Fildy Bejaoui

Less than a tutorial, this is more of a guide on how introspection usually goes, as observed with countless people, including myself, that I’ve done this process with.

Step 1: The cluelessness stage

The initial stage of mind digging is the cluelessness stage: it’s the stage where either someone brings something to your awareness when they either:

• complain about it to you/complain to you about you do
• tell you about something they’ve noticed about you / they’ve noticed you do, without the negativity of complaints, because they are not personally affected by it directly so they retain their ability to be neutral because the burning desire to remove the discomfort and problematic element out of their lives isn’t there

Or when you yourself notice something about yourself because you:

• caught yourself doing it, and either
  • 1) felt it was particularly interesting, because it was connected to something of importance to you, a specific pain point you have, or something is important or vital information about who you are, and that you wish others or someone would notice, because the noticing of it either by someone or others would mean enabling specific connections and trigger the process that would enable specific things you want, to happen.
  • 2) Never saw yourself do this thing before and your natural instinct of self-understanding is taking over, and you’d like to have a better and clearer image of who you are, and this new element is intriguing to you, or new, or different, because you never did notice it before.

During that stage, there’s usually very little understanding from you/your subconscious, and when poked about that specific thing, this is the stage of mindless regurgitation. I.e, you say whatever comes to you, whatever impression the morsel of information you’ve been given, if this thing was brought to your attention by a third party, gives you. For instance, the specific words and phrasing used by that third party may echo something completely different (temporarily leading you astray, by the way). Or, it may prompt new angles from which you can observe the situation, that you hadn’t considered at all before this.

This is the stage where your most common answer/response to someone asking you why you do something, is “I don’t know.”

Step 2: the middle stage — where digging begins

This is when the real digging occurs. Prior to this it was just a surface analysis where you regurgitate everything that jumps out to you and sticks out in your mind.

But the more this happens, the more it’s like there’s a specific barrier, between you and the depth of you (the bottom of you) melts away. This happens because of the brainstorming and mind analysis you’re doing. The more you ponder and contemplate something, the more what stands between you and understanding melts away slowly.

At this stage, you may regurgitate disjointed, somewhat random facts that seem poorly connected not just to each other but to the original thing either pointed out to you or noticed by you, and it will evidently not be the answer.

Step 3: the introspection stage

The third stage is the coolest one because this is where all the flashbacks and the real answers begin to emerge. At this point, you may begin to experience random flashbacks that will shoot through you, they may resurface in a very slow way (→ speed and way of resurfacing depends on degree and type of repression) and wash over you (however horrific the memory) in a very water-like way, etc.

This stage is usually the clarity stage, where the answer becomes more obvious. That’s where you’re able to identify the source of a behaviour as the reaction to X event that occurred which prompted X emotional response and thus led to whatever false solution you then adopted according to these parameters. This is where the technical things are unearthed, and the real work happens.

⧖ Timeline

The time frame of these stages doesn’t matter. It could take you an hour, it could take five decades. Active thinking/mind analysis can yield results faster, but when an aspect of you is complex because connected to more/multiple aspects of your emotional reasoning compared to something “smaller”, aka a single branch of the whole reasoning, and involves severe trauma, aka an alarming and profound level of repression, then it can legitimately take years for the resurfacing to occur, and that’s with active digging.

→ the trick is regularity, hence why I advise everyone to get therapy. The more consistently you do something, the easier it becomes, because, as it is trained like a muscle (or like your brain), the responses not only increase in speed, but, after a while, you also become so knowledgeable of yourself and who you are, that when a new, previously unknown element shows up, it becomes easier to link it to everything else, and therefore understand how each sections of you, aka branches of your emotional reasoning, are interacting with each other, influencing each other, and the general and individual impact that an external or multiple external events have had on how many of these branches.

→ This is also the effect of compound interest, aka the snowballing effect, and once again why therapy is important: the more you do it, and the earlier you get into it (well ideally none of us would ever go through trauma, or would obtain resolution the second trauma is created, but the fun logic as usual is that no one able to give you resolution would also be the type to traumatise you in the first place because they’d be too aware of themselves to do it in the first place), the more the effects and results of the process compound into each other. I can personally tell you that after months of self-therapy (and by that I mean therapy, not band aid meditation), you can already get a much clearer overview of who you are, and what is going on inside your head, and things will no longer feel like they’re such a mystery.