Blogging on Good Therapy

by Sarah Jenkins, MC, LPC

Click here to contact Sarah and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

“Well, when one’s lost, I suppose it’s good advice to stay where you are until someone finds you. But who would ever think to look for me here?” - Alice “Alice Adventures In Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll

“I warn you dear child, if I lose my temper, you lose your head. Understand?”
- Queen of Hearths “Alice Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

You know her. You have met her before. Curious and unsuspecting, Alice goes down the rabbit hole, following the ever late, white rabbit. Her naivety gets the better of her. Tumbling down a dark chamber, Alice falls and finds herself facing temptation. “Drink me,” it instructs. She complies, without question, doing the very thing it compels her to do. Regrettably, she then notices, it is too late. There is no return. She is small, too short to reach for the key, the very key to open a way out. Then, a piece of cake presents itself to her, “Eat me” it instructs. She complies, astonished and horrified as her body stretches to become nine feet tall.

How many times have you just “known” that something was not good for you, and you did it anyway? How many times have you said to yourself “this time it will be different” or “I won’t do that again,” to find yourself doing the very thing you don’t want to, yet again. Why do we do this to ourselves, even though we want something different?

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

In “Through the Looking Glass,” Alice meets Tweedlee and Tweedledum, two brothers who agreed to have a battle. Consider that you, too, are a mind with two “brothers,” i.e. your conscious and unconscious. You are conscious that you are reading these pages. You can be aware of your conscious. Nevertheless, you are also unconscious. As you read this, your unconscious serves to keep you alive, functioning, and protected. You are not making your lungs take in air; you are not consciously making your heart beat. Your unconscious works in simple ways. It looks for danger; it focuses on survival. It is no small job.

Yet, like siblings do, the conscious and unconscious mind contradict each other. Even though you would think that they could “play nicely” because they both are a part of you, they often don’t. They often “battle” each other; each has in mind what it thinks is in your best interest. From the outside, it looks like “self sabotage” or relapse.

The Battle

Here is why they battle. What you want, consciously, often exists in opposition to what your unconscious wants. For some reason, buried deep in the recesses of your unconscious mind, down the rabbit hole, there are experiences that “taught” you these “negative beliefs.” Your unconscious mind holds onto these negative beliefs and they become truisms. Even if you consciously “know” that the negative beliefs are not really true, your unconscious doesn’t agree.

As a result, your unconscious sabotages your best decisions, actions, and choices. Anything that serves to “prove” your unconscious belief as being false gets rejected. Your unconscious mind doesn’t sabotage you out of malice. It just does it because it has held these negative beliefs for as long as you cannot remember.

Lets give you some examples to demonstrate what I mean. Do any of these common negative “beliefs” feel true to you, even though, logically, they may are not: “I’m bad,” “I’m not good enough,” “I am not lovable,” I don’t deserve good things,” “It’s my fault,” “I am too much.” These are just a few of the beliefs that your unconscious will maintain, against all odds, even if your conscious mind wants something different

Here is how this battle gets created. As a young child, perhaps you experienced something traumatic like being physically abused by a parent. Developmentally, young children often want to maintain the belief that their parents are “good” even if the child is experiencing the most hurtful, painful abuse. Instead, the child’s unconscious mind must find other ways to “explain” the abuse. So, the unconscious looks for an alternative belief, one that is more acceptable to it at that developmental stage. In this example, perhaps it chose “its my fault.”

Splitting

Now, in order to maintain that belief, your unconscious must also “reject” all of the things that would “disprove” the negative belief it seeks to maintain. To do this, the feelings, thoughts, sensations, or images about the events that would “discredit” that belief are pushed aside. They “split” from you. They are tucked away, pushed out of the body, or even forgotten. Because of this, your unconscious can now hold on to the negative beliefs about yourself. Only the feelings, thoughts, sensations, or images that maintain the negative belief are allowed to stay in the body and in the conscious. For example, maybe the emotion of anger is rejected. If the child actually allowed the anger to stay in the body, the mind would actually have to consider that it was the parent’s fault, not the child’s.

Now, lets assume that, consciously, you want to believe and act out of a different place. Perhaps you want to accomplish a goal, make a change. You have a made a decision that “right, this is it, I am changing _____.” That’s great! At the same time, know that you have already started a battle with your unconscious mind. It may fight back; you are attempting to disprove an underlying, negative belief that you have about yourself. You can do this though!

Do you know what those beliefs are? Do you know where they originated from? Have you spoken with your therapist, if you have one, or spent some time exploring these areas of your life? Know that logic, alone, does not teach your unconscious mind to consider alternative beliefs. Only exploring those deep, painful, difficult experiences can get to the root of them. Remember that sometimes we have to go down the rabbit hole, just as Alice did, to come out the other side.

©Copyright 2008 by Sarah Jenkins, MC, LPC and Dragonfly International Therapy. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Sarah and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Psychotherapy: Specific Issues Treated and Changes Made. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.