Your Mind's Hidden Messages
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ~ Carl Jung
We all have things that have been relegated to what we call the “unconscious mind”. Memories, beliefs, and ways of being all get stored away and buried in places we don’t even know exist. I compare it to the back of the closet you haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years. It’s just stuff you forgot you had. The problem with this stuff is that it’s affecting your daily life and most people don’t realize it.
The irony is that you do recognize it as thoughts and feelings you can’t place. You’ve just been taught not to pay attention to them. You’ve been taught that those things are irrational because you can’t figure them out immediately. That’s an unconscious memory, belief, or idea ratting itself out. Your job, instead of wallowing in the emotion or ignoring the thought, is to figure out where the thought or feeling came from. Chances are good, because you don’t immediately know where it came from, it was the unconscious part of you letting you know it’s there.
Let’s not leave our behaviour out of the conversation. Do you have behaviors you can’t explain? Things you do but you don’t know why you do them? That’s the unconscious ratting itself out through your own behavior. Do you understand why you respond or react the way you do to everything that happens in your life? If not, you probably have some unconscious things affecting your behavior. Again, if you’re feeling it, thinking it, or doing it, it’s not unconscious anymore.
Who taught us to ignore the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors we can’t explain? Where did we learn that from? Chances are you learned it from a bunch of other people in childhood that didn’t understand their own unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. We learned from the people around us in childhood. Our job as adults is to begin questioning all the things we were taught to ignore.
Unlike Jung, I don’t believe the unconscious is that much of a mystery. We aren’t taught to acknowledge things we can’t immediately explain. Often, when we do try to explain those things we blame somebody else for them or, as Jung stated in his quote at the top of the article, we call it fate instead. It’s not fate. It’s not a mystery. It’s stuff you buried that wants your attention.
The biggest problem with the unconscious is not that it’s somewhat hidden, it’s that people are scared of it. People are afraid of what they might find in those shadows or in the unconscious. We have this idea in society that the unconscious is a part of ourselves that’s going to tell us how awful we are or that the unconscious truth is that we’re horrible human beings that deserve to be punished. This fear and the untruth that goes with it means the unconscious exploration gets left to therapists and psychologists.
If the unconscious was really out to get to you, it wouldn’t show itself as a vague feeling you can’t explain or some random behavior that you don’t understand, it would just try to take over the world. But it doesn’t do that. It wants you to begin to explore it. It wants you to learn about what’s there, not be afraid of it. It’s gently trying to get your attention with random things you can’t explain. It’s not waving a sharp object in your face. Are you afraid of the back of your closet at home? Probably not. So why are afraid of your own internal closets?
The stuff in the shadows are things that you put there. It’s your stuff. Your judgment of it as something bad that you need to protect yourself from actually causes you more harm than anything. By slowly allowing yourself to check out the cobwebs without judging what you find, the unconscious will begin to be a valuable tool that will help connect some of the dots in your healing journey. It’ll start to make sense of the things that you don’t currently understand. The key to the unconscious is not to judge it.
Once you shine a light on the shadows, they cease being shadows. The light is nothing more than acknowledgement. The tool for understanding the shadows is the same one we use to understand the things we’re consciously aware of: self-mastery. Sit down with yourself and question yourself.
Where did that come from? You probably have a vague idea already because it’s likely something you’re already, at least partially aware of.
What’s trying to reveal itself to me? This is just another layer of the proverbial onion we talk about in healing sometimes. There’s a new layer, but this layer you couldn’t see at first and now you can.
Why am I afraid of exploring or accessing this part of me? If you’re feeling the fear this is going to be a very valuable question for you to ask yourself.
Stay out of judgment. New information is not a reason to beat ourselves up, to find something or someone to blame, to argue, defend, or avoid. New information is valuable insight. The more open you are to it, the more you’re going to discover about yourself and all the stuff you hid in your internal closet.
We all have an internal closet. I had a few of them! I buried all kinds of nonsense back there. The more things I brought to the surface, the better I felt. The more light I had to be able to shine on other parts of me that I had hidden. The more light I had access to, the easier it got to clear out other parts of me.
Sometimes we think of the unconscious as the inner child or inner teen or inner young adult. Jung had his own version of this idea. The unconscious is often stuff we buried much earlier in life because we couldn’t handle it at the time. That’s okay. There is a part of ourselves as children that knows to save stuff for our adult minds to deal with later on. There is a somewhat unconscious survival mechanism that children seem to have that lets them save things for their adult selves to deal with. I personally think it’s a brilliant strategy, but it does require our adult selves to be willing to do the work, and that’s where we’re lacking.
If we think of the unconscious as nothing more than the stuff our child selves saved for us to deal with, it’s far less scary. It would be like your kids now hiding dishes in their rooms for you to find in a month or two - you don’t know what’s hiding under that bed, but you’re going to go find out. Do the same with your unconscious. Be willing to go find out what your child self left for you.
There is a whole new level of yourself waiting to be explored. If the only thing that’s stopping you is a fear of what you might find, challenge the fear. It’s okay to go digging. There is nothing there that you don’t know about. You may have forgotten about it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know about it.
In my podcast episode later in the week, we’re going to continue to talk about this idea of the unconscious mind—not as some deep, unknowable boogey man, but as a collection of experiences, beliefs, and emotions we’ve saved for later. We’ll talk about how to recognize when the unconscious is speaking to you, how to work with it instead of fearing it, and how self-mastery plays a key role in integrating what you find. If you’ve ever felt like your thoughts, feelings, or behaviors don’t quite make sense, this episode will help you start connecting the dots.
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Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you later in the week!
Love to all.
Della
