Your Unconscious — Look whose driving your car!

How many times have you asked yourself, “Why did I do that?” I should have learned that doesn’t work.

I have a favorite metaphor to explain how unconscious processes drive our behavior. Imagine that you have grown up, away from your troubled childhood, and have created your dream adult life. You are in the back of a limo. You have cash. And you look great. The only problem is the limo driver. You can’t see his/her face and no matter how often you order them to take you to the finest restaurant and most beautiful mansion, that darn driver keeps turning that car around and going back to some dirty bird restaurant you ate at as a kid. And rather than taking you to a mansion, your driver keeps pulling up to the house you grew up in. Urrgh!!!

Whether you are a layperson, like most screen writers, and use the term “sub”-conscious, or have training in Psychology and like to look smart by saying, “un”-conscious, the meaning is the same. We all have early life feelings that are out of our awareness, yet drive most of our conscious life.

So, are we a slave to our unconscious, or can we break the shackles of early life programming and think, feel, and behave as an adult? The answer is yes, but not without help. If we’re super lucky, we have a love relationship that both contains us and challenges us to grow. The rest of us pay for therapists to do that.

Sigmund Freud may have been a victim of his Victorian era, but he was a genius when it came to understanding the unconscious. He believed that by helping the unconscious become conscious, people can be relieved from psychic pain and bad behaviors. He also believed that dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious” in that they contain “pre-conscious” material. Not that dreams are literal. But that dreams are feelings with pictures. My advice: If you are choosing a therapist, ask them if they do dream therapy. There is plenty of material in the nocturnal theater of our minds.

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