Self-Awareness: Emotional Healing Starts Here (March 2025)

If you haven’t had the chance to read about The Emotion Bucket, you can learn about this in these three posts. To summarize, the Emotion Bucket illustrates how unprocessed hurts and emotions accumulate until they overflow, impacting our mental health and relationships.

Next, let’s look at how to use this information as you journey toward self-awareness and healing.

Shane, a 52-year-old man, came to therapy with symptoms of anxiety and depression.* To develop his self-awareness, we discussed The Emotion Bucket and he identified his primary emotions of fear, shame and hopelessness. Then, examining the events that were most likely to trigger those emotions, he discovered they were all related to his performance as a father, his performance as a husband and his performance as a friend. Realizing this, we worked on dismantling his perfectionist habits and building more reasonable expectations for himself and others.

Shane’s work began with the identification of his core emotions–his primary emotions–and then considering the triggering events for the emotions. Understanding your emotional reactions and triggers is the first step toward self-awareness. Look for the common thread of your triggers. Shane’s common thread, the pressures of “performance," led to his primary emotions of fear, shame and hopelessness. 

Once he realized this, I asked where he learned the importance of performance. Shane remembered how his performance was scrutinized as a child. Using adult insight, he recognized that his performance was unfairly used as the basis for receiving love—and punishment. He was able to reflect back on past events with new compassion for his younger self. With adult insight, he acknowledged the harm done to him and how he continued to live with the same assumptions—that performance is the basis of his worth—throughout life.

Then, he worked on changing those assumptions.

While Shane’s memories served as a guide for his healing, others may struggle to recall childhood memories. If this is the case for you, you can explore current events that trigger your common emotional reactions. Working through life’s early events is helpful to the process of healing, but it is not required.

The work of self-awareness requires pause and reflection. It doesn't happen in a single moment. Even as a therapist, I've had reactive moments that overflowed my own emotion bucket which took days to sort through. Most of us have at least a few common threads. They can vary widely in subject, such as fear of retaliation, shame about food consumption or fear of failure. 

To improve your self-awareness, consider reflecting on these questions:

What scenarios trigger my most significant negative emotions?

What common themes or patterns do these scenarios share?

What meaning do I attribute to the words or actions of others in these situations?

What deeper, primary emotions underlie my feelings of anxiety, depression or anger?

What events or experiences in my past might have contributed to these negative emotions?

An excellent spiritual discipline to aid in the development of self-awareness is called Examine (1). This centuries-old spiritual discipline invites us to reflect on God’s presence in our daily lives. Spend a few quiet minutes each evening with God, reviewing the day’s events. Start by asking for his wisdom and presence. Look for high points, and offer gratitude to God for those moments. Then, look for low points, and ask for wisdom, clarity, forgiveness or comfort, depending on what you need. Consider the following verses for meditation as you seek to discover who you are through God’s lens:

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Psalm 139:23-24, NIV

The practice of Examine enhances emotional clarity by bringing attention to your daily highs and lows with God’s presence and care.

Find a trusted person with whom to process your feelings and thoughts. Use the tools above to grow your self-awareness. You’ll find this becomes easier with practice, and that the more you use self-reflection, the more you can change toward healthier thinking, feeling and relating toward others.

*Fictitious clients with plausible stories

(1) Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices that Transform Us (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015).

Next Month:

Safe Relationships: Why self-awareness isn't enough, and safe relationships are VITAL to our healing