Your Superconscious and Unconscious collide in your Neo-Cortex (your conscious mind).
Your Unconscious is everything below your Neo-Cortex, including your body. Your Superconscious is your Prefrontal Cortex just behind your forehead.
We store memories, experiential states and the thoughts that go with them, both in our brain and body. When we ‘remember’ an experience we draw up and mentally reconstruct the situation we were in at the time - different aspects of what we remember are stored in different places. We’re not alone in this. Scientists tell us, for example, that when a bird has an unpleasant reaction to a toxic berry it stores information on the size and shape of the berry in one place; the taste memory in another; the shine-level memory of the berry in yet another and memories of the unpleasant physical consequences somewhere else. When it sees another similar berry these different memories are brought together and reconstructed to cause the bird to avoid it.
Let’s say you had an argument with someone in the past and for you the argument remains emotionally unresolved. If you want to you can draw up the emotional memories from your body in such a way it takes you right back to those moments. You re-enter the location or atmosphere; re-visit the person; re-generate the verbal content and tone of your argument and enter the emotional vibratory state you produced at the time causing the sensations to be re-felt. When these memories come together against your will, which is what happens when you are suffering with a trapped emotional response, you may find them upsetting - but rather than see yourself as a victim of a bad experience you can instead deliberately enter into it intending to complete and resolve the argument without the other person ever knowing you did so or taking any external action.
It may be you found the initial experience so painful your only concern was with escaping it as quickly as possible. During the argument things said to you, by a then trusted person, went straight into your unconscious. Left unchallenged, these criticisms have been damaging your self-image or self-esteem and now in the safer revisiting of the experience (in which you know its full limits) you are able to see things more objectively. Drawing up those negative judgements made against you now means you have time to carefully challenge them; re-frame your opinion of yourself and release the trapped emotional energies repeatedly driving these re-forming memories into conscious attention.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all easy. In fact for someone with an emotional disorder making the change means going through a series of internal battles before the war can be won; sometimes for months and, as in my case, for years. This war takes place between the Superconscious (your Prefrontal Cortex telling the rest of your brain and body how you intend to feel) and your Unconscious, telling how you currently feel.
This big argument between the two meets in the Neo-Cortex.
Whenever you ‘change your mind’ it is the Prefrontal Cortex that drives this. But there is a problem when you change your mind - you are confronted by all the years of biased interpretations and learning you previously sent down into it and oh, how we value the miserable work we’ve put into creating and keeping it there!
The argument is ‘it’s kept you and your loved ones alive and safe this long - so why risk it?’. Most of your current unconscious programming probably doesn’t show up much in your Neo-Cortex - with all those nasty emotional responses attached - until you fully commit to doing the opposite of what it keeps telling you to do. And then the emotionally driven arguments appear telling you such things as:
‘You cannot change how you interpret the past - that’s lying to yourself. You’re trying to pretend the other person was wrong. You need these bad feelings to remind you to stay on track and protect what you value’.
‘Don’t go into these painful feelings - if you go in you will never come out and then what? You will have to commit suicide to escape them - or you may get cancer and die. There is no you on the other side of this. This is you!’.
‘This is your punishment in life for not being good enough’.
‘Normal people do not experience these feelings - you’re crazy!’.
‘If you talk to someone else about what’s going on inside not only will they start avoiding you they might call the police who will then lock you up and throw away the key. You’ll be sectioned and drugged and electrocuted or even lobotomised. Your kids will never see you again’.
‘You can’t change yourself - it’s who you are. It can’t be done’.
As you keep moving inwards images start to come up accompanied by overwhelming emotional responses which cause normal thinking to shut down and the evidence being presented to the observing Prefrontal Cortex by the Unconscious is that the new approach will cause the entire self to close down (die).
If you imagine yourself as an organisation, with your Prefrontal Cortex acting as senior management, your Unconscious as the front line workforce threatening to go on strike and your Neo-Cortex acting as the day to day supervisory managers trying to keep normal productive life going on in the meantime it provides quite a good model. Both sides are well intentioned, but one has to win over the other to prove its case in regards to the new direction being taken.
You will see this kind of inner battle in the simplest life situations. For example you start a new job thinking your college training makes you an expert only to discover you’re once again ‘at the bottom of the ladder’ and have to learn whole new skill sets to thrive in the workplace. Or you suggest a new idea to someone and get criticisms for feedback.
As the Prefrontal Cortex drives these inner changes home it is confronted by these old arguments against change, and they are powerful arguments that change your actual body chemistry for a while. Now the Prefrontal Cortex has to agree to come up with alternative ways of thinking. You must give yourself permission to like yourself. You must accept the feelings you are experiencing as normal given the thought seeds, buried deep in your memories, that are driving them.
Whenever these thought seeds appear in your conscious mind (in your Neo-Cortex) your Prefrontal Cortex must grab them and deliberately change them or they will just carry on festering away in your Unconscious again.
‘Not only was I good enough I was outstanding - it was they who had the problem’.
‘These kinds of feelings are normal for anyone having to deal with that kind of situation’.
Whatever thought seeds you need to plant in your Unconscious in order to bring about inner happiness you plant right in the middle of this argument phase - repeatedly and whenever you have to. It doesn’t matter if these thoughts are not someone else’s truth - the truth is they’ll be your truth.
Achieving internal happiness, not re-writing history or making everyone else look good, is your goal here.
Regards - Carl
No comments:
Post a Comment