To lead a happy, productive and successful life you need to operate (at least some of the time)        

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in a state of awareness, that is the ability to sense what is real and what is not, to know who you really are and how to be that person. Being in this aware state is natural and normal, it feels comfortable, true, balanced and even. It is not, however, automatic and for many reasons may be temporarily lost or disabled. There are a number of significant stages in losing awareness and finding it again.

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1. Natural Awareness - Your birthright
You were born with a degree of natural awareness, including an ability to sense intuitively (without words) what was real and what was not. Depending on what you needed to do as a child to fit in with your family or life in general, you may have stayed closer to your road to awareness or moved further away from it. Some of your reality will have remained with you and some will have been lost.

2. Adapting Stage  - (Changing and Becoming less aware)
Adapting means changing yourself and the direction you are going in life. It’s natural to adapt to avoid trouble, fear or pain whether it is being caused by people, things or events around you. For instance if you keep hearing ‘You’re silly’ each time you tell your parents about something that is actually happening or what you really think, you will soon stop sharing your reality with them. In childhood, adapting seems like the right thing to do because it makes it easier to ‘fit in’ with the your family and life at school. However, adapting is something like putting on a mask it only works because you are hiding more and more of your natural awareness and sense of reality.

Your Inner Selves
These ‘masks’ by the way, are what are called your ‘inner selves’ or sub-personalities. The greater the pain or trauma you have to deal with, the more changes you have to make to yourself and so the more masks or adapted inner selves you develop and the greater the loss of your natural awareness.

Negative Core Beliefs
As you adapt, you also start to take on negative views of yourself (core beliefs) that seem true at the time but are not really accurate. To compensate for these beliefs, you then develop specific skills to offset them called compensating skills. A young boy who has to work seven days a week may develop a core belief that the only way he can become ‘good enough’ to fit into his family is to work harder and harder. This ability to focus on work is a typical example because its positive value compensates for the ‘not good enough’ belief. Unfortunately, it also tends to lock the false belief even more firmly into his reality. Why this happens is explained in later sections.

3. The Adapted Life - ‘As good as it gets’
From late teens onwards, a high level of adaption helps you make friends, fit in, get on well at work and find yourself a loving (and equally adapted) person who says they want to spend their life with you. This kind of adapted lifestyle, run by managed for you by your inner selves, can, at this time, appear to be ‘as good as it gets’. It seems to be working really well as the selves help you ‘fit in’ better and better with other people.

4. Adaption Starts To Look Like Reality  (I no longer realise I when am not aware)
If this continues, you reach a point at some time in your life, usually from the late twenties onwards, where the adapted way of looking at the world has become so familiar that it starts to appear more and more like ‘reality’.  This illusion is extended by the other characteristics of adapted inner selves as explained later, including polarised or unbalanced thinking which keeps you connected to distorted beliefs about what you can or cannot do in your life. The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes to notice that what seems ‘real’ is only an illusion. Instead of reducing vulnerability, as it was meant to, adaption now sets up an increasing cycle of problems.

Life at this point can go in different directions each with accompanying complications. Many people halt the downward slide before they get too far away from awareness, and begin moving back into reality again. Others, having reached the crossroads (see diagram on the next page) cannot stop and find themselves entering a state of higher adaption and lower and lower awareness.

The Low Awareness Zone
Living in the low awareness zone means settling down for a long and relatively safe but totally adapted lifestyle, giving up the desire to reconnect with the person you were really meant to be.  For example a person who has become too adapted may take the view that fitting in with others and maintaining peace and harmony is always better than trying to be real or authentic. Such a lifestyle may seem good enough to settle for, safer and a more comfortable alternative than rocking the boat by facing reality. Their low level of awareness helps achieve this.

Low Awareness relationships
Living in a low awareness relationship offers a similarly safer alternative for some people, even if they have to spend much of their time locked in a bonding pattern, that is with one partner acting one-above while the other is one-below. For example one may become a long suffering martyr while the other plays the rescuer role. Low awareness relationships can become permanent or, years later one partner may rebel and flip into an opposite state to escape the bonding pattern. This, by the way, does not mean they are out of the low awareness zone, they have just swapped positions with their partner inside the zone.

The ‘adult-child’ state
Sometimes the person loses all contact with their adult side and in their unawareness tend to think, speak and act in ways that are just no longer like a true grown-up. This is termed a ‘grown-up child’ or ‘adult-child’ state. (See diagram on the next page.)  People in this state characteristically get stuck in polarised (black or white) negative thinking, resulting in poor insight and lack of judgement. Alternatively they may move into an ‘I don’t need anyone’ coping pattern or spend much of their time day dreaming. They are an adult in years, yet shut down like a scared child, grown up yet immature.

Double Blindness
As the gap widens between what is really happening (reality) and what I tell myself (and truly believe) is happening, life starts to become more complicated. Sooner or later, a life spent in a too adapted state and too far away from reality has to break down.  Each of us may experience this loss of awareness in different ways. If someone is far enough out of reality they may even fail to notice they are now trapped in a cycle of unawareness. This is described as double blindness - not only unaware but also totally unconscious of being unaware.

Losses, Defeats and Breakdowns
What is noticeable is the mounting losses. Work is more and more stressful, a career path may become blocked. Health problems increase. Also noticeable is the need to turn more and more to medications like alcohol nicotine and food or process medications like work, or gambling.  Relationships fail, often to the point of losing a long term partner or lifelong friendship. If people in this state still had even partial awareness, they would see that they cannot expect to use relationships to ease their problems, but from the blind spot of unawareness this is just what they try to do. They then blame their partner (either the original one or the latest replacement) when the relationship fails to help them feel better.

Low awareness -Deeper Addictive Cycles
As the breakdown gains pace, the individual turns further towards unawareness, with increasing distortion or denial supported by illusions about a false reality that takes more and more work to maintain. Typically, at this time people move deeper into addictive cycles as a way of blocking off a reality that by now would be intolerable if they had to face it.  An alternative way of escaping is through denial, disassociation or even dishonesty and deception, and similar indications of a very low state of awareness.  To others watching this, it may look as though living in low awareness like this and the inevitable breakdown that follows, is a permanent shift, but this is not so. Even a major loss of awareness is reversible as this book explains.

Bypassing the Low Awareness Trap
I mentioned, earlier, that if people can see what is happening soon enough, they can manage to by-pass the low awareness stage. This realisation can come about in many different ways, talking to a friend, reading a book, listening to a tape or watching a video. For others it is spontaneous – it just happens.  Working with the inner selves as described in this book is one of the easiest and fastest way to achieve the same understanding because it uses the power of the inner selves as teachers to help separate illusion from reality.

6. Breaking Out of the Low Awareness Trap
The alternative to spending life trapped in the low awareness world is to break out of it. However, once inside, no one leaves the low awareness zone until they are serious about wanting to break out. That only happens when they can see that their pain and their losses caused by staying inside the trap are greater than the pain and fear they are avoiding by breaking out and facing reality.

Realising my Awareness has Gone Missing
A break-out begins with the realisation that awareness has gone missing, described as becoming aware that I am not aware. This can occur as a result of counselling, joining any kind of therapy group, going to a Twelve Step meeting, reading a book or watching a video. The understanding is usually accompanied by some fear as people realise they have no idea what to do about their loss of reality, which is true.   This, however is a sign in itself that awareness and reality are returning.

7. Becoming Aware – a Growing Process
After the break-out, awareness continues to grow. This book is largely about how this can happen and the fact that you are reading it suggests that you are already at this point.  There are many joys to be gained from growing your awareness. One is that awareness in adulthood cannot be lost as it was in childhood. It becomes a non-reversible process. This brings a sense of self empowerment and joy. Continuing to work and get to know your inner selves is an excellent way to grow awareness to the point where it can never be lost again. There are of course many other ways to do this, including group and individual therapy, meditation and writing. The activity sheets throughout this book are also there so you can work on your own to increase awareness.   If your awareness is already on board but not working as well as you would like, you can use the same techniques to extend it further.

8. Aware Adult Stage
The term aware adult describes the situation where you are conscious of a practical, functional and balanced awareness working in a partnership with your adult mind. In this state you find you can solve problems in practical ways, you embrace options and avoid the trap of polarised thinking. You are back in reality, using authentic and adult ways to deal with life.

You soon become familiar with the different way it feels when you are aware, compared with the times you slip back into being unaware. That gives you the power to move out of the old adapted side whenever you want to.

This differs from the aware ego.  I see the aware adult as an integrated system that combines many different energy states, life skills and emotions and helps all of them to work together in harmony. Living life with your aware adult system in charge (rather than the adapted inner selves) is often described as ‘feeling more grown-up’. This makes sense when you look back over the kind of life the inner selves had mapped out for you.

Advanced Awareness - the Aware Ego
The aware ego state is an even higher level of awareness, and is achieved over a longer time. During this period you learn to separate more and more from the logical, rational mind and to channel almost all processes including your thoughts through the awareness side. Growing Awareness does not take you that far. The acknowledged masters of aware ego work are Dr. Hal Stone and Dr. Sidra Stone. When you are ready to move on to this higher level I can do no more than recommend their work to you.

Honouring the Inner Selves
All this does not mean you have to get rid of your adapted inner selves. They were created in childhood when there was nothing else to protect you and it is one of the miracles of life that they were able to take you so far. It is important to embrace them and honour them for this, while recognising that it was not their fault they lacked the maturity you now need to get on with the job of becoming who you really were meant to be. If some of what you have read here sounds familiar, then this book is for you.

Welcome to the Road to Awareness. May your journey along the path bring great joy, inner peace and balance into your life.

RETURN TO  A Dynamic or Energetic Approach to Understanding the Inner Selves .

Copyright © John Nutting 1996 - - 2010  and   ©   GROWING AWARENESS   All rights reserved World Wide   LAST UPDATE 

Don't worry about these copyright notices at the foot of each page. It just means I want to hang on to legal ownership of what I write for use in future books.  Until that day, please feel free to copy and even adapt them for your own use and for friends as long as you acknowledge me as the author and owner of the copyright and you don't charge anyone for them. If you want to use them professionally or commercially (charge a fee for them) or for clients, each sheet you hand out must include full acknowledgment of copyright ownership as above and if  you are benefiting as a result, I would appreciate an appropriate sharing.

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