One day, my mother and I wrote the description about the same scene. I thought mother's would be almost the same as mine, but her description was quite different from mine, although we didn't mean to change anything. We were surprised, then realized that how people sense what happened depends on each person. That showed us that what we think true is not always the truth.
I asked my Self-Counseling teacher if my mother and I needed to figure out the true scene. Her answer was no, because the most important thing in Self-Counseling is to figure out not the truth, but my feeling at that time. As long as I remember the scene as I write, that is the truth and how I sensed it. Your reaction is always connected with how you sense what happened. So if you write exactly what happened from a tape recording, that might in fact prevent you from finding out your feeling.
After reading Watanabe's books, I also realized many things about myself. The biggest discovery was that I even couldn't decide if I like something or not. As long as I remember, I started having this kind of tendency when I was a junior high school student. I remember that for example I was sometimes scared even to go shopping with my friends, because I thought that if my taste was different from theirs, they might think of me as a strange person. Not only at a store, but also everywhere I always tried to agree with others, because I didn't want to come to the surface. I was doing that almost unconsciously. After I noticed that, I also remembered what influenced me to be like this, and thus I felt that I was changing to a person who has her own opinion.
Well, as I often write [I don't want someone to think...] in my description, I still care what others think of me and sometimes hide my real feelings, but now that I have learned self-reflection in a Self-Counseling way, I think this is OK, because I think it is more important to think why I couldn't express my feeling at that time. As long as I know the reason, I don't feel uneasy often.
I know I will keep doing Self-Counseling in my life to continue discovering more and more about myself. This, in turn, will improve my relations with others.