Meaning & use
self-understanding
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Meaning
noununcountable
A clear awareness of your own feelings, motives, strengths and weaknesses, and of why you act as you do.
Grammar: No plural and no article in general use: self-understanding grows with time.
Patterns
- gain self-understanding
- deepen your self-understanding
- a lack of self-understanding
Therapy helped her reach a deeper self-understanding.
Journaling is one way to build self-understanding.
His lack of self-understanding made the same conflicts repeat.
Common combinations
- gain self-understanding
- Travel alone helped him gain self-understanding.
- deepen self-understanding
- Honest feedback can deepen self-understanding.
- promote self-understanding
- The course aims to promote self-understanding among teenagers.
- a lack of self-understanding
- A lack of self-understanding often lies behind poor choices.
- emotional self-understanding
- Children develop emotional self-understanding through play.
Synonyms and how they differ
- self-awareness
- Slightly more about noticing your feelings in the moment, while self-understanding suggests a deeper grasp of why you are the way you are.
- self-knowledge
- Stresses knowing facts about yourself, whereas self-understanding includes making sense of them.
- insight
- Can be about anything, including other people, and is often a single moment of realization.
Opposites
Word family
- self noun
- a person's own identity
- understand verb
- to grasp the meaning of
- understanding noun
- knowledge or comprehension
- self-aware adjective
- conscious of your own character
Commonly confused: self-understanding or self-confidence?
self-understanding vs self-confidence
Self-confidence is trust in your own abilities, while self-understanding is knowing what you are like.
Practice
After years of therapy, she had a much deeper ___ of why she reacted so strongly to criticism.
Choose one answer.
Self-understanding is awareness of your own motives and reactions. Self-defense is protecting yourself physically, so it does not fit a reaction to criticism.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “self-understanding”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.