If you are new to self–inquiry, start here!! This is your go-to episode when you need a quick self–inquiry tutorial, refresher or a little help coaxing you into the self–inquiry mood. Dr. Lexi Giblin, PhD, orients you to the key components and process of self–inquiry. With these basics in hand, you can more fully take in The Appetite’s Self–Inquiry series and possibly begin your own self–inquiry journey. For a deeper dive, go to Episode # 18 Emotion and Learning: The Self–Inquiry Process in Radically Open DBT.
Connect with Opal:
Thank you to our team…
Editing by David Bazzi
Music by Aaron Davidson: https://soundcloud.
Sound engineering by Ayesha Ubayatilaka at Jack Straw Studios
Transcription by Rev.com
Lexi Giblin (00:07):
Welcome to the Appetite, a podcast brought to you by Opal Food and Body Wisdom, an eating disorder treatment clinic in Seattle, Washington. On this podcast, we talk about all things food, body movement, and mental health. I’m Dr. Lexi Giblin, your host for today, and I will be giving you a self-inquiry overview on this episode. And we thought this could be a place that you could come to learn self-inquiry and also a place to get a refresher on self-inquiry or get yourself in the self-inquiry mode. Also, you might want to come back to this just to kind of get in the groove of self-inquiry because it is such a different way of experiencing yourself. So I hope this can be an episode you can turn to for many reasons just to get a refresher and such. So self-inquiry is a core mindfulness skill in radically open dialectical behavioral therapy or R-O-D-B-T, which was founded by Dr.
(01:10):
Tom Lynch. In self-inquiry, we are choosing to go towards unwanted emotions or distress for a specific reason because you definitely would want a good reason to do something so uncomfortable and that reason is to learn and grow. A basic assumption of self-inquiry is that emotional difficulty is one of our greatest teachers moving away from emotional difficulty, or we also call it dysregulation can block potential growth. And the worst, the adversity you’re facing, the greater the opportunity for learning. And so good therapy hurts. So in R-O-D-B-T, the self-inquiry process is intentionally short at about three to five minutes. And as Dr. Lynch says, you want to visit the cemetery, you don’t want to build your home in the cemetery. So it serves as a touchpoint for feeling hurt, not an invitation to choose to swim in the pain all of the time. So we want it to be a place that you would want to return and you can do self-inquiry in your head in a journal or verbally with someone else.
(02:29):
And when you’re in self-inquiry, you are looking to learn and you learn by finding your edge or the place where the known meets the unknown. And you’re assuming you have blind spots and are getting curious about what you do not yet understand. And a reframe we use is that we can’t see what we can’t see. And you are in self inquiry, you are feeling with curiosity. So you’ve tapped into some emotion and you’re getting curious about what the learning is as you are feeling. So it’s experiential and your emotion is leading the way. While you are layering on questioning and curiosity, you are seeking your shadow self or the part of you that you would rather not see. So in self-inquiry, you are intentionally disturbing the peace and looking for dysregulation. It is a place where ambiguity, complexity and messiness reign supreme, as I always say, if it’s complex, let it be complex.
(03:43):
If it’s ambiguous, let it be ambiguous. Self-inquiry is the antithesis to tying things up in a neat bow. We are searching for the unexpected and looking out for old stories or pattern routine ways we have of making sense of our experiences. And importantly, in self-inquiry, we are working to find good questions, not answers. And in self-inquiry, we are suspicious of quick answers and we wonder if answers are actually serving to regulate someone and help them move away from the discomfort. So we’re suspicious of quick answers for that reason. Good questions in self-inquiry are questions that cause dysregulation or elicit discomfort, resistance, confusion, strong emotion or physical tension. And when you hear a question in self-inquiry that brings discomfort up, dysregulation up, those questions are the keepers, those are the zingers as we say, and ones you’ll want to keep in your pocket for further.
(05:01):
So let me break down the three steps in the three to five minute self-inquiry process. So the first part is that you are feeling this is the feeling part. Well, you’re feeling for the full three to five minutes or you’re trying to hold the feeling for the three to five minutes, but this is the part where you’re really taking yourself into a specific time when you experienced an unwanted emotion. And it’s important to find a specific time when you felt something uncomfortable and you take yourself into it by describing a bit of the context, like what were the sight sounds, smells, sensations in your body, what was happening when you felt the most intensity. So thinking about when the tears popped into your eyes, what was said or what happened just before that moment. So that’s the first part, taking yourself back into a specific time.
(06:03):
And then the second part is that you’re getting curious. So you’re asking the golden question, what is the learning here? And you’re asking also, is this an old story? So you might answer that question with some kind of a pattern routine way you have of making sense of experiences similar to the one you are self inquiring around. So you ask this question, is this an old story to see if perhaps you’re getting stuck in some kind of routine old patterns and asking there? And if the answer is yes, this does feel familiar to me, then the question would be, what might be a new way of seeing? So what am I not yet understanding? And then finally, you’re finding a reminder or a good question to get back to this learning in the future.
(07:03):
You’re looking for questions that you do not want to ask. So these are those questions that will hide out under rocks that you don’t want to move. So those are the questions that are often the most powerful. So your reminder, your question should prompt you to feel the dysregulation associated with the learning in your self inquiry. And asshole questions are celebrated. So the more provocative, the better because that could lead to more learning. Now that’s an overview of self-inquiry in general. And on our self-inquiry series, we’re going to be doing self-inquiry in the group context. So myself and typically Cari will be on the mic and we will have self inquiries in studio with us sharing their self-inquiry work. And so our series will double down on the power of independent self-inquiry by positioning the work in a group context where multiple viewpoints can come to play in the process.
(08:19):
So the different perceptual biases of the group members will create a particularly fertile ground for helping to see the parts of ourselves that we cannot see. Our group process around self inquirers journal work is extra heat on. And so it’s important that the self inquirers always know that they can end the process at any time. So we’re going in our self-inquiry series, we’re going beyond the five minute self-inquiry length, so it’s extra heat on. And we want to respect of course that if anyone at any time is feeling like they want to step away from the work that is fair. So during the episode, someone not doing the self-inquiry will write down the questions being posed so that the self inquiry can have them for later and focus on what it feels like to consider the questions being posed. So remember that good questions or zingers are the ones that are difficult or confusing to hear.
(09:21):
And for those of us not doing self-inquiry, our job is to serve as provocateurs and ask asshole questions. We will work to not validate or soothe or get in the way of the self inquires process. So we’re coming from a place of kindness, and the kindness is an interest in helping the self inco grow and learn. And remember here we’re assuming that dysregulation and discomfort is the place of learning. And so it is with kindness that we’re allowing the person to be in the discomfort. So that gives you an overview of the self-inquiry process and a bit about our self-inquiry group context. And I hope that this helps you better understand our self-inquiry series and the work behind or the theory and tenets behind the work that you will hear on our self-inquiry series. If you are interested in doing self-inquiry on air with us, submit an application by clicking on the link in the episode description. Thank you to Jack Straw Cultural Center for Sound Engineering. Thanks to Aaron Davidson for the Appetite’s original music, and to David Bazzi for editing. If you want to learn more about opal’s programming, go to opal food and body.com. Until next time.
