The Importance of Self-Awareness for Peer Support Specialists: Six Strategies for Success

People are surprisingly complex, which is one of the reasons I will never be bored in this line of work.  One of the more subtle but important ways that people differ from each other is in the area of self-awareness. 

 We are aware of some of our own behaviors and motives, but we are not aware of others.  Our brain is so complex that we can do things - complex things - that we don’t see ourselves doing.  For example, I may be aware I used to treat other people in a certain, or I may not.  If I am aware of it, I may explain my behavior in one way, but later I may realize that it is really because of a different explanation.  We never fully understand all parts of ourselves, or even recognize all aspects of what we are doing.

 One of Freud’s key ideas was the “unconscious”, and the recognition that we all have elements of our personality that we are not aware of.  The problem is that we can’t change what we are not aware of.  If I want to be more recovery-oriented in my language, I have to first recognize what I’m currently doing in terms of talking about recovery and why, and then find a way to change the patterns that need changing.  Behaviors that are outside my self-awareness are very hard to change.

 As a Peer Support Specialist, you will do things that you are not aware of – things that happen in your interactions with those you are trying to help.  Some of those actions will make it more difficult for clients to hear and trust you, and maybe more difficult for them to engage in recovery. Everyone in the helping professions can benefit from greater and greater self-awareness.  It is part of understanding how we impact others.  It is also part of our own recovery and our ability to become more helpful.

 Hopefully, some of your training has already started you on the road to persistent pursuit of self-awareness.  Supervisors and colleagues should be providing you feedback in ways that can help with this.  Your own curiosity should help as well.  Consider a few more strategies:

  1.     Keep track of what you are doing.  Listen to yourself when you are talking with clients.  Look at how you act when you are supporting clients.  How do your words and behaviors change in different settings and with different clients.  Become an expert on your own behavior.

 2.     Be curious about yourself.  Tracking your own actions will help you find behaviors that you don’t fully understand.  Let your curiosity drive you to figure out what those mean and then to change those that need changing.

 3.     Be skeptical of yourself – could you be acting in certain ways for reasons other than what you’ve been telling yourself?  Don’t accept simple explanations for your behavior without an honest and skeptical review.  Always be willing to at least consider that there may be alternative explanations under the surface.

 4.     Get open honest feedback from others.  I am convinced that honest feedback from friends, family and co-workers is key to true professional development in the field of mental health and recovery.  If you don’t have anyone you trust enough to give you honest feedback – find someone.  Those relationships will be key to your professional development.

5.     Work on having courage to see what is true and addressing it.  Even with honest feedback, it is still our own courage to face ourselves and to decide to change what we can change that will determine if any of this will benefit others.  This is not a simple step – courage requires some degree of confidence that you can make a change, as well as the recognition that living a life of honesty and integrity is of great value to you.

 6.     Consider using psychotherapy and/or peer counseling to build your self-awareness.  Both tools involve helping people be more aware of their thoughts, feelings and actions.  Both involve working with another person who is specially trained to help build that self-awareness.  If you’ve not participated in psychotherapy or peer counseling before, consider using them as tools for building your self-awareness.

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