Modern life tends to lose its authenticity because falsehood makes life easier than experiencing vulnerability or judgment. However, pretending too much or ignoring yourself can actually lead to feelings of loss and underappreciation. It's like losing yourself if you suddenly have to be alone again, if something is missing from your life, or if you have to act the way someone else wants you to, instead of going your own way. So how can you rediscover yourself, the person you already know so well? Luckily, we never lost this guy. We can always reconnect with our true selves if we are able to change some habits and replace them with new ones.
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Method 1 of 3: Rediscovering Yourself After a Breakup
Step 1. Give yourself a chance to feel sad
In order to find yourself again after a broken heart, you must first be willing to let go of the person you have been with and the relationship itself.
- Give yourself time to feel sad. There is no right way to escape sadness. You can ignore the sadness and avoid it, but someday these feelings will come back.
- Allowing feelings to build up and run away will not only hinder your progress, but will only get worse when these feelings surface (and they always do).
Step 2. Do activities that you enjoy
One way to find yourself again after a breakup is to remember the things you (only you) loved.
- Reconnect with yourself through activities you enjoy, whether it's running, spending time in the shower, watching your favorite TV show all day, etc.
- However, don't let this activity you enjoy become a means of dwelling on the past. Do not use this method to escape sadness or hide from reality because you will be trapped in this state more and more, instead of achieving what you want.
- Instead of doing this, allow yourself to recover, even if it may take days or weeks. However, be honest with yourself when it's time for you to take another step. Don't hold back.
Step 3. Don't communicate with your ex-spouse
If you're on good terms with your ex, you don't need to cut ties with them, but it's best if the two of you don't talk to each other (at least a few months) to recuperate.
- If the relationship ended on a bad note and contact with your ex only brings back painful memories, breaking off communication can help you begin your recovery.
- Even if the relationship ended on good terms, you need to give yourself time to truly separate from your ex. Memories of your former self will keep coming back, unless you really want to spend time with who you really are.
Step 4. Write a free essay
If your thoughts and emotions are overwhelming, try freelancing as a means of rejuvenation.
- Freelancing can be done while sitting down and writing whatever comes to mind while following the flow of consciousness. Don't try to pick out the thoughts that come up or arrange them to make your writing look good, let alone follow the rules of grammar.
- Decide how long you want to write freely, maybe 5, 10, or 15 minutes and then write without stopping.
- Freelancing can be an opportunity to channel your thoughts and feelings without trying to judge them first as this can leave you feeling overwhelmed. It also helps you understand thoughts and feelings that may be very energy-consuming.
Step 5. Don't be easily distracted
Often times, we feel like we don't know ourselves because we allow other people and things to distract us. Take time to be alone while feeling calm and free from things that distract. This may sound easy, but in order to reconnect with your real self, first of all, stop avoiding yourself.
- Start making time for yourself by paying attention to what you are doing right now. If you are cleaning the bathroom, do this job to completion. Don't play music, turn on the TV, or do other activities that can distract you from yourself.
- At first, this method may feel uncomfortable, especially if you are someone who is easily distracted. Usually, these distractions are meant to attract attention so you don't have to think, feel lonely, uncomfortable, sad, etc.
- Instead of trying to distract yourself from the feeling, admit it and let it go. Once you stop resisting them, these feelings will usually go away on their own over time.
Step 6. Define goals
When you feel lost and confused, you need to be able to set goals to feel like you have direction and purpose.
- Determine the main goals for the long term and intermediate goals that are easier to achieve in the short term.
- In order to determine your main goals, think about what you want to be in the next one and five years. Determine possible goals and then write them down in the form of a statement so you can read it again and remind yourself every day.
- For example, if you want to live in Paris in five years or win a marathon, write it down. Get in the habit of reminding yourself of your goals and making them a part of your daily activities while looking for opportunities that can lead you to achieve them.
- For short-term goals, choose important things that can be achieved. For example, maybe you want to exercise 3 times a week for one month or meditate once a week for six weeks. Achieving short-term goals will allow you to feel accomplished and make the progress needed to keep recovering and moving forward.
Step 7. Build good relationships and stay away from bad ones
While you are trying to rediscover yourself, look for positive, loving and supportive people around you.
- Stay away from negative relationships, perhaps from friends or partners who need to be convinced to love and support you or from family members who are constantly criticizing you. This relationship will only get in the way.
- If there are negative people that you cannot avoid in your daily activities, such as your boss, co-workers, or close family members, try to distance yourself mentally and emotionally, rather than physically. Intend not to involve them and view the negative things they point at you as their flaws, not yours.
- Look for people who love and accept you for who you are and want to support you. Make time to meet people who make you feel energized and get to know who you really are.
Step 8. Accept your existence
Once you are able to focus on the present, instead of dwelling on painful memories or distracting yourself from your feelings, you will realize that you are not defined by your past.
Take advantage of what happened in the past just to determine what you want. So let the past become a part of you and respect yourself for who you are and who you are today
Method 2 of 3: Rediscovering Yourself Is Like Losing Certain Aspects of Yourself
Step 1. Recognize how you feel when you lose
Do some reflection to determine what you seem to be missing and what might be causing it. Ask yourself the following questions for thought or better yet if you write them down. For example:
- Who am I right now? Do I like myself?
- What aspects of me seem to be missing? When did it disappear? Why did it get lost?
- What do I really crave?
- What was my dream when I was younger? What excites my life?
- What kind of living conditions do I want right now? Next year? The next five years?
- What are the values that are the principles of my life?
- What do I value most?
- What makes me feel happy and satisfied?
- Use the answers to these questions to help you figure out what's not going well in your life. For example, if your life principles are courage, honesty, and kindness, but during this time you work or are surrounded by people who pursue money and success at any cost, the conflict between your life principles and those around you can make You are separated from yourself.
Step 2. Pay close attention to people and events that might cause you to miss certain aspects of yourself
Take some time to sit still and reflect on everything you've been through to find out what made you ignore certain aspects of yourself.
- For example, were you forced to neglect the imaginative aspect because as a child your parents emphasized that your fantasies and daydreams were in vain?
- Think about the things that have a big impact on you physically, mentally, or emotionally. Start with the important things that you can easily remember and then look for the less pleasant little things. For example:
- Specific events (positive and negative)
- Personal relationships (with friends, family, spouse)
- Work you've ever done
- Transition in life
- Accident
- Health problems
- Childhood memories (positive and negative)
- Lost
- Forced to do unpleasant roles
- Forced to lie to or about oneself
- Remember that reflection isn't about blaming other people or what happened, it's about understanding how and why you lost certain aspects of yourself so you can recover.
Step 3. Begin to calm your mind on a regular basis
When you feel like something's missing from you, mindfulness exercises can help you reconnect with yourself.
Practicing meditation, yoga, and taici is great for calming your mind and connecting you to yourself on a deeper level
Step 4. Build good relationships and stay away from bad ones
While you are trying to rediscover yourself, look for positive, loving and supportive people around you.
- Stay away from negative relationships, perhaps from friends or partners who need to be convinced to love and support you or from family members who are constantly criticizing you. This relationship will only get in the way.
- If there are negative people that you cannot avoid in your daily activities, such as your boss, co-workers, or close family members, try to distance yourself mentally and emotionally, rather than physically. Intend not to involve them and view the negative things they point at you as their flaws, not yours.
- Look for people who love and accept you for who you are and want to support you. Spend time meeting people who make you feel energized and get to know your real self.
Step 5. Give yourself time
It's like losing yourself if you can't give yourself time to think too much. It's easy to get lost in troubled thoughts or emotions if you can never take time just to feel calm, without music, without people around, without books, without the internet, etc.
- To feel reconnected with yourself, stop avoiding your own thoughts and feelings. You can be sure, it feels uncomfortable the first time you sit still and just be with yourself for a moment. Thoughts and feelings may come up that you've been avoiding for a long time, but once you can identify them and stop avoiding them, things will become easier to control and less intimidating.
- Get used to sitting still for 5-10 minutes every day. You can sit on the sofa in the living room, in the rocking chair on the terrace, or under your favorite tree. Wherever the place is, start reconnecting with yourself and enjoy this togetherness.
Step 6. Define goals
Setting yourself a goal that you want to achieve, instead of being set by someone else, makes you feel more connected to yourself and happier in your everyday life.
- Set long-term and short-term goals. In order to set long-term goals, think about what you want to be in the next one and five years. Would you like to be more forgiving of yourself and others? Are you satisfied with your current life and work? Make this a long term goal.
- Use short-term goals as a way of achieving long-term goals and making you feel accomplished and progressing. Determine the goals that may be achieved so that long-term goals are more easily realized. For example, if your long-term goal is to feel calm and peaceful, set a supportive short-term goal, such as meditating four times a week for a month or journaling three times a week for two months.
- Write down your goals and put them in a visible place each day to remind you what you are working on.
Step 7. Be patient
Reflecting and rediscovering lost aspects of yourself can be challenging and take time.
- Don't despair if you don't get inspired right away.
- Be patient with yourself and let the curiosity run its course without having to find a specific answer.
- Know that you need to go through a long process every day until you can find yourself again and recover lost aspects of yourself because this doesn't happen all at once.
Method 3 of 3: Rediscover Yourself if You Feel Losing Authenticity
Step 1. Think of a time when you were happy and liked yourself
Try to recall important moments that made you feel happy and energized. What was the moment like and what aspects did you have in that moment?
Do things and activities that reconnect yourself with moments when you felt accomplished and happy
Step 2. Pay attention to what triggers pleasure
As you go about your daily life, pay close attention to what makes you happy or feel good. When you do what you really love, rather than out of necessity, you will feel more connected to yourself and happier in your daily activities.
- Maybe you'll be carried away and inspired by activities that require you to be creative when writing emails or writing your thoughts in a journal. Or, you're always intrigued when you hear someone talk about quantum physics on TV or on the radio.
- Whatever interests you, jot it down and intend to pursue it later. Look for books on the topic, do online research, watch documentaries, etc.
Step 3. Identify the things that upset you
Try to find out the cause of minor irritations or annoyances, such as in traffic jams or people chatting while watching a movie. Pay attention to things that always irritate you. You can see similarities between things that tend to cause negative emotions and then use this knowledge to eliminate the causes of your dissatisfaction.
- For example, if you are upset when someone hurts someone else, using this incident to remind you that you need good and caring people around you to encourage and/or help people in need can be activities that make you happy.
- Or, if you're annoyed that you're wasting time without doing creative activities (singing, dancing, drawing, etc.), conclude that you always need creative ways to fill your day to feel happy.
- Also remember that we often judge others arbitrarily based on things that make us feel insecure ourselves. If you tend to judge people who own luxury cars as extravagant and extravagant, think again about the insecurities and vulnerabilities you experience from being proud, showing off, or living too much. What issues prompt you to judge others and why?
Step 4. Observe yourself when you feel like you're faking it
Pay attention to the discomfort that comes from pretending when you talk, act, or think.
- Write down mentally or on a note what you did while pretending.
- After that, think carefully about the fear or anxiety about the particular thing that triggers the behavior. What moved you to pretend? Is it because of fear of rejection? Tired of dealing with the people around you? Feeling unappreciated?
- Think of ways to ignore beliefs or anxieties that make you feel the need to pretend. If you are afraid of being rejected, for example, try to accept and respect yourself for who you are. The ability to accept yourself can eliminate the fear of rejection and you can be honest with other people.
Step 5. Keep a journal
Journaling can be a way of inward reflection and note-taking so you can find important recurring themes.
- Write whatever you want in a journal. Set aside a space to write thoughts about things you could have more of in your everyday life, maybe more time with your family or more painting opportunities.
- Try journaling regularly. The more regularly you journal, the easier it will be for you to find common themes and gain understanding.
- Once you've collected a few lines, read over from the beginning and see if there's anything in common in the activities you want to do more often, the things that annoy you, etc.
- Try to find solutions to things that annoy you and ways to do things that make you more excited about your everyday life.
Step 6. Begin to calm your mind on a regular basis
Practicing calming your mind can help you reconnect with yourself if you're not being honest with yourself.
Practicing meditation, yoga, and taici is great for calming your mind and connecting you to yourself on a deeper level
Step 7. Build good relationships and stay away from bad ones
While you are trying to rediscover yourself, look for positive, loving and supportive people around you.
- Stay away from negative relationships, perhaps from friends or partners who need to be convinced to love and support you or from family members who are constantly criticizing you. This relationship will only get in the way.
- If there are negative people that you cannot avoid in your daily activities, such as your boss, co-workers, or close family members, try to distance yourself mentally and emotionally, rather than physically. Intend not to involve them and view the negative things they point at you as their flaws, not yours.
- Look for people who love and accept you for who you are and want to support you. Spend time meeting people who make you feel energized and get to know your real self.
Step 8. Prepare a plan for emergencies
When you're feeling really tired and it's hard to be yourself, use an emergency solution. There are several ways you can use when you feel lost, for example:
- Listen to a series of songs that can bring back the feeling of who you are. Instead of setting up too many new songs you're not familiar with, choose the ones that mean the most to you. If you feel uncomfortable, listen to this song to recover.
- Find someone ready to call. A close friend or trusted family member who you can reach out to can help you recover when you feel lost. Involve them in your activity plans and ask them to provide support if needed, but don't forget to return the favor.
- Be honest. If you notice you're faking, know that there's always a powerful way to beat pretending, and that's honesty. While you're faking it, take a deep breath, calm down, and ask yourself, "What do I really want right now?" and/or “What do I really feel right now?” Answer these questions and then use what you feel as a guide.
Warning
- If you feel like you've lost yourself after a major trauma, ask a therapist for help and find a support group in your area.
- Apart from feeling like you're missing certain aspects of yourself, if you're experiencing symptoms of depression, talk to a therapist for better treatment.
