THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND part 2
In the previous posts in our series “It’s all in your mind”, we talked about the Unconscious Mind, the seat of effortless change, what is it, what it is not. We looked briefly at how language determines our reality (we will go deeper into this in a later post specifically dedicated to language) and at one of the major jobs of the unconscious mind. In this post, we continue our exploration of the unconscious mind.
⁃ We know that the unconscious mind is that part of ourselves we are not conscious about.
⁃ We also know that it runs and preserves the body (handling all the crucial physiological functions, healing you and keeping you from harm).
⁃ We know that calling the mind “the mind” (a noun) does not really reflect the changing nature of the processes that go on inside creating a complex web of interlinked connections and patterns.
⁃ We know that the boundary between conscious and unconscious is porous, i.e. we can increase our awareness with practice.
Not everyone agrees that we have an unconscious. For example, some schools of psychology consider that behaviors are the result of conditioned reflexes. In NLP however, and to an even greater extend, in hypnosis, we believe that the unconscious mind holds enormous potentials for healing and change.
For one, not all memories are conscious. We hold a lot of memories outside of our awareness. Some memories are held just below the level of consciousness, some deep into the unconscious. A simple example of that: say your phone number to yourself now. Before I asked you, that number was outside of your awareness, but it probably did not take long for you to get the memory back to the surface (except if like me, you have all important numbers on automatic dial on your phone so it takes a little more time to remember them…)
As we saw in the previous post, one of the big ‘jobs’ of the unconscious is to run and preserve the body. But that’s not all.
Job #2: It handles all our memories. A good metaphor to understand this is the technology metaphor: see the unconscious as a kind of Microsoft Explorer or Finder on the Mac. It files memories away; all of them.
Remember in the first post of this series, we talked about the process of perception: we take in an enormous amount of information coming through our five senses, and most of it is filed away in the unconscious through the triple processes of deletion, distortion and generalisation, so that in the end what we only consciously remember very little.
Some of those memories are stored deep into the unconscious, so they don’t come back to the surface that easily (a skilled hypnotherapist can help someone bring the memories back to the surface, as in forensic hypnosis for example), some of them are just there, available right away if you need them, and some of them, the ones we cannot handle, are locked away in a small (metaphorical) pouch and the unconscious mind knows exactly when to open the pouch so they can come to the surface and be resolved when we are ready for them (this is what happens when we suddenly have a realisation about something from childhood for example).
There are a few more things you want to know about your unconscious mind.
#1: It is symbolic and works by associations.
What does this mean? Even though it holds the solution to many of our problems, we need to learn to read its message. Why? Because the unconscious speaks only in symbols: images, intuitions, flashes or dreams for example, but not words. So we want to become attuned to symbols as those sometimes hold important messages and insights.
Personal practice: the dream journal.
This is a practice that has proven very useful during times of confusion or transition. Buy a notebook, and leave it by your bedside. Before you sleep at night, give yourself the suggestion that you will have vivid dreams and you will remember your dreams when you wake up in the morning. In the morning, before you awake completely, jot down what you remember from the dream(s) in your notebook. Do this regularly over a period of time of at least 2 weeks, preferably one month. After you jot down the dream detail, ask yourself: what does this mean to me?
Remember dreams are symbols, don’t take them literally, they are metaphors, this is how the unconscious mind communicates. What is important is that you find out what it means TO YOU. I am not too found of dream books (the type that tells you what it means if you dream of a bird or of flying). I think you know better than anyone else what symbols mean to YOU, and by imposing sense to symbols, they tend to severely limit the communication between our own conscious and unconscious.
In all likelihood, every dream will be different, but as you read through you will discern a guiding pattern, a main theme.
Illustration
Jim had a series of very vivid dreams that he recorded over a month. He had a difficult situation at work that he did not know how to handle. His dream journal filled up quite quickly, so will I just present two of them here. One night, he was a human size bird in a human size cage. The cage was hanging from a very high ceiling with its door open. He wanted to fly away, and was weighting the pros and cons. Then he suddenly realised someone had closed the door. In another dream, he was driving a powerful fast car on a winding road, and was stuck behind a slow truck. As cars were coming in the other direction, he was trying to overtake, but was not certain he could clearly assess distances. When he read through his journal at the end of the month, he could clearly see that the main theme was freezing before taking action because of uncertainty that things would go the way he wanted. He used this insight in the work issue he had and cleared it up in a day.
#2: It cannot process negatives.
What does this mean? Simply that saying “I am not bad today” is different from “I am good today”. How? Try this for yourself: if I tell you “don’t think of a pink elephant”, what do you have to think about? A pink elephant. And then you have to remember not to think about it. You have to FOCUS on what you do not want to think about in order not to think about it. Many times, when clients come to coaching, they are very well aware of what they do not want in their life. For example: “I don’t want to feel stressed when I have to speak in a company meeting”, or “I am carrying the whole department on my shoulders, I have nobody I can really rely upon in this company”.
Personal practice #1
Ask yourself “what is it that I don’t want, don’t like, am not happy about in my life/work/relationship”? Write the answer to those questions down. Then, translate each of them into a positive statement asking yourself “what do I want instead?”
Personal practice #2
For one whole day, decide to use positive language. Ban all “not”, “no”, don’t”, “can’t” etc… from your vocabulary. In your daily dealings with people, use positive language. In your daily self talk (i.e. talk inside your head), use positive language. when you catch yourself using a negation, rephrase the negative sentence into a positive one.