Tag Archives: unconscious

Displaced Anger:
“All you think about is your career!”

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"Impact—Out of the Sandtrap"
by Mimi Stuart © Live the Life you Desire

Have you ever surprised yourself by lashing out at someone you’re not angry with?

If a woman is angry that her husband is too career focused, but she isn’t able to talk to him about it, she may find herself criticizing others in her life instead, such as her career-focused girlfriend.

Her subconscious knows that she’s acting inappropriately. In fact, she may be quite proud of her friend’s successful career. Yet she just can’t help herself.

The vehemence of her criticism does not have much to do with her friend. Perhaps it feels too risky to take up the issue with her husband because she fears losing him. The power of her attacks may be expressing her fears about her crumbling marriage.

Her feelings may be ambivalent and difficult to sort out. Perhaps, she doesn’t really want him to become less career-focused. Or she may fear that even IF she and her husband spent more time together, they would not enjoy being together. Her anger thus gets focused on a safer target—her girlfriend.

The Unconsious

When we are taken by surprise by something we say or do, it’s because an unconscious part has suddenly expressed itself. Such outbursts reveal a struggle between our conscious and unconscious desires and fears.

Displacement is the act of associating one thing with another. You direct an unconscious feeling, such as anger or blame, on somebody or something other than the original offender.

Our fixations and outbursts reveal our internal conflicts, which indicate precisely where we have the greatest opportunity to grow. When we ignore the eruptions of the unconscious, we can bet that they will come out in even more disruptive ways. Through becoming aware of our unconscious we see how we can work on becoming more whole human beings.

Solution

In this situation, after apologizing to her friend, the woman should find a way to talk openly and compassionately to her husband. Usually it’s best to express ambivalent feelings without sounding controlling or critical.

For example, “I find myself feeling disappointed that we don’t spend more time together because of your career focus. Yet, I’ve never brought it up to you, because I know how important your job is to you. Maybe there’s a way that we can still spend some special time together without your jeopardizing your work.”

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Compassionate Confrontation: ‘He said he’d spend more time with me, but has not followed through.’”

Read “The Persona and the Shadow: ‘I’ve always been accommodating, but at times I find myself saying very mean things.’”

“My parent was controlling.” How we develop Defense Mechanisms (Part I)

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"Musical Gems" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

It is surprising how many of the “choices” we make are not by choice at all. We are frequently driven by unconscious forces. These responses were programmed out of necessity when as children we were trying to get our needs met.

Generally, people experience their parents as either too engulfing or indifferent. Depending on their personality, children of a strong parent who is engulfing/controlling/hovering tend to develop one of the following belief systems:

1. The compliant person believes “I should be sweet, self-sacrificing, and saintly.”
2. The aggressive person says “I should be powerful, recognized, and a winner.”
3. The withdrawing person believes “I should be independent, aloof, and perfect.”

1. Compliance: While accommodation is sometimes appropriate, it is not okay when it becomes reflexive and automatic. An emotional chameleon ceases to have personal integrity. In extreme cases, compliant people feel they have no will of their own. They become totally dependent on what others think, expect and want of them. This can lead to harm of oneself and others.

2. Power Complex: Assertive behavior is an attempt to try to get control. We need to be self-empowered. But when power becomes one-sided or unconscious, it becomes aggressive and problematic. In the extreme you get the sociopath who must be in total control and disregards the welfare of others. Dictators exhibit the power complex in the extreme.

3. Avoidance: The withdrawing person steps away from anything threatening, and suppresses reflection about difficult issues. This is sometimes a wise move, but not when it is done without conscious choice or in every situation. Whenever there is avoidance, the unconscious perceives that the Other is a large and powerful force and that he or she is not. In extreme cases, a person may become disconnected from reality or even dissociative.

Why bother figuring out what anxiety-management systems we use? The moment we become aware of our automatic psychological reflexes, we open up the opportunity to make genuine choices. Ask yourself what these responses cause you to do and prevent you from doing? Where are you stuck?

With awareness of our unconscious belief systems, we can thoughtfully choose whether to comply, withdraw, or assert ourselves, among other possible responses, depending on the situation, rather than having the same knee-jerk reaction in every situation. When we start responding differently, we can transform our old patterns to new adventures of our choosing.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “How we develop Defense Mechanisms Part 2 ‘My Parent didn’t care about me'”

Read “She’s just like my mother! — so weak!” “He’s just like my father — so controlling!”

Reference and recommended reading and seminars: James Hollis, PhD, Author and Senior Jungian Analyst

Important Decision Making:
“I’ve looked at the pros and cons, and think I should buy this home.”

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"Intuition" by Mimi Stuart
Live the Life you Desire

When you make a big decision, do you think it’s best to:

A) Make an immediate decision,

B) Take some time to think about the pros and cons and then decide, or

C): Consider the pros and cons, then forget about it and do something else, and later come back to make a decision?

It turns out that people are happiest with their decisions when they do C), that is, take some time, get distracted from thinking about the issue, and then make a decision based on reason and their intuition.

While the unconscious gets blamed for a lot of emotional upheaval, when decisions are complex, the unconscious is able to contribute vital information inaccessible to the conscious mind.

Conscious thought focuses well on straight-forward issues. Conscious decision-making processes, such as listing pros and cons and studying statistics, are best used when there are just a few concrete variables in the decision, like deciding what lawn mower to buy.

The unconscious, on the other hand, has a holistic ability to do parallel processing and access countless hidden clues about people and situations that the conscious mind does not access easily. It can pick up obscure patterns and connections, as well as hidden emotional and physical sensations.

The unconscious works best on a particular problem when the conscious, rational mind is not interfering with the unconscious because it is distracted by some other endeavor. “I better sleep on it,” is a wonderful way to allow the unconscious to uncover those key factors in deciding whether to buy a particular home, for example. Such factors might include the emotional impact on you, the feeling of the neighborhood, the subtle cues like smells and views, and perhaps clues of construction quality not picked up consciously.

In this age of rapid communication, people might make better decisions when they resist the temptation to make snap decisions or even to simply list the pros and cons. In addition to using objective reasoning, they might take a bike ride, sleep on it, watch a movie, or take a couple of weeks for big decisions and see what the unconscious has to contribute.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

~Stephen Hawking

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Recommended: David Brooks “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.”

Read “Black and White Thinking: ‘I used to think she was fantastic but it was all a facade. She’s really horrible.'”