What is up, daddy?
Gang?
It is your founding father, Alex Cooper, with call her daddy, doctor Nicole Perro.
Welcome to call her daddy.
Thank you so much for having me.
Alex, you are a clinical psychologist, and you have a new book, how to meet yourself.
So you talk about how getting to know yourself means a variety of things, including understanding why we react the way we do in certain situations, why we're drunk to certain situations, why we get stuck in certain patterns, and how all of these behaviors are rooted in our childhood and interactions we had with our parents.
So, from a psychologist perspective, let's start with what does it mean to be self aware?
Yeah, I think this is a really, really great place to start and to speak to your point, the self that many of us are enacting in the world, reacting to in the world from, again, is what I call in the book at least, our habit self.
It is all of our conditioned experiences wired literally into our brain and our nervous system, and it becomes our way of being, so much so that many of us, well into later in life, don't really know who we are.
And I remember me having many moments in my twenties when I was coming to that realization that I actually don't know who I am.
I don't even know how I want to spend my time.
Even though to speak to the point of self awareness, I did have the idea that I knew myself.
I was studying to be a clinical psychologist.
I had been in and out of therapy on my own.
But what I really came to realize is the self that I was most familiar with, that I imagine many of you listeners are most familiar with, is that conditioned self.
All of the habits and patterns, again, that were an adaptation to my earliest environment, that stored in my subconscious mind, become how I am in the world, but not who I am in the world.
So for me, self awareness really means becoming conscious of, first and foremost, the impact of those earlier patterns or habits so that we can then create the space for true self awareness, dropping into the deeper, more authentic space of ourselves.
I appreciate you explaining that so well, because I think that self awareness sometimes is such a broad topic that people, like, run from it.
They're like, I don't know what the hell it means.