Thomas: 0:00

Make sure that our thoughts are aligned with his thoughts. God's not scared of our emotions and it's okay to be angry,

Trisha: 0:07

right? He gave us emotions. That's

Thomas: 0:09

exactly right.

Trisha: 0:10

Can we allow the Lord to search us, search our soul and expose those areas within ourselves where we can get rid of or allow His love to infiltrate into those areas where we are being selfish. Seeds for your marriage.

Thomas: 0:32

Welcome to Conversations with Trisha and Thomas. We are Trisha and Thomas Walker, relationship coaches and communication experts. We help couples improve their communication, resolve conflict, and achieve God's design for an amazing marriage. that we can get rid of or allow his love to infiltrate into areas where we may be Today, we are going to be talking about self awareness. Trish, self awareness is the ability to be in touch with ourselves to have conscious knowledge of what's going on inside of us and how we're experiencing a given topic and issue. It includes what we see, what we hear, our associated thoughts, our emotions, our wants, as well as actions. Getting our awareness on a specific issue or topic is really foundational to healthy communication in relationships. In fact, it's the most important resource that we can bring into any situation. To clearly communicate what is going on inside of us.

Trisha: 1:36

Absolutely. Have you ever felt you're just not being understood when you're talking to someone? Or they tell you, I don't get what you're saying, I just don't get it. Or sometimes we feel frustrated with the conversation because two people are just talking past each other and they're not grasping what one other are saying. Sometimes we feel we're not able to articulate what we're thinking, what we're experiencing, because so much is coming at us so fast, we don't even know how we feel or think about something.

Thomas: 2:08

Yeah. And the goal of this is to become more aware, to slow down, to be able to reflect and then be able to communicate our experience on the topic from.

Trisha: 2:23

sometimes situations and topics, can feel like a spider web and we're coming at it from two different perspectives. And it's the same thing. But we're seeing it two completely different ways.

Thomas: 2:39

Exactly. Let's take for example, the other day I came home and the door slammed, really hard. Now, I didn't think it slammed hard. I just closed the door. There was a gust of wind and it closed. I was just coming home from work. But you saw that differently, didn't you?

Trisha: 2:57

Yeah, because I was on the other side of the house and all of a sudden I hear this huge, Boom, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, he's home from work. What is he angry? Is something happened? What happened?

Thomas: 3:07

Yeah. So that's a great example of how one thing happened, the door closed, but we saw it from two completely different perspectives. And if we're not able to communicate that with each other, one of us could be walking around with an assumption or a thought that then shapes how we communicate and actually can lead to a disconnect or a conflict. So we don't want that to happen, right? We want to have the ability to share and say, Hey, I saw it this way and you saw it that way. And that's not right or wrong. It's not bad. It's just how we experience things differently.

Trisha: 3:41

Exactly. And, how we experience something, whether it's a situation or a topic, it can really shape our conversations. It can shape how we relate to one another, and so what we like to do is break down our self awareness and how we are experiencing something into five complete parts.

Thomas: 4:06

Yeah. And the ability to do this leads to a few things. Number one is we get our own understanding, right? We understand, okay, what is going on? And we're going to break this, these parts down momentarily. The second thing is with that awareness, we're in a much better position to then share it with the other person. And that's really key is we want to be understood. And so part of being understood is being able to say things. In a way that the other person can hear them and receive them. So the first one is sensory data. And this is an essential question, which is what happened? What happened? Our brains are wired as human beings to always be scanning our environment, and we're always taking in data. Whether we see things, we hear things, smell, taste, touch. These are all sensory data. Our five senses and we're always taking things in and that's the sensory data that's so important for us to be able to understand and recognize it could be verbal, nonverbal data, like the eyebrows clenching down or the arms getting folded over in the middle of a conversation that becomes sensory data for us and we take it in to say when I was talking and I saw you fold your arms, it made me think that you didn't want to hear what I had to say. The other type of data that can come also is internal data. We can have memories, we can have dreams. The more we get in touch with those details, the better we become at using what I call a database. A database of experiences and senses that, things that our senses pick up. We can begin to describe that more effectively, which actually, a lot of sensory data leads into our what?

Trisha: 6:02

It leads into our thoughts. So when we're able to truly step back and assess, what did I see? What did I hear? What is going on around me? Then it can help us figure out what our thoughts are on that situation. To analyze our own thoughts, right? And our thoughts are powerful. They heavily influence our decisions, our actions. They impact our emotions. Don't you have an example of how a sensory data could lead to a thought?

Thomas: 6:39

Yeah, absolutely. let's just say I log into the bank account and I see an unexpected charge or actually we could flip this in like real life. You would log into the bank account and see an unexpected charge. That's sensory data, because you open up and you see a withdrawal that you maybe weren't expecting to see. And that can lead to a thought to say, Oh my goodness, he's being irresponsible. He's being irresponsible. I don't understand this charge. So now I'm thinking. That Thomas is being irresponsible, but then I come home and you ask me about it and I might say actually I wasn't being irresponsible. It was an emergency. I had a hole in my tire and I had to stop by the tire store to get my tire repaired. So that thought, if it had gone unchecked, could have led to a whole. sense of frustration and disappointment, but it's the sensory data that led to that thought, which it wasn't the right thought.

Trisha: 7:37

Yeah. Our thought life is so critical. In second Corinthians 10 five, Paul talks about taking our thoughts captive and making them obedient to Christ. The three realms where our thoughts originate from the enemy he's always a liar and he's always trying to tell us lies about Ourselves or about someone else that we're in relationship with about a situation to try to trip us up in our life. We also have our own thoughts, that we formulate from experiences or just from our past, things like that. And then we have thoughts that come from God, when the Holy Spirit is giving us inspiration or encouraging us or telling us this is really what's going on. This is really what's happening here. This is my truth on the situation, but. Understanding, being able to listen and understand what are these thoughts that are coming in. Being able to process them. Where are they coming from? It's important because it helps us. To ensure that we're aligning our thoughts with God's thoughts.

Thomas: 8:48

I agree. And, I love back to the scripture, second Corinthians 10, five, I'm always coming back to the end, making them obedient to Christ. That is an active thing that we need to do in our lives. When it comes to our thought life and immediately, thoughts from the Those are the ones we want to identify. And, just give the Jesus right away and just get rid of them and just say, okay, take this away from me. I don't want anything to do with how the enemy might be seeing a situation. I think as you talk about our own thoughts and then thoughts from God, our goal in my opinion, our goal is to align those two things where I'm thinking what God thinks I'm saying what God says, I'm doing what God wants me to do. And the key word there, Trisha, that you said is discernment.

Trisha: 9:37

Yeah.

Thomas: 9:38

And that means that we need to be in a place where we can take our thoughts to the Lord and allow him to refine them, shape them, and correct them as needed.

Trisha: 9:47

You talked about the example of me opening up the bank account and seeing this withdrawal that we said we weren't going to spend money out of this account, but I'm seeing money being spent. So my thoughts could immediately go to, like you said he's being irresponsible. That could be a potential thought from the enemy, see, he's doing it again, he's being irresponsible, just so many negative, and bad thoughts that the enemy could be trying to infiltrate into my thought life. Or it could just be me thinking about, Oh man, what's going to happen now? Like we said we weren't going to spend this money out of this account. Now how am I going to get money to replace it? Whatever it is just our own thoughts. But if we don't sit with ourselves and assess what these thoughts are that are coming through our mind, we can't take those captive thoughts, right?

Thomas: 10:41

Exactly. And I'm sensing the Holy Spirit wanting to say that the example that you just gave where sensory data could lead to a thought that might not be positive, Thomas is being irresponsible. But you haven't spoken to me yet, right? You just saw something and now you have a thought that could lead to an emotion that could lead you make you angry, now, how you enter into that conversation with me. Because if you come in already believing that I'm irresponsible and you're angry, your words are going to be a lot different than if you say, Hey, honey, I noticed that there was this withdrawal from the account. Can you help me understand what it was? That's very different. Because now you're saying, I'm seeing this, and I want to understand what's going on. It can resolve and maybe avoid a lot of conflict than if we approach it in the former. In the former which is I'm coming in hot, I'm already angry, I'm heated, and I'm about to let you know about yourself.

Trisha: 11:40

Exactly. Like as Thomas said, the thoughts that we have going through our head and that we're, that keeps repeating in our mind, those are the thoughts that end up triggering emotions. They can trigger emotions.

Thomas: 11:51

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Trisha: 11:52

And those motions often cause Reactions in ourself and our blood pressure, right? Our own blood pressure and our relationships with other people, how we communicate whether it's verbally or non verbally.

Thomas: 12:10

And I think it's important to be able to identify the emotion. Emotions when we work with couples is one of the areas that can often be either untapped. In terms of people getting in touch with their emotions, or secondly, they can get confused between a thought and an emotion because they're very different. And a lot of times we believe that if we're feeling something, that must be the emotion. But in reality, sometimes I can say I feel like you don't love me. That's not an emotion. That's a thought. And so the ability to get emotions out of our thought life and get thoughts out of our emotions and Distinguish between the two is really important.

Trisha: 12:54

Yeah, so explain to me Why I feel like you don't love me. Why is that not an emotion? Why is that a thought?

Thomas: 13:03

Because usually a an emotion first of all, there's only six basic emotions, right? We can either be happy we can be angry, we can be surprised, and there's a few other from the other podcasts, but there are six basic emotions. And emotions are not thoughts, they're actually states of our being and how we feel about something. Thoughts are, I feel like you don't love me. So if you can say, I feel usually you can say, I think you don't love me. And if you can get it back up to a thought, now we can hopefully move further back to the sensory data and say, what happened? That made you think that, right? Whenever I came home and saw that the kitchen wasn't clean, I asked you to clean the kitchen. I came home, it wasn't clean and it makes me think you don't love me. And that makes me sad, right? So now I'm connecting pieces of the different parts of awareness so that I can help my partner understand what happened that led to a thought that created an emotion.

Trisha: 14:10

Yeah, this is actually very powerful because being able to get in touch with those emotions, like I feel this, I feel happy, I feel sad, I feel fearful, I feel angry. I feel disgusted, frustrated, like some people have big emotions, but they don't know how to identify it. And if you can just identify it with one word, I feel this. it can help you go deeper into that. why do I feel this way? And it can help you get into some of those thoughts that are triggering that feeling of fearfulness.

Thomas: 14:49

Exactly. I think that's great, and I think being able to name that emotion also brings it to the conscious realm. Because emotions are really close to our action network in terms of how we're wired as humans. And if we don't know what emotion is actually happening in us right now, we can end up reacting. We can end up acting out instead of having a chance to actually reflect, consider, like you just said, Why am I feeling this way?

Trisha: 15:18

Yeah.

Thomas: 15:20

And that would lead to if I don't want to feel that way, what do I want? And if I want to feel that way, what do I need to do to keep feeling that way? If that makes sense, right? If I'm happy, I want to stay happy, probably. And if I'm disappointed, I probably want to figure out what can I do to remove the disappointment that's in my life? So that gets into the wants, and there are really three types of wants. You either want to be, or we want to do or we want to have. To be means I want to be healthy. I want to be a doctor. I want to be successful in my life. To do is, I want to get a job, or I want to go to dinner, or I want to go to bed. And then, to have is, I would like to be able to buy a house, I want to retire with no worry about money in the future, or I want to buy a new car. Why do these matter? Because they speak to our values. And some of our wants are really strong where it's something that, man, it's really inside of us and we really want that and others are just like, I want it, but you know what, it's not that big of a deal and I could live without it too. And then lastly, it gives direction. After the wants we get into the actions, right? And that's the alignment with, am I willing to do what I need to do to bring the wants that I want in my life. And of course, I'm not doing this journey alone. There's you, and there's me, and then there's we. So that actually gets into the fact that wants can fall into three areas in our life. There's wants that I want for myself. There's wants that I might want for us in our relationship. And then there's wants that I want for you. Now, what's the danger of me wanting things for you? That maybe you don't want for yourself

Trisha: 17:08

and just cause this disconnection if you're wanting something so bad for me But I don't want it for myself. They can just cause Conflicts and our relationship.

Thomas: 17:19

Yeah. In fact I used to do that in the whole area of gift giving where one of your love languages is quality time and One of my love languages is gifts And so I would shower you with gifts at Christmas and anniversary and you're like I don't want a gift. I just want to be with you. And it created a lot of tension in the early years of our marriage because I was bringing you expressing love and wanting to put something on you that you did not want for yourself.

Trisha: 17:49

Absolutely. Yeah.

Thomas: 17:51

So where do we go from here? Getting clarity around our wants is the key takeaway from this part of it. What is it that we want? And these become our interests, our desires. And it's really important that we are able to identify those things and communicate those clearly with our partner, because that leads to the next thing, which is actions. So let's talk about actions. What are actions, Trish?

Trisha: 18:18

So actions are what we do, what happened. What we want to happen, like action steps to move forward in maybe a particular situation that we're in, how to put those wants that we maybe have aligned on, or the ones that we've processed with the Lord, how to put them into action and move forward.

Thomas: 18:39

Yeah, that's exactly right. And, the actions become sensory data for others. At the same time. And so as we're moving around and we're doing things, just know that other people are seeing that and that becomes sensory data for them. Which is you said that you wanted to, lose weight, but I'm still seeing you eat catfish pepper soup. All the time.

Trisha: 19:03

That's actually pretty healthy. Other than

Thomas: 19:05

The yams maybe have a few carbs, but other than that, you're right. Who would ever turn down caffeine? But you get it, right? Which is, we want to make sure that our actions are congruent with our wants, because if they're not. It just creates a disconnect in, do we really want it? Are we really aligned to doing what it takes to bring it about in our life? I think the last thing, and we're going to bring this home for today's session is the test, which is, I want to back up to wants. Cause I think there is a really important test that we can do in our relationships is check the wants and say, do they match? Do they match? Are we wanting the same thing? When we realize that we want the same thing. It means that we're moving in the same direction, and now all we're gonna really be talking about is how do we actually bring those wants into our life. If you don't know what the other person wants, there is one simple tool that we can use to find out. What do you think it is?

Trisha: 20:08

I don't know. Tell me.

Thomas: 20:10

Ask.

Trisha: 20:12

Yeah.

Thomas: 20:13

Sometimes we have assumptions. This is what they want. Let's check those assumptions and make sure it's really what they want. Because when we want for other people things that they don't want for themselves, as you already said, Trisha, it is a source of conflict.

Trisha: 20:28

Yeah, I think when, especially when you're in any relationship really, and you're looking at those wants and you're looking at your wants for somebody else, checking How much you care, the caring behind it, what is the root of why you're wanting something from, for somebody?

Thomas: 20:46

Yeah.

Trisha: 20:47

Are you wanting something from them? Is that what really it is? You're wanting something from them, where you're getting something that benefits you? Or are you really wanting something for someone? where It's actually bringing about careness, right? Yeah. You're caring, you're caringness you're love. What is the yeah, just what is the root of the wants? Because when you can get to making sure that the roots are, there's good intentions behind those and it's pure, it's out of a pure heart, then you can both come together and collaborate on. What you each are wanting and help to like align on that move forward.

Thomas: 21:28

I agree. I agree. Honey I just want you to make breakfast. I want you to feel good about making breakfast every morning for me, that's an example of a want, which is I want something for you, but the real person that benefits is me. Whereas I could say, honey, you know what? You want to be an ordained minister and I want that for you. It has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with you, your interests and your desires. And I want to come alongside of you. I want to come with you and partner with you to figure out how do we bring that into your life? So that's the difference. That's the distinction.

Trisha: 22:07

Yeah. Would actually just like to pull out to just on an individual level with our relationship with God, like how can we pull and tap into those wants with the Getting to his heart, Lord, show me what is on your heart for me, what is on your heart for my family or whatever it is that you're praying for, or you're seeking guidance on getting to his wants and aligning with his heart. There's so much power in that.

Thomas: 22:38

Yeah. Now you're starting to cross into identity and purpose. And is it, what does God want? Because really that's where it all starts. He is the Alpha and the Omega and in him, we live, we move, we have our being. And so you're right. Like that, you talked about the root a few minutes ago, making sure that the root is anchored in Christ. I think is really key and we always encourage people to involve God in everything that we do. There's no area in our life that he doesn't want to be a part of.

Trisha: 23:10

Exactly. And we can have ones that are selfish. We often, every one of us, I think we're born to be selfish, but how can we allow the Lord to search us, search our soul and expose those areas within ourselves where we can get rid of or allow his love to infiltrate into those areas where we are being selfish and we're not even realizing it, right? Allowing his light to come in and infiltrate those areas of selfishness and transform the wants that we're only looking at it from how it benefits us or me, but we're now seeing the bigger picture and how Certain wants can change to benefit more than just me and benefit for the long term. That's really

Thomas: 24:05

good. Yeah, kingdom purpose that we're so much part of a bigger plan That the Lord has for his people on this earth.

Trisha: 24:13

Yeah,

Thomas: 24:14

and how amazing that we get to play a part in that Yeah,

Trisha: 24:17

so it's just being known by him like Lord search me search my soul Like, reveal to me know me, search me, I want to be seen by you, I want to be known by you.

Thomas: 24:28

And I want wisdom, Solomon asked for wisdom, right? And, Proverbs 4, 7, Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding.

Trisha: 24:42

Absolutely. So we all need to be self aware. If we do not understand ourselves, it would be very difficult for others to understand us. Lack of self awareness often leaves us in a reactive state of being instead of being reactive, we're often reflective instead.

Thomas: 25:04

Yeah. Yeah. And, letting the light shine. Into dark situations light shines and darkness cannot overtake it. And so we want to expose those areas of our life. And this is what I think you're talking about in communing with the Lord and allowing him to reveal things that are inside of us that we might not otherwise have seen. So I think that's really important because that will make sure that our thoughts are aligned with his thoughts. Our emotions, God's not scared of our emotions. And it's okay to be angry,

Trisha: 25:39

right? He gave us emotions. That's

Thomas: 25:40

exactly right.

Trisha: 25:41

And

Thomas: 25:42

then our desires and then the actions that we take. I would love to make sure that as I'm taking actions They're the ones that I believe and have faith are the steps that the Lord has ordered in front of me.

Trisha: 25:53

Absolutely.

Thomas: 25:54

So what's the outcome from self awareness? Where does this take us?

Trisha: 25:59

We can move forward with a greater degree of intentionality to go after our wants and bring them to reality. And that goes for ourselves individually, for our relationships, for our marriages, for our families.

Thomas: 26:14

Yeah, the intentionality, I'll add another I as well, which is intimacy because as we become more self aware and we share that with each other, we're opening up a window into our hearts that only we can see by being vulnerable, being transparent and allowing ourselves to communicate with clarity what's going on inside of us. It just makes the walk so much richer and we move more in connectedness.

Trisha: 26:44

All right.

Thomas: 26:45

Thank you for listening in. God bless. Thank you for listening to Seeds for Your Marriage with hosts, Trisha and Thomas Walker. We pray this episode has given you tips and tools on how to thrive in your marriage. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Trisha and Thomas. We want to hear from you. Be sure to leave a review and let us know how we're doing. It's our desire that this podcast completely benefits you. So also let us know future marriage topics that you would like to hear about.