Self Awareness

• Awareness of one’s feelings, beliefs, attitudes, values and thoughts that is essential to the practice of psychiatric nursing.

• Process of developing an understanding of one’s own values, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, feelings, motivations, strengths and limitations and how these qualities affect others.

• Process by which the nurse gains recognition of his own feelings, beliefs and attitudes.

• Recognition of one’s own uniqueness. It encompasses self-knowledge about one’s behavior and its impact on self and other feelings toward self and others, one’s needs and whishes and one’s sense of life purpose.

• Keystone in therapeutic relationship.

• The nurse needs to discover himself or herself and what she or he believes before trying to help others with different views.

• The goal of self-awareness is to know oneself so that one’s values, attitudes and beliefs are not projected to the client, interfering with nursing care.

• Self-awareness does not mean having to change one’s values or beliefs unless one desires to do so.

• Can be an effective tool as you interact with clients who are anxious, depressed, confused or psychotic.