self-aware people are curious about their minds.

Self-aware people make a habit of thinking about their patterns of thought. Self-aware people are curious about their minds and inner work, just like a good scientist is curious about making observations, forming theories, and conducting experiments. Curious people notice patterns of thinking, like when they think more pessimistically and when they tend to think more optimistically. They wonder about the overarching beliefs that motivate their behaviors.

When you're curious, you begin to see patterns, and when you see patterns, you begin to understand, and once you know, it is possible to build lasting change. Remember that curiosity about oneself can be cultivated with time and practice. Avoid suppressing your curiosity by competing habits of self-criticism. It's hard to be curious about yourself when constantly judging yourself. Allow your natural curiosity to rise up. Watch your self-talk habits, and practice re-framing how you talk to yourself in more compassionate terms.

Self-aware people look for their emotional blind spots.

Self-aware people understand their emotional blind spots. We all have emotional blind spots. We've often ignored them for so long that we don't even know they're blind spots. Simon, for example, went to a counselor because he thought he would get fired. Over time, it became clear that Simon was experiencing a lot of anger and frustration at work, but he wasn't aware of it. He also discussed that growing up, he had an alcoholic father who used to rage and become violent when he was drinking. After a few difficult conversations on the topic, Simon began to see that, because he was afraid of turning out like his dad, he had built up the habit of buying his anger--sometimes with sarcasm and humor, sometimes with distractions, and often by simply calling it by a different name like "stress" or "annoyed."

Once Simon realized this connection—that avoiding anger was a leftover coping mechanism from childhood that was severely impacting his life—he began making major changes. For example, anytime he caught himself describing how he felt "annoyed" or "stressed," he used that as a cue to ask whether there wasn't really some stronger anger behind those descriptions. This process helped Simon at work and in other areas of his life.

Self-aware people ask for feedback and take it well.

Self-aware people ask for feedback. Genuinely self-aware people understand that they can't always see themselves objectively and that, often, the best way to be more objective about yourself is through the lens of other people. The trick is that there is no trick. You must ask if you want to see yourself through other people's eyes. It's that simple.

What gets in the way of most of us asking for good feedback is that we're afraid of getting uncomfortable news. Getting criticism always hurts. Anytime we get hurt, we tend to do one of two things: fight or flee. We try to overwhelm our painful thinking by making the other person look bad in some way (fight), or we dismiss their feedback as invalid (flee). To sum up, one of the best ways to learn more about yourself and improve self-awareness is to get objective feedback from others. But to do this, you must be willing to tolerate the discomfort of receiving criticism and work to avoid defensiveness at all costs. However, your self-awareness will increase dramatically if you are willing to ask for feedback and take it well.

Self-aware people take time to reflect on their values.

Reflect on your values. Get clear about your values--what's most important to you--and learn how to go after them. Highly self-aware people have a habit of regularly reflecting on and considering their values. While they're always trying to be aware of what they might be unconsciously avoiding, they're also striving to be clear about what they want in their lives. It's essential to clarify what we're chasing after in life regularly. Highly self-aware people typically have some mechanism for doing this consistently.

Fostering Self-Awareness in Peer Support

Peer supporters are encouraged to develop a keen sense of self-awareness and an understanding of the impact of attitudes and beliefs on the support relationship. Monitoring one's own reactions during peer support services (self-awareness/self-monitoring) heightens interpersonal skills such as empathy, making peer support more effective.

Dowden and colleagues (2014) suggest three tiers of self-awareness that peer supporters can use to monitor their reactions during the support process. The key questions involve asking yourself, "What are you thinking and feeling during and after you are engaged in peer support?" Your responses to such self-reflections will help you be a better peer supporter.

Three Tiers of Fostering Self-Awareness

Tier 1: Self-Check

In Tier 1 of the Dowden et al. (2014) model, supporters are encouraged to conduct self-checks. Self-checks are brief opportunities to stop and check on oneself by thinking about one's emotional well-being. Peer supporters might be especially vulnerable to stress; therefore, it is essential that they find small incremental periods throughout each day to engage in thinking critically about things so that they can increase awareness and reduce stress. It is suggested that they do hourly self-checks throughout the peer support day.

Questions: Participate in ongoing self-checks by asking yourself the following questions after each support session:

• How do I feel at this moment as a result of what occurred?
• What steps can I take to remove or reduce these feelings?
• How can I prevent these feelings from recurring in similar situations?

Reflection: Imagine you are a peer supporter of Christian, a peer with diabetes. Whenever he comes to you, he appears irritated and aggressive, saying that he has "heard it all before" whenever you discuss his thoughts, feelings, and behavior about his health. His refusal to think about these things is frustrating to you, and you notice yourself becoming stressed and irritated during your peer support sessions, which you think might impact your response to Christian. How would you feel now as a result of what has occurred?

Tier 2: Self-Talk

Tier 2 of the Dowden et al. (2014) model encourages peer supporters to engage in self-talk. Self-talk is an ongoing process used to reduce negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and provide oneself with positive verbal feedback. It is helpful for combatting negative thoughts stemming from field experiences. You can do this anytime throughout the day. Self-talk allows us to redirect our negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

Questions: Utilize self-talk to m maintain keen awareness and improved self-care by asking yourself the following questions when you are alone or meditating:

• What is it that I feel?
• What caused me to feel this way?
• What steps can I take to remove or reduce these feelings?

Reflection: Think back to the scenario with Christian. You identified what you were feeling in the last activity. Now, reflect. Whatever your negative thoughts and feelings were in response to your frustration with Christian, ask yourself what might have caused you to feel that way. For example, you might have thought, "If only I were a better peer supporter, I could convince Christian to be more concerned about his health." Or you may have even thought, "I'm not good at this at all." And as a result, you felt anxious whenever Christian came to you with the same story. Why do you think you felt that way? What negative did you engage in, and how could you think about it differently next time Christian comes to you?

Tier 3: Self-Journaling

Self-journaling is really just written communication with yourself. It is an ongoing process to analyze, diffuse, and assess thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Self-journaling provides an opportunity to reflect as a means of examining thoughts, behaviors, and feelings while learning from those same reactions. Peer supporters are encouraged to develop creative self-journals. These journals can be mental maps, personal logs, and/or letters to oneself. In each case, these self-journals have the potential to bring about cognitive, emotional, and behavioral change.

Questions: Write targeting (themes) journals that highlight stressful events, log the process of removing or reducing the emotion, the timeframe for emotion removal/reduction, lessons learned (new ways of thinking, new strategies for coping), and setbacks. Ask yourself:

• What is it that I feel/felt during the day?
• What caused me to feel this way?
• What steps can I take to remove or reduce these feelings?

Reflection: Think back to the scenario with Christian. You identified what you felt in the first activity and reflected on your thoughts and attitudes in the second activity. Now, journal. Write a brief journal entry about your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to your peer support session with Christian.

Conclusion

Self-awareness gives peer supporters the power the influence outcomes. It allows you to communicate with clarity and intention, frees you from assumptions and biases, and helps you understand things from multiple perspectives. Self-awareness enables you to be a better listener and decision-maker in the peer support role.

Self-awareness is a practice, and for many, an overlooked or uncomfortable practice. It takes humility and strength to allow oneself to open up, to dig deep within, and to sit with what you see, feel, and observe. With self-awareness, you can regulate your inner life, which has a ripple effect through your behavior and actions. It is a practice that can challenge your thoughts, behaviors, and sense of self. When you do it consistently, you can better regulate your emotions and responses, recognize where your thoughts and feelings are leading you, and make the necessary changes to serve those you support better.

Are you a peer supporter?

Do you practice self-awareness?