THE MINDFUL FAMILY: The Power of the Unconscious Mind
By Charlton Hall, MMFT, LMFT-I
The part of our brains that is responsible for consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. Far more of our brainpower is used for unconscious activities. For example, until you read this sentence, were you consciously aware of your breathing? Or of your heart beating? Or of the thousands of biological processes currently going on in your body, being regulated by your brain?
Likewise, many of our emotional reactions and memories take place on an unconscious level. If you’ve ever had a strong emotional reaction to a place or situation, without knowing why, you’ve experienced the power of the unconscious mind. The unconscious part of the mind, where emotional memories are stored, has no sense of time. That’s why often a strong grief reaction doesn’t get better with time. Time alone cannot heal a childhood trauma. It only gets better when we learn how to deal with it.
Think back right now to a time in your childhood when a deep spiritual connection in your life was severed. Do you still have a strong emotional reaction to it? If so, you’ve again experienced the power of the unconscious mind.
Not everything about the unconscious mind is negative, though. It has been theorized that the unconscious mind is also the seat of creativity. It’s the part of your mind that is activated when you dream. Most creative people report that their best ideas seem to come ‘out of nowhere.’ Think back to the last time you were inspired by an idea or a flash of insight or a hunch that turned out to be right. Was there a conscious process involved, or did the idea just seem to come to you, fully formed? If you’ve had such a moment of inspiration, you’ve once again experienced the power of the unconscious mind.
The problem with trying to tap into the power of the unconscious, is that if we could be consciously aware of its workings, it wouldn’t be unconscious! So how do we get there from here? Sigmund Freud called dreams the ‘Golden Road to the Unconscious.’ He believed that the apparently nonsensical content of our dreams was in reality the unconscious mind’s attempt to communicate to the conscious mind.
Later psychotherapists began to expand on this idea, especially in the use of projections from the unconscious. You may have seen a Rorschach ink blot test, in which a subject is shown an ink blot on a piece of paper and is asked to describe what he sees. Such images are attempts by therapists to tap into the subject’s unconscious, in much the same way that Freud and Jung used dreams to achieve the same end.
Such techniques are used by therapists to try to gain insight into the unconscious minds of those who have mental health issues, but what if we could harness the power of the unconscious mind for creativity and connectedness as well?
Charlton Hall is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapy Intern and the Director of the Mindful Ecotherapy Organization (www.mindfulecotherapy.org). You may contact him at: chuck@mindfulecotherapy.org.