What is Constructed Awareness?
Constructed Awareness (CA) is a recently developed approach to therapy that helps clients understand how they experience and don’t experience themselves. CA explores how clients construct their experiences from three parts, referred to in CA as “building blocks” (i.e., mind, body, and external senses), and use awareness of those building blocks to resource and process trauma.
Other therapeutic approaches often aim to change one aspect of the self. For example, cognitive therapies concentrate primarily on the mind by recognizing and modifying disturbing thoughts. However, clients who lean on their minds to navigate life may succeed more using cognitive interventions than those who rely less on their mental faculties. Reacting to cognitive therapy’s emphasis on thoughts, pioneers in somatic therapy shifted the focus of therapy from the client’s mind to the body. The popularity of somatic therapy has again led many counselors to favor one aspect of the client’s experience over others that comprise the whole person. CA addresses this issue by bringing awareness of all aspects that construct our reality.
The easiest way I’ve found to introduce CA is to review its three principles.
Principle One: Bringing awareness to the client’s experience changes their experience. By this, I mean if you bring awareness to your experience, the awareness itself has the power to instantly transform your experience. A good example of this is how you behave differently at home alone than you would if someone were with you. Why? Because you are being observed. If you’re a parent, you’ve witnessed the power of awareness because you know children behave differently when they are being watched versus when they are not. You’ve certainly had instances where you caught your kid doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing, only for them to instantly correct their behavior as soon as they realized you were watching them.
CA relies solely on awareness as the means of change. Our Western society relies heavily on self-control and willpower to bring about change (and this is reflected in many of the prominent therapy models). We’re taught from an early age if we want something, we can work hard to achieve it. But how many times have you tried with all your might to achieve something, only to fail?
Some things you just can't make happen, like falling asleep. This has never worked for anyone in human history. Anytime you’ve tried to force yourself to fall asleep, the opposite actually happens. It leads to fighting with sleep. This is an example of how force and willpower create the opposite effect.
The same is true for emotions. Growing up, we are taught by caregivers things like, “Don't worry; don't cry; don't be upset.” Unfortunately, this instilled a false impression that we have control over our feelings. But I'll speak for myself: if I had control over my feelings, why would I ever feel bad?
We see this kind of misguided advice in expressions like “Choose happiness.” I wish it were that easy. I find this suggestion insulting to all my clients who struggle to connect with feelings like happiness. If we had control over what we felt, we would only feel good. We’d be blissed out in euphoria every second, every minute, every day, for the rest of our lives. If we actually had a choice, we wouldn’t choose to feel as bad as we so often do.
CA teaches that this type of control is an illusion. You can’t will away undesirable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. You can’t swap out a negative feeling for a positive one like a flat tire. Attempts to do so just repress symptoms instead of actually dealing with them. Most of the time, when we try to force change, it worsens the problem. An example of this is that no one has ever calmed down from someone demanding, Calm down! So, instead of relying on willpower and self-control to change undesirable thoughts and feelings, CA therapists rely solely on mindful awareness to bring about change. We believe that awareness itself can transform the client’s life. (For more on CA’s first principle, see my blog, “The Power of Awareness.”)
So, what do we bring awareness to? That gets us to the second principle.
Principle Two: The human experience is made up of three building blocks: thoughts, sensations, and external senses.
By this, I mean everything you’ve ever experienced is constructed by those three parts; they comprise reality. I’d love for you to chew on that. Again, I’ll speak for myself. I’ve never experienced anything that wasn’t a thought, sensation, or external sense perception. It’s incredible to think we can boil down our entire conscious human experience to something so simple.
Emotions, then, are defined by CA as constructed experiences comprised of the three building blocks. CA therapists express this composition as thought + sensation + external stimuli = emotion. And emotions are viewed merely as concepts. They are umbrella terms that describe the collection of the parts that form them. Our minds are adept at taking something made of multiple parts and describing it using one word. For example, it’s much easier to say I want spaghetti for dinner than to say I want boiled noodles, ground beef, tomato sauce, etc. It would be an arduous existence if we had to communicate that way. Lucky for us, our brains can conceptualize complex experiences into single words.
Our brains do the same thing with emotions. Imagine you encounter an external stressor that triggers thoughts and sensations (notice in that sentence that we have the three building blocks). Within that experience, you can tangibly identify the external stressor through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. You can feel the tension, heat, etc., that arises as a sensation. And you can see or hear the thoughts that come to mind. All those parts of the experience come together to create an emotional experience that you might label “anxiety.” But the word “anxiety” tells us very little about the full expression of the experience.
Instead of working with emotional concepts like “anxiety,” CA therapists bring the client’s awareness to the building blocks that construct them. Details about the thoughts, sensations, and external cues that comprise the emotion tell us so much more about the experience than the emotion word. In fact, we call CA “Constructed Awareness” because practitioners bring awareness to the building blocks that construct their emotional experiences. For more information about CA’s construction of emotion, check out my blog, “What is an emotion?”
CA’s second principle regarding the three building blocks naturally advances into the third principle, which informs therapists about how to use CA’s organization of experience in clinical practice.
Principle Three: Most people naturally orient their awareness more strongly to one of the three building blocks. By this, I mean most people rely primarily on one part of their experience and less on the other two. We use the term orientation to describe how someone uses their building blocks to regulate themselves, connect with others, and meet their needs.
Some people are Mentally Oriented. They spend more time in their minds analyzing, fantasizing, or planning. Other people are Sensation Oriented. They give more attention to their bodies and sensations. And some people are Externally Oriented. They focus more on what’s happening in their external environment.
The Constructed Awareness Level One training prepares clinicians to determine and interpret client orientation. Trainees also learn a typology of six personality styles, what I call orientation styles, to help clients understand their personality and character traits based on their orientation style. The training also teaches specific self-awareness resources that apply to each orientation style.
By arranging the three building blocks—mental (M), sensation (S), and external (E)—from most used to least used, we create six orientation styles. For example, if a person relies most on their mind (M) and least on their sensations (S) to regulate and connect with others, their orientation style would be MES, which we refer to as the Striving style. Each combination of building blocks creates a unique orientation style with unique character traits.
The orientation styles are:
MES: Striving: These individuals are often analytical, assertive, driven, good at developing and following through with plans, decisive, creative, charismatic, respected, ambitious, detail-oriented, competent, opinionated, pushy, hard-working, intense, impatient, judgmental, and inflexible.
MSE: Thinking: These individuals are often independent, undemanding, intelligent, creative, inquisitive, analytical, thoughtful, empathetic, prone to dissociation, imaginative, reclusive, unassertive, and often drawn to spirituality, art, philosophy, or fields that involve deep thinking.
EMS: Adapting: These individuals are often adaptive, extroverted, outgoing, optimistic, versatile, talented, spontaneous, fun, energetic, witty, talented, adventurous, spontaneous, empathetic, charismatic, charming, scattered, undisciplined, impatient, and impulsive.
ESM: Giving: These individuals are often accepting, caring, optimistic, generous, nurturing, caregiving, adaptable, peace-making, reliable, responsible, devoted, loving, conflict-avoidant, indecisive, resentful, obligated, self-blaming, self-doubting, and over-accommodating.
SME: Feeling: These individuals are often imaginative, creative, empathetic, intuitive, caring, loyal, value-oriented, sensitive, shy, practical, emotional, easily overwhelmed, withdrawn, dramatic, easily rattled, socially awkward, and prone to self-destructive behaviors.
SEM: Trusting: These individuals are often kindhearted, caring, sweet, childlike, endearing, adorable, innocent, empathetic, considerate, likable, alluring, helpless, dependent, gullible, suggestible, needy, emotional, unreliable, unpredictable, indecisive, and easily overwhelmed.
The CA typology is a broad topic—too big for this blog. I plan to write several future blogs on the subject. But for now, if you’d like to learn more about the CA typology and discover your orientation style, click here to take the Constructed Awareness Scale (CAS). The CAS is an assessment designed to reveal your orientation style and give you information about your style’s personality, attachment, and communication traits.