It’s unthinkable that a force more powerful than our own will may exist within us. We are convinced, and have proof of our power and autonomy. We build skyscrapers, planes, sculpt glass and create complex organizations, proving that when we have an intention, it most often will materialize. Acknowledging the force, power and influence of the unconscious on the shape of our lives leaves a bad taste in the mouth. How can a force within my mind – operating mostly outside of my awareness – shape my life? As startling as this is, I am more and more convinced and in awe that the unconscious exists and exerts a seemingly confusing influence upon us toward self-destructive behaviors.
In the 1900s, Freud asserted the existence of the unconscious (although not coining the term) and brought psychological light to its nature when he began psychoanalysis. He discovered patients consistently suffered from “not knowing” memories, experiences and intentions that he felt were clearly part of the patient’s history but repressed, or otherwise “asked to leave” the stage of conscious awareness. (For the sake of this article, please forgive Freud for asserting things about patients that are now considered questionable in light of the progress and cultural changes in the field since that era.)
First, unconscious thoughts, feelings, and impulses occur in a wordless state, mostly outside of conscious awareness. Not to say they can’t be known, nor were never known – how else could one repress without distinguishing between which thoughts and feelings are worth repressing and which are not? It’s more accurate to say that the unconscious is “dimly aware,” not completely unaware.
Second, the unconscious behaves as a primitive or archaic structure of the mind, akin to an adolescent development stage, full of feelings, ideas, wishes, and thoughts but without the cohesiveness and structure of the conscious mind. Evolution seems to have programmed us to avoid physical dangers and we have a built-in fear of snakes and spiders to prove it. However, we head toward familiar and yet emotionally dangerous realities without the same built-in warning signals, and we find ourselves making repeated emotional mistakes.
Third, the unconscious thinks with pronoun blindness. It is a reservoir of thoughts, feelings, and structure that constitutes 90% of what you feel, but it is bad with names. When I suggest to patients “your unconscious is confusing mother and lover,” I am clarifying that although the patient intellectually and consciously knows that his mother and lover are different, his unconscious does not and the attachment and feelings toward one have melded into the other. One side effect of this melding is the experience by the spouse that his/her partner is harming him in the same way he felt harmed in his childhood experience by his mother or central caregiver (I think that we are all “harmed” to some degree in childhood insofar as we are powerless to choose differently for ourselves, and we are helpless to the tide of our parents emotional and lived-out realities. One of the essentials of trauma is helplessness, which all children have to contend with daily by way of parental and adult authority).
Remember that the unconscious is a powerful but primitive part of our mind fueling our impressions, beliefs, and attitudes toward the world and others. However, these unconscious impressions do not always distinguish events in the distant past from recent events, particularly if the present pain mirrors central early pain. We continuously experience and re-experience past traumatic memories sometimes referred to as micro-traumas by an unconscious which is wordless, primitive, temporally-confused (time-confused), and pronoun-confused and therefore naturally looking for someone to “assign” the trauma.
For this reason, spouses mistakenly blame one another for emotional harm and are unaware that their unconscious process has contributed to framing their spouse. “Sacred blame” best describes the specific kind of blame that unfolds within marriage as having a structure of justification around it, analogous to the “sacred violence” exchanged between Israel and Palestine. The unconscious’ structure fuels feelings of victimization that each spouse has toward one another because of its blindness despite the conscious mind knowing better.
For example, it’s reasonable to believe a person with a distant and unaffectionate relationship with his mother would seek a loving spouse to fulfill his need for adequate affection and love. If we interviewed him before seeking a mate, he would claim and believe that he set himself on a course of finding someone that met his needs, not one that duplicated his past hurt. In this claim, he would be responding to his conscious intention and would find attracting an unaffectionate spouse absurd. However, he actually does what he intends not to do; seeks out and becomes attracted to a spouse who happens to injure him in the unique way in which he has always felt injured, leaving him re-experiencing the hurt and dejection of his childhood!
His unconscious attraction is pointing him unknowingly toward someone who helps him recreate his early harm and his unconscious has a “blindness” from knowing he is doing so. The unconscious is clumsily compelled to tell its story to the conscious mind by way of recreating early pain in present relationships and in this sense it “thinks in Braille”. The unconscious does not recreate the specific events of our childhood, it points us toward recreating the specific state of mind that follows those early events which is why it is so challenging in therapy to make these kind of connections clearly.
The eureka moment in therapy is the realization that early painful experiences cannot tolerate being left unheard, and if we repress or suppress the pain and grief related to those experiences, our unconscious will point us toward repeating that pain until we surrender ourselves to grieving and naming it.
Most patients feel guilty and ashamed coming to terms with their own hand in the creation of their current life pain. However, it is in the process of taking this responsibility that we indirectly find autonomy and begin to experience life as within our control to shape and define. To the extent that we fight against grief and deny or disavow ourselves from relationship with our inner life, suffering, and woundedness we invite the unconscious to transmit those realties into our daily lives. Healing involves a process of allowing early memories and realities to emerge and be honored, and cannot be willed away.
