Understanding ourselves is probably the hardest undertaking anyone can endeavor to do. That’s could be because much of the time we’re acting on subconscious drivers outside of our awareness. Not to mention, decoding the puzzle of a human being is easier if you’re not the human being in question. Our blind spots are plenty. Just let someone attempt to show us what we can’t see about ourselves and watch our fierce defenses bite back in denial or projection.
What lay in our subconscious holds the key to understanding behaviors that evoke shame, guilt, and embarrassment. Once understood, those behaviors can evoke compassion, love, and grace instead. The subconscious is hiding the truth about what drives the behaviors that oppose our conscious intentions. Have you ever said you want something or want to change in some healthier way and then find yourself doing the exact opposite? Or worse, creating bigger problems for yourself?
Maybe you have something on your heart to express or a passion calling to you, yet you feel paralyzed in getting started. Maybe you even schedule it in but never do it. Maybe you want to live a healthier lifestyle by exercising and choosing healthier foods, and then find yourself binging french fries and dessert. Maybe you even bought the gym membership but rarely make it there. Then there are the behaviors you deeply want to stop but find yourself doing again and again before you’re even conscious you’re doing them. You might really want to be committed to a relationship and have a partner, but when faced with it you find yourself entertaining interactions with other people outside the relationship or engaging in any number of other ways to sabotage it.
Any of this sound familiar? What I can tell you is if your subconscious carries beliefs and programming in opposition to what you say you want, you’ll always fee like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill when trying to change. Our subconscious is the part of our psyche that operates below the level of conscious awareness. The bad news about the subconscious is it’s responsible for about 95% of what we think, feel, and do. Well, I suppose that’s only bad news if it’s not aligned with our conscious will. We’re largely habitual creatures, and most of those habitual responses can be attributed to our early experiences and our traumas. They’re hard to shake because a lot of times they can be linked to survival.
When you want to get healthy, your subconscious knows you might begin to look different. Maybe you’ll lose weight or feel more attractive, bringing more attention to focus on you. If at some time in your life that kind of attention was not safe, your subconscious has logged that information. So that association will always be antithetical to your conscious desire to be healthier. This part of you operating at the subconscious level is not against you. Its attempting to protect a vulnerable part of you.
It might be that you want to write or speak or be visible in some way via your unique expression, but you feel muted and can’t bring yourself to share. If your subconscious has a belief you’ll be attacked, ridiculed, or harmed in some way, you’ll feel paralyzed when it comes to sharing. It wants to keep you safe and ensure you survive.
In the video below, I use the relationship example to illustrate this issue. (Click to watch)
So what to do?
First, in the experience notice what feelings come up around that thing. Maybe you feel paralyzed at the thought of someone criticizing the way you express yourself. Or you notice a feeling of fear about others looking at your physical body and finding it attractive.
Second, ask yourself when you have felt that before, and specifically when was the first time you felt those feelings.
Third, explore those experiences where you felt the same way in the past. If you go all the way back to the first incident begin to find the associations you made then about safe and unsafe ways of being and relating.
You may be able to find a lot of those unconscious associations and beliefs this way. But there may also be other associations and beliefs that are more deeply out of your awareness. You can still look for subconscious beliefs, emotions, associations that are harder to access through inquiry. You’ll just have to use other tools to uncover them from the subconscious.
How? Here are a few options to look into and try:
Muscle testing statements: Do muscle testing with a partner or self muscle testing (search the internet for tutorials). Some examples of how to use muscle testing would be to think about something you’re working on, for example, you have a fitness goal of going to the gym and getting fit and healthy. You can make statements like “Its safe for me to get fit” or “I’m comfortable with my body changing” or “I feel safe receiving more attention as my body changes”. If you test weak for any of the statements, you would know that your subconscious does not believe you’re safe or comfortable in those circumstances.
Stream of consciousness free writing: Put on a timer for 5-10 minutes and write about that area of your life without stopping or picking up your pen. If you get to a moment where it feels like nothing is coming then write “nothing is coming” or scribble as if you’re writing until words begin flowing again. Bonus points for doing the free write with your non-dominant hand. You should see that you get to some deeper insights and understandings that were outside your conscious awareness around the topic you’re working on.
Body signals/symptoms: The body IS the subconscious so we can look to the symptoms and signals from the body to understand what is happening in the subconscious. In the relationship example used above, you can notice what is happening in your body when you think about it or when you’re with that person. those signals in the body can give you clues. If you feel your chest tightening, for instance, and its hard to take breath in we can follow the thread of that sensation. You can do word association to get there like “I feel like the life is being sucked out of me” or “I feel like I’m being suffocated.” It begins to let you know what those subconscious associations might be. You can even try to remember when those physical symptoms were present for the first time or in earlier experiences to get to the earlier wound that created the subconscious program.
Once you have this awareness and some dots have been connected, you’ve already set yourself on a new timeline. Once something has been brought to conscious awareness, you can’t be unconscious to it again. Even if you don’t catch it in time, and its only after the fact that you realize you’ve repeated the same pattern again, it won’t drive you without your knowing again.
There are usually three stages in the awareness of subconscious patterns. The first is not catching it before you’ve played it out again, but being aware in the reflection after the fact. The second is being aware you’re doing it, but not being able to stop yourself and pivot in the moment. The third is being aware you’re about to do it, and having enough of a moment of pause to contemplate it and make a different choice.
Just knowing what is driving your behavior is not enough. We have to work to repair, reparent, and resolve the originating wound. Beyond that, we need to learn new behavioral patterns that feel more in integrity with who we want to be and who we truly are.
I may do a part two going into these next pieces. If you’d find that helpful, please let me know with a comment. I’d love to know if this has been useful to you in some way.
From my heart to yours…
