Awareness and Existential Presence

The Phenomenology of Awareness

Together with practicing psychotherapist Maxim Pestov, we explore how to recognize and differentiate the emotions that overwhelm us, the dangers of fully merging with our feelings, and which mental resources are needed to master emotional regulation.

There are countless texts on the phenomenology of awareness, but today we’ll focus on its therapeutic functions and examine why awareness alone is not enough to achieve mental well-being.

Awareness in Gestalt Therapy

In Gestalt therapy, awareness is one of the main mechanisms for developing a more complex psyche. Why is it needed? The answer is simple: to be able to regulate your emotional life. There are two extremes: when a person is fused with their feelings and completely overtaken by them—sometimes to the point of affective narrowing of consciousness or borderline splitting—and when a person can emotionally respond while also observing the process. Awareness allows us not only to participate in something but also to see how it works. By being aware, I place myself at the center of what’s happening, rather than drifting on the periphery.

To use a metaphor, the mind without awareness is like a horse running wild. Awareness helps you remember that you are riding the horse. Once you realize this, you can control the horse instead of being at the mercy of its moods.

The Foundation of Emotional Regulation

Awareness is the starting point for emotional regulation. On one hand, it initiates a process that unfolds over time and can be observed. On the other, it needs a supportive foundation.

Often, even when we understand the need for awareness, we don’t realize it right away. For example, we may regret not using the skills we have when we needed them. That’s why awareness must be paired with mindfulness—a concept with many connotations in Western psychology. The term “mindfulness” (as opposed to “awareness”) refers to the ability to activate awareness at the right moment. In this sense, it aligns with the concept of the observing ego.

Another essential skill for awareness is the development of attention or concentration. It’s not enough to simply understand something; you must maintain awareness for a sufficient period. Common sense tells us that contact with unpleasant experiences naturally makes us want to end them quickly. In Eastern traditions, this urge is countered by the ability to observe emotional reactions as objects of the mind, remaining uninvolved. In Western traditions, the ability to process unpleasant experiences is called the nonspecific strength of the ego. Thus, attention develops along the lines of clarity and stability, giving awareness the necessary direction and resilience.

Grounding and Symbolization

We’ve briefly described the “left and right hands” of awareness. Now, let’s see what follows. In terms of process, awareness helps restore the wholeness of experience. When we talk about awareness, we often mean focusing attention on the bodily components of emotions. Psychotherapists sometimes call this grounding—when observing bodily sensations helps reduce emotional overwhelm. This happens partly because awareness slows things down, increasing accuracy and reducing the intensity of experiences. This is the first stage: discovering yourself at the starting point.

The next stage is symbolization or the process of making meaning. It’s important to be able to place your experiences in some context, since emotionally difficult situations are part of the rest of life. Often, affect arises when an experience is left hanging and isolated from background feelings. For example, anger can be especially hard to bear if you can’t access other emotions present in the relationship. This kind of affective reaction is called borderline splitting, where hatred for a “bad” object destroys its good qualities and thus breaks attachment.

Emotions as Contact Phenomena

It’s also important to remember that emotions are contact phenomena. This means that awareness alone is not enough: it’s crucial to connect the emotion with a need and with an object that could satisfy it. When emotions remain an “individual” process that the person tries to handle alone, without bringing them into contact, we see a halt in experiencing. The extreme manifestation of this is psychological trauma. Therefore, the goal of emotional regulation is to restore sensitivity in cases of psychological anesthesia, not to support avoidance of negative emotions.

Context and Process Thinking

Awareness of context allows you to move to the third stage of emotional regulation, which we’ll call process thinking. This means being able to observe a complex emotion in terms of the past (shared history) and the future (its potential development). If this doesn’t happen, the experience of interrupted processes—where it feels like relationships are falling apart or life is split into “before” and “after”—greatly contributes to affect that floods consciousness and leads to acting out. This approach does not add to experience; in fact, it hinders psychological processing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, awareness, like any other phenomenon, does not exist in isolation and needs support—both in the “here and now” (through mindfulness and attention) and in the dimension of development (from context to process). Awareness, as the point where the present manifests, lies at the center of an imaginary line from past to future. This enables the integration of different parts of experience and increases the density of existential presence.