Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. –
Seeing more clearly into ourselves—our motivations, our feelings, our needs, our triggers—is a good thing. And it’s also a tall order. How do we make the unconscious conscious so that our lives don’t feel driven and sabotaged by forces within in us that operate beyond our awareness?
We can’t exactly think our way to knowing what’s unconscious to us. That’s clear by the definition of the word “unconscious.” It refers to inner experiences or psychological phenomena that are not known, and aren’t easily knowable, to the thinking mind. This concept really challenges most of us in our modern culture. We like to think a lot. We like for problems to have rational solutions—solutions we can find if we think hard enough. And, indeed, many important problems can be solved by thinking hard.
But as anyone who has ever had difficulty breaking a habit, or changing a relationship, or getting over a loss can tell you, this approach to problem solving doesn’t always work too well with matters of the heart or spirit. In these cases, you need another way in. You need a way to explore the aspects of your self that are hard to pinpoint—or even perceive—through thinking.
Emotion-focused and body-based techniques are some of the approaches in psychotherapy that can offer that. These techniques pay attention to channels of experiencing that are largely “sub-cortical.” This means they happen below the neocortex of the brain. (The neocortex is where rational thinking takes place.) We can focus our attention on emotion, sensation or sensing, and movement, however and when we do we can start to glimpse another realm of our being—one that stays largely imperceptible if we focus mostly on our thoughts.
This realm matters a lot! Our emotional, sensory, and energetic responses to the world drive us to make decisions in ways that are often beyond our awareness. We find ourselves in unhealthy patterns or struggling to move through a challenging situation—and we don’t really even know why.
By slowing down and carefully observing the feelings, sensations, and energetic shifts of the body—and then seeing just how these might connect to our thinking patterns and beleifs—we can start to do the work that Jung described as ‘making the unconscious conscious.’ We can look closely and at our innate and primed responses to our environment and our relationships. We can start to try on different ways of moving through these responses, inviting them to shift.
Change happens as we gain awareness of these sub-cortical processes and rework these old patterns from the bottom up. It’s this kind of deep work that ultimately transforms how we interact with our world—so we can live in ways that feel more safe, more satisfied, and more connected.
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